The following essays circle about, hover over, and occasionally home in on science fiction. Four—and only four—examine individual science-fiction writers’ works; the last three of these presuppose recent if not repeated intimacy with the texts. This book is not an introduction to its subject.
The fourteen pieces here were written from 1966 to 1976. They are not a unified project, and there is terminological inconsistency from one to the other—the more confusing, I’m afraid, because I have not presented them in that strictly chronological order which would allow a reader to follow the terminological development. But I have chosen to group them (somewhat) according to topic because that arrangement seems to afford them and the reader the greatest service in other ways. Some minor inconsistencies I have been able to bring into line—along with the excision of some minor infelicities of style and analysis. The major inconstant terms, however, “science fiction,” “speculative fiction,” and “SF,” I could not integrate without major surgery—plastic rather than radical, I suspect, but still beyond my current energies if not skills. I must therefore assume those interested enough to read these pages most probably bring their own ideas on how the terms’ thrusts differ, as well as where their loci overlap.
For science fiction, here we must make do with Damon Knight’s ostensive definition: “Science fiction is what I point at when I say ‘science fiction’”—with the rider that after we have said a great deal more and, besides pointing, have handled and examined and taken some apart, even if no strict definitions are forthcoming, we shall still know a great deal more about what we are pointing at than we did before.
Speculative fiction, roughly between 1964 and 1972, was an active term among a number of science fiction writers (borrowed, in some cases unknowingly, from Heinlein a decade and a half earlier) in their talk with one another about what they and a number of other writers felt they were doing. Since then, it has by and large passed out of the talk of these same writers, except as a historical reference.
SF, happily or unhappily, is the initials of both.
For our purposes, this explanation for when each term appears and when it does not, however inadequate, must suffice.
The recent passage from “mainstream” to “mundane” as a term to designate that fiction which is neither science nor speculative strikes me as a happy gathering of generic self-confidence. (I first came across “mundane fiction” in a 1975 Galaxy essay by Roger Zelazny.) Yet the insecurity it remedies is part of our genre’s history. Though a comparison with the original of some of these pieces might suggest that I have shamelessly rewritten it other places, here at least I have avoided the temptation to revise that insecurity out and let “mainstream” stand in the older essays—only noting that we have all been unhappy with the term as far back as I can remember.
Rereading the pieces for this edition, I am pleased with a consistency in their movement toward a language model that all of them, for all their different levels, their different methods of approach—intuitive, thematic, textural, or structural—ascribe to. And that model is, after all, their object.
Intensive criticism of science fiction is a comparatively new phenomenon. Its most effective organizing principles have not been established. Also, I emerge into such criticism from a most subjective position: a practicing science fiction writer. The center provides a fine view of certain aspects of our object of consideration and a very poor one of others. Among the poorest it provides is a view of that object’s edges. In the SF world of readers and writers, we are all used to the phrase, “Fandom is a way of life.” Being an SF writer is a way of life too: it is a way of life which courts all the traditional problems of the artist as well as those problems unique to an artist socially devalued in a particularly systematic way—a way that has nothing to do with the family’s disapproval of John for enrolling at the Art Students’ League, or with the neighbors’ suspicions that the Colton girl has not only been writing poems again but sending them to magazines that actually publish them. The Rimbaldian intensity with which our writers are forever abandoning the SF field is, I suspect, emblematic of the process by which SF writers, along with losing sight of the edges of their object, tend to lose, by the same process, sight of their own edges as well. And if money is a reason frequently cited for these defections, well, money is our society’s most powerful symbol: it exists at points of social and material vacuum; its trajectory has seemingly infinite potential; its strength is measured by all that moves in to displace it: food, sex, more money, shelter, art, or anxiety.
There are places in these pages where I have exceeded my object’s edges (for my own are no more intact than any of my colleagues’), notably in Shadows and the closing Autobiographical Postscript. “What,” my reader may ask, “does Quine’s hesitation to quantify across predicates or the play of light on Mykonos in winter have to do with science fiction?” My answer is simply: I don’t know. Yet the ontology suggested by much in the Quinian position as I understand (or possibly misunderstand) it seems an ontology that much of what I value in science fiction strives to reinforce; and the particular analytic flight the light on that most lovely of Greek islands called from me in the winter of ’65/’66 seems a fine topos for a kind of thinking that goes into the richest science fiction. Thus the inclusion of these and similarly “unrelated” bits of speculation and/or autobiography.
In a sense, then, this is the most subjective of books on science fiction—by someone who spends much of his subjective energies analysing the SF phenomenon. But the discourse of analysis must not be confused with some discourse of privileged objectivity. Such privileges in our epoch have less and less place.
