“Do not seek the Ur-shanabi,” she said, in a voice melodious and clear. “For the Plant of Heartbeat brings only heartache when it flowers.”
“I need to find it,” the Stranger said. “I have to.”
“Then find a fucking cartographer,” the thing that was Fledermaus said.
The shadows behind them coalesced, and bellowed in an invisible gale … somewhere, there was the sound of wind chimes.
When the Stranger woke, he found himself alone by the side of the old white road. The sound of the horses raised him from his stupor, their neighing and farting and the sound of cloven hooves stamping on earth, of tails swishing, of grass being ripped from the ground and chewed. The fire in its circle of stones was dead, and had been so for some time. He stood up groggily. The day was overcast and the sun was wreathed in mist. Of the tinkerers and their wagon there remained no sign. The Stranger relieved himself and washed sparingly. When he went inside the old clown church he saw that only his boot prints were in the thick layer of dust on the floor. And when he reached the place behind the dais he saw that the stained-glass window with the harlequin’s visage had been violently broken and the pieces scattered on the floor.
Tucked on the wood board, behind where the window had been, was a small and naked dandelion.
The Stranger rode out that day along the twisting road, the horses following patiently behind him. By midafternoon the road began to grow faint at the edges, and soon it had faded away entirely, and when he looked back he could not see a sign that it had ever been there. He rode on and soon he saw the small outpost town of Kellysburg in the distance, its dismal single-story buildings with their chimneys churning black smoke into the air, and farther away like a series of hash signs was the railway line.
The Stranger spurred on his horse and rode into town.
An Interview with Samuel R. Delany
Conducted by Brian Evenson
Born on April Fool’s Day 1942, Samuel R. Delany is the author of nearly two dozen novels, a number of highly acclaimed stories, and more than half a dozen collections of critical essays. He is best known as a writer and critic of science fiction, though he has written masterfully in a number of genres—science fiction, science fantasy, fantasy, literary fiction, experimental fiction, pornography. He has been a finalist seven times for a Hugo Award, four times for a Nebula Award, and twice for the Locus Award. He won the Hugo Award for his story “Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones,” which also won the Nebula Award. His story “Aye, and Gomorrah” also received a Nebula Award. His novel Dark Reflections was a Stonewall Book Award winner in 2008. Another Hugo Award winner (for non-fiction), his autobiography, The Motion of Light in Water (1988, revised 2004), is a book that suggests a very different kind of person—racially, sexually, socially—from the usual conception of what, until then, a science fiction writer was thought to be. In 2013, he was named the thirty-first Grand Master of the Science Fiction Writers of America.
I came to Delany’s work through his transgressive and often difficult later fiction, books such as The Mad Man and Hogg, only later circling back to his science fiction. When I did, I found much to admire in the early books, with certain themes and ideas echoing from his earliest books to his most recent, Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders (2012). Throughout his career, Delany has pursued his own path, and the political ramifications and candid sexuality of his science fiction had a big impact on the field as a whole and on the writers who followed him. “Aye, and Gomorrah,” which first appeared in Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions anthology, was a source of controversy due to its frank and disturbing sexual content (depicting a culture of neutered, androgynous astronauts and a sexual subculture that fetishizes them). His novel Stars in My Pocket like Grains of Sand (1984) depicts a society with cross-species sex and hook-up zones, and can be read (as some critics have) as mirroring pre-AIDS gay culture in New York.
Delany’s notion of a “General Information” service in two novels (Trouble on Triton and Stars in My Pocket like Grains of Sand), as Carl Freedman has suggested, “anticipates the World Wide Web with a remarkable prescience comparable to Jules Verne’s in anticipating the submarine or Arthur C. Clarke’s in anticipating the communications satellite.” To my mind, Trouble on Triton anticipates the web as it has been, demanding a computer interface, while Stars in My Pocket like Grains of Sand suggests where we seem to be heading, with the Internet wired directly into the brain.
There’s a great deal I could say about Delany’s individual novels and stories, the variety and originality of which is as impressive as those of any genre writer I know, but for considerations of space I’ll remain silent. But I’d be remiss not to at least mention Dhalgren (1975), which most see as Delany’s greatest achievement in the field. It has sold more than a million copies and is Delany’s most popular book, though also one of his most controversial (it was disliked by both Philip K. Dick and Harlan Ellison). Ambitious and linguistically complex, Dhalgren is the kind of thing that might have been written by James Joyce if he had been a science fiction writer.1 Set in a ruined city, depicting sexuality of all kinds, often graphically, it has been praised by writers such as Theodore Sturgeon, Elizabeth Hand, and Umberto Eco. It is an expansive, embattled book, one that uses stream of consciousness and other modernist techniques to productively shatter the consciousness of the reader. It is an example of science fiction at its most hallucinatory and most narratively inventive.
