slipstream

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English

Etymology

Compound of slip +‎ stream. Fiction sense coined by cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling in 1989.

Noun

slipstream (countable and uncountable, plural slipstreams)

  1. The low-pressure zone immediately following a rapidly moving object, caused by turbulence.
    • 2019 September 8, Andrew Benson, BBC Sport‎:
      Monza was the seventh race in a row at which Leclerc had out-qualified Vettel. There were extenuating circumstances this time - Vettel did not have a slipstream on his first lap and the farcical end to qualifying prevented him doing another - but a clear pattern is emerging.
  2. (figurative, by extension) A generated advantage which makes forward movement easier.
    • 2012, Benjamin Barber, “Liberal Values in the Age of Interdependence”, in Logos: A Journal of Modern Society and Culture‎:
      The Republicans, who in fact quintessentially represent what I understand to be private and special interests of a narrow economic kind, have nevertheless managed, flying in the slipstream of Ronald Reagan’s rhetoric, to look like the true guardians of the nation’s public interest.
  3. (uncountable, fiction) A genre of fantastic or non-realistic fiction that crosses conventional genre boundaries.
    Coordinate term: New Weird
    • 2000, Damien Broderick, quoting Justina Robson and Rozanne Rabinowitz, Transrealist Fiction: Writing in the Slipstream of Science, Greenwood Publishing Group, →ISBN, page 88:
      Slipstream is not simply a mixture of fantasy and realism, but something which lies between or even beyond the two.

Derived terms

Translations

Verb

slipstream (third-person singular simple present slipstreams, present participle slipstreaming, simple past and past participle slipstreamed)

  1. To take advantage of the suction produced by a slipstream by travelling immediately behind the slipstream generator.
    Synonym: draft
    Although dangerous, over-the-road truck drivers sometimes slipstream with each other to save fuel.
  2. (computing, transitive) To incorporate additional software (such as patches) into an existing installer.
    • 2003, William Boswell, Inside Windows Server 2003:
      You do this by slipstreaming the updates into the distribution folder.
    • 2004, Ed Bott, Carl Siechert, Craig Stinson, Microsoft Windows XP inside out:
      A better solution is to create a bootable Windows XP installation CD slipstreamed with the current service pack...
    • 2005, Jesper M Johansson, Steve Riley, Protect your Windows network: from perimeter to data:
      It is illegal to distribute slipstreamed CDs. In some locales, it may also be illegal to create them.

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