Stories for Chip

by Nisi Shawl

  Well, she says, it just has to simmer now. Won’t be done for a yonk.

  ◊

  What do you think? Am I prepped for action?

  Jaq in Puk’s skivvies, pinging waistband and thumbing thighbands straight, rootling pod to set his bollocks, shift cock to the left. To the right.

  I don’t know which way I dress, he says. These are yanked.

  He settles on upright as fated outcome anyway given stirrings to the novel cling and intimacy of frottage by proxy, or loinspace incursion, or whatever it is that’s scrunching ballsack and rousing yen in his pintle. Yen that earns dints of esteem from other browsers in the togstore, an invite from a gazing ageling girl over by the hats, which he dints thanks and apologies to, sorry, he forgot to update his publics with his tweaked kinsey, which she missives a shame, them both being sixers, but sweet that he’d do that for his beau, shift his hanker to fit so snug, and no need to apologize at all. Also: his gambit to unspotlight Puk is adorable, if he doesn’t mind her saying.

  Puk having been blithe to strip in the store, since Erehwynan nonchalance was on display throughout among the browsers—no different to the sauna, really—but unprepped for the sprucer that aforesaid browsers were politely nudged to cleanse with before trialing summer-sweaty skin in whatnot. Heads turned to his yelp of startle, from the cubicle, at the blasts of high-pressure vapor from all angles, and hot air to dry, and focused particularly on nooks of flesh most like to be ripe. And of course the door opened auto the click it was done, so there Puk stood, mortified by the pricking of his pintle at the sprucer’s intimacies. Whereupon Jaq, fingersnap pronto, tossed him the first britches to hand, (navy blue) nimble as could be, and dropped his own in a grand diversionary show of trialing this quaint custom of underwear, with a quick stride down the aisle a few steps, as if to optimize Puk’s view of his twirl, but in fact to set a precise distance whereby they weren’t a duo drawing more attention now, but rather a soloist and his singular but backgrounded audience.

  Try the paisley, he says, the black on silver. It’ll be like a flip of your Geister synthe, a Fourier Harmony.

  It’s not about transforming Puk to a native, Jaq explains as the Earther slips out of one set of britches and into the other, or painting him as a sham of such, but about finding the permutation of him for this new domain.

  How about these ones? says Puk.

  The same pattern in crimson and jade.

  Even better, says Jaq.

  ◊

  Herbaceous, rhizomatous, perennial, Mentha spicata (or viridis) sprouts well in most any temperate climate, from her fleshy rhizome spreading wide and down into the soil—unless some spoilsport gardener captures her invasive roots in pots or planters—stretching her variably hairless to hairy stems from thirty centimeters to a meter tall in limber abundance. She does prefer partial shade, she has made it clear to Susurrus, but will thrive in anything from mostly shade to full sun, flourishing soft leaves with serrated margins, five to nine centimeters long, one-and-a-half to three centimeters broad, the oil of spearmint chewed from her tender pale green flesh by Puk now, from a soggy leaf lipped from a straw, rich with the dextro-carvone which imbues her aromatic foliage with that scent so unmistakably fresh it was only natural to use her on the bodies of the dead, to hold the line valiantly (if vainly) against the stench of rot. Used as a treatment for hirsutism in women too, spearmint produces flowers in slender spikes, each flower pink or white, a slight two-and-a-half to three millimeters long and broad.

  She has always been pretty, in sight, scent, taste. The god Hades loved his Minthê for that, and she basked in his affections, blithe until the day she boasted in her pride that she was so much better than his queen Persephone, at which the goddess, or her mother Demeter perhaps, transformed the nymph into the mint plant they’d then use to flavor the sacred barley-drink of their Eleusinian Mysteries, as she would one day flavor also, in far western lands of slaves, mint juleps and mojitos, which taste much better here, in a tavern on Boulevard Hovendaal, in the mouths of dark and golden-eyed lovers. Taste best in each other’s mouths as they kiss in the recessed booth, Jaq fumbling with the tash on Puk’s trews, unbuttoning the ballop, because when the tumblespace cast danced focus from a pairing in the New Davenport outlet to frame the snugged lushes, Puk gave an Oh! oh! and a grinning handflap, and pounced to mash lips, to whoops and whistles of esteem.

  ◊

  Dawnlight through the door of the treehouse.

  The fuzzled canoodling that inflamed, via gropes and giggles, opposed by half-hearted remonstrations