Delany is also a serious and significant critic of science fiction, with much of his writing on science fiction gathered in two volumes: The Jewel-Hinged Jaw and Starboard Wine. In these books he thinks through what it is about science fiction that makes the genre unique, considering the way in which it handles language. He discusses more radical science fiction writers such as Thomas Disch and Joanna Russ, explores more seemingly traditional writers such as Theodore Sturgeon and Robert Heinlein and Roger Zelazny, thinks about sexuality and self in relation to the genre, and (in the later editions of the books in particular) offers the historical context in which he was writing the individual essays gathered here. His book The American Shore, first published in 1978, is a critical and largely structuralist study of Thomas Disch’s short story “Angouleme,” and still the most thorough and illuminating reading of a science fiction short story (and perhaps any sort of story) that I know.
After publishing Stars in My Pocket like Grains of Sand in 1984, Delany mostly moved away from publishing science fiction,2 instead publishing literary and transgressive fiction until 2012’s Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders, which feels at first like a contemporary novel. In it, Delany blends a literary style with transgressive moments to project forty years into the future. The near-future science-fictional elements here have a different feel and tone than that of his generally far-future early work—they’re mentioned offhand, in bits and pieces. The story of two young gay men who meet in 2007, who come to live in a gay utopian community, and who stay together and in love for the rest of their lives, Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders is probably Delany’s most total integration of the science fictional, literary, and pornographic elements of his work, and can be read as a meeting place for the various political and generic elements that inform his work as a whole. In other words, when Delany did finally return to writing science fiction in the twenty-first century, he did so in an entirely different way than how he began. Indeed, where most authors would be inclined to rest on their laurels, Delany even into his seventies has continued to take risks and chances, to continue to strike into new territory.
BRIAN EVENSON: Maybe we can start with terms. In The Jewel-Hinged Jaw you talk about the terms “s-f,” “science fiction,” and “speculative fiction” as having connections but dissonances as well. Do you think of your work as being in one of those categories more than another (or perhaps another category)? Does it depend on the work and/or the place in your career? It does strike me that a term like “speculative fiction” might b
e seen as accounting for all of your work, overtly science fictional or not.
SAMUEL R. DELANY: All texts carry an implicit genre mark; that’s because they can be described, quoted, other texts can be conceived as like them or as different from them. This is what allows them to be categorized. At first, the system of categories may rival the complexities of the texts themselves. But that defeats the purpose of categories, so that the category system over time tends to simplify and generalize. But in different locales, in different circumstances, different category systems develop different forms. Science fiction has been developing its category system—its genre system and its subgenres—since before the term “science fiction” struggled into existence, first in 1851 (when it was promptly forgotten) and then again in the readers’ letters columns of Hugo Gernsback’s magazines Amazing and Fantastic at the end of the 1920s, as the readers attempted to simplify Gernsback’s own clumsy term “scientifiction” as a speakable term. The readers are the ones who replaced “scientifiction” with “science fiction” with the agreement that it meant the same thing.
“Speculative fiction” hit in 1947, when Robert Heinlein used it in an essay because he felt it better described what he was doing than any of the attempts he’d encountered to say what “science fiction” itself meant.
And no one paid any real attention to it for a dozen years.
When I began to write science fiction and was fortunate enough to publish, the genre had a very serviceable genre-classification system in place—that didn’t include “speculative fiction,” but did include the term “science fantasy”—as well as “near future” SF and “far future SF.” “Science fantasy” is what I thought my first four published books (The Jewels of Aptor and the subsequent trilogy, The Fall of the Towers) were. My fifth—The Ballad of Beta-2—was science fiction, at least as far as I knew.
Now “speculative fiction” must have had a history between 1947 when Heinlein first used it and when, in England in the middle sixties, some writers who had gathered around Michael Moorcock’s English magazine New Worlds began to use it and, at the same time, came to prominence both because of Moorcock’s program and an arts council grant to the magazine. They drew a certain amount of attention, and to the term they were using. But I have never been able to find out much of that history as it relates to the originator of the term, Heinlein—back at the end of the forties.
“Speculative fiction” was never a term I was very comfortable with and I only used it for four years—between 1968 and 1972. During that time it had a clear meaning, which was not the same meaning Heinlein had given it. It meant science fiction, fantasy, and any experimental fiction that used SF or technological imagery. Soon it entered the conversation of American academics by the trajectory through which so many neologisms enter the critical discourse: where a vague term that slides around all over the place displaces relatively clear and unambiguous terms. It’s a process similar to the one through which bad money drives out good. This means that, however radical you may decide I am as a person or as a writer, as a critic and user of critical terminology I am pretty conservative.
I never heard it till after I visited London on my way back from my first trip to Europe in 1966, and returned again over Christmas and New Year’s for three weeks in ’66–’67. I tried it out for a while (those same four years), but I didn’t feel it was necessary for what I was doing. I still don’t. It’s not a term I really needed to think with. And though I have a sense of what other people probably mean—and when I describe it sometimes I can be a little snide—I don’t use it.
You say, rightly, that “speculative fiction” could apply to all my work. Frankly, that’s what’s wrong with it—the term, I mean. It doesn’t make enough distinctions. Up until 1968—and well after Heinlein’s fairly careful attempt to describe what he wanted to do (he very specifically excluded fantasy from it)—“speculative fiction” grew to mean the collection of all science fiction, all fantasy, as well as all experimental literature that used technological or scientific imagery. Speculative fiction meant two categories of science fiction and one of literature [that] could be rhetorically identified but were discursively very different—one was literary (a subset of experimental fiction) and two were paraliterary (commercial fantasy and commercial science fiction).