Here I must thank the people who first requested that some of these essays be written, oversaw their publication as editors, or to whom they were written in response: Terry Carr, Thomas Clareson, Leslie Fiedler, David Hartwell, Peter Nichols, and Robin Scott Wilson.
Finally I must thank the students of my two extremely astute classes at SUNY Buffalo during the winter ’75 term (particularly Jane Nutter, Mayda Alsace, and Charles Thomas, III); and also Randson Boykin, Eugenio Donato, Marc Gawron, Carol Jacobs, Judith Kerman, Maureen O’Merra, Paul David Novitsky, Judy Ratner, Robert Scholes, Janet Small, Eric Steis, and Henry Sussman for everything from stimulating converse over these and related subjects to detailed response (in person, letter, or fanzine) to various of the pages here, the results of which are evident in minor revisions of the older works and hopefully inform the newer. Needless to say, errors and eccentricities are all my own.
MARCH 1977
For this Berkeley Windhover edition I must also thank—for myriad microimprovements—Camilla Decarnin of San Francisco, Florine Dorfmann of New York City, and Professor Teresa de Lauretis, Assistant Director of the University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee’s Center for Twentieth Century Studies, where I was so happily a Fellow in 1977.
MARCH 1978
The revision here is extensive. Pieces have been dropped (the longest essay in the original book, “Shadows,” and three of the essays, “Teaching S F,” “Characters,” and “On Pure Story-telling,” are now available in other volumes, Longer Views [1996] and About Writing [2005]); pieces have been moved (“Letter to a Critic,” initially the book’s Introduction, is now a second appendix); and pieces have been added “Letter to the Symposium on ‘Women in Science Fiction’” is my first contribution to that extraordinary document; and a first appendix, “Midcentury: An Essay in Contextualization,” which, under the title “Velocities of Change” initially appeared in briefer form in Josh Lukin’s and my Fifties Fiction [Paradoxa #18, 2003], almost making up for the length of the omitted “Shadows”). Here, something should be said, clearly and directly. Save for what is more promise than practice in the first piece, “About 5,750 Words,” the first eight and the last three pieces are more or less passionately thematic. Only the ninth, “To Read The Dispossessed,” openly abjures thematics to focus on textual analysis. And, as I have written elsewhere, thematic does not, in any way, shape, or form, vanish under such a regime. It only changes some of its aspects, some of its discursive positioning.
“About 5,750 Words” grew out of a talk presented at the Modern Language Association Meeting in New York, December 27, 1968, and was published in SF: The Other Side of Realism, Thomas D. Clareson, ed., Bowling Green University Popular Press, Bowling Green, Ohio, 1971.
“Critical Methods/Speculative Fiction” and “Quarks” appeared respectively in Quark/1 and as editorial notes in Quark/1, Quark/4, and Quark/3, Samuel R. Delany and Marilyn Hacker, eds., Paperback Library, New York, 1971.
“Thickening the Plot” first appeared in Those Who Can: An SF Reader, Robin Scott Wilson, ed., Mentor Books, New American Library, New York, 1973.
“Faust and Archimedes” appeared in The Science Fiction Writers of America Forum, Terry Carr, ed., New York, 1966.
“Alyx” first appeared as an introductory essay by Samuel R. Delany in Alyx, by Joanna Russ, Gregg Press, Boston, 1976.
“Prisoners’ Sleep” was first delivered as a lecture at the State University of New York at Buffalo, April, 1975, and appeared in the first edition of this book.
“Letter to the Symposium on ‘Women in Science Fiction’” appeared in “Symposium: Women in Science Fiction,” a special issue of Khatru, 1975, edited by Jeffry Smith.
“To Read The Dispossessed” appeared in the first edition of this book.
“A Fictional Architecture That Only Manages with Great Difficulty Not Once to Mention Harlan Ellison” first appeared in Lighthouse, Terry Carr, ed., vol. 3, no. 1, New York, 1967.
“Midcentury: An Essay in Contextualization” first appeared as “Velocities of Change” in Paradoxa #18, Fifties Fictions, edited by Samuel R. Delany and Josh Lukin, 2003, and was initially conceived as an introduction to the paired reissue of the revised editions of The Jewel-Hinged Jaw and Starboard Wine until the pressure of occasion turned it into something quite other.
Initially written to critic Leslie Fielder after his talk to the SFWA in 1972, “Letter to a Critic” first appeared, somewhat revised even then, in The Little Magazine, David Hartwell, ed., vol. 6, no. 4, New York, 1973.
All pieces here have been somewhat revised with each edition.
—Samuel R. Delany
JUNE 2007