Four years later, by 1972, when those in the academy had taken it over, the critical conversations around commercial SF in this country dropped that already scattered definition (in the sense of what a dictionary of critical terms might say it meant) so that along the path of least resistance, basically the term had come to mean: whatever SF the speaker happened to approve of just then (near future, far future, social, psychological), and more or less informally excludes the rest. I didn’t think that was useful and I still don’t. When Sheree Thomas put together her two anthologies of black speculative fiction, Dark Matter and Reading the Bones, she went back to the pre-’68 definition of the term. Terms can be defined. I didn’t approve of it. But if you read her introductions, you at least know what she’s talking about.
EVENSON: Writing about Joanna Russ in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, you suggest that in Russ’s science fiction “the privileges (i.e., the easy sureties) of one mode of discourse are subverted by employing signs from another mode—which causes us to reconstruct the discourse from one mode to the other …” You go on to describe the shifts that causes in the reading experience, how you move from one mode to another and back again, your sense of what it is you’re reading going through quite interesting sea changes.
Reading that, I couldn’t help but think of your own work. I’ve always thought of you as a writer who is incredibly capable of crossing genre lines within a work. Reading your work I often think, “Here is someone who is well and widely read, voraciously so, and who has thought a lot about literary form and mode and structure, and is willing to use whatever tools he needs.” Just having reread your first novel, The Jewels of Aptor (1962), I feel that’s something that’s been with you from the very beginning. Along with the science fictional elements, there are hints of heroic fantasy, classical literature, supernatural and fairy tales, adventure tales, and other things. I know that novel is quite a ways in your past, but were you actively manipulating those elements at that stage or was it more intuitive? Were you responding to what you felt writers around you were doing, or did it feel like you were entering new territory?
DELANY: Thank you, Brian. If you are a generically sensitive reader, that’s what happens when you read Russ’s text. If you’re not, something else happens. Whatever it is, it is. But I find it very pleasurable, when that happens to me.
I try to respond to what’s happening around me. (Look at my Facebook posts.) And every once in a while one seems to get through the Facebook set of algorithms and touch a nerve—such as I think at least one of the last couple have done. (Every once in a while, someone—like my friend Vince Czyz—will make a comment that resonates with me: not only does no one have a piano anymore, everyone has so much stuff they have to rent a storage unit, often one that’s never emptied, because no one is really moving into larger quarters. (I thought I was when I came down to Pennsylvania last September. But it turns out I wasn’t.) Even I have one, as Vince points out, and he has even helped me carry boxes to it, in what was for him a kind of surprise set of circumstances on his first in-the-flesh visit. As he points out, twenty years ago, no one had one. Today, almost everyone has one. And there are articles—like the one on the destruction of pianos—on how many new storage facilities are being built.) As well, like Charlotte Brontë, in Jane Eyre, I tend to respond to my surroundings in an oppositional mode.
At the time, I hadn’t figured out that having only single members of an oppressed group in a novel is by definition oppressive because it veers toward presenting such figures in isolation. But I was certainly thinking in oppositional terms. Marilyn Hacker’s own description of the typical SF novel she was editing was that the female character was either a wimp whose o
nly function was to cower in the corner and be rescued by the correspondingly over-male hero, or, if she was a woman with any kind of agency at all, she was an evil femme fatale who did nothing but betray and sabotage the hero until, at the last moment, she was exposed for all to understand the evil force she was or for which she was an agent, at which point she was either destroyed or robbed of all power for the rest of her natural life and/or hopelessly humiliated. And the reader and all the other good guys make snide comments about her frigidity and how much she needs a good fuck (to turn her into a proper wimp) and are supposed to be supremely pleased with themselves and with the world.
EVENSON: The other thing I realized in rereading The Jewels of Aptor was that much of what I like so much about your more mature work was already there, at least to some degree. Among other things, there’s a focus on friendship and community, a questioning of authority, no simple division into good and evil, a lot of gray area. There’s also a clear sense of politics, the refusal to let one person dominate as the hero (very nicely depicted in the way the jewels are passed from character to character), and an image of a community that is inclusive and welcoming. Do you see those connections? And, on the other hand, what do you feel separates Jewels from your more mature work?
DELANY: The form of an interview such as this lures the interviewee into arrogance and bragging. And that’s a bore.
I am much more aware of the continuity of the personal disruptions that plague the point of view that is my absentminded perception of the world around me than the disruptions that fall between the works. That’s my way of saying that the world is more coherent than I am, right through here. That’s what regularly reminds me of my mortality.
You say The Jewels of Aptor is a book about friendship—and male friendship, as well—and it is. But simply from the roughest synopsis you can see the kinds of things it opposes as a commercial genre novel of the early sixties—starting with the fact that the hero is a poet hired on as a common worker rather than as the best/strongest/most heroic … (you fill it in), who establishes his alpha status in the first three chapters by besting one of the secondary bad guys in a physical fight.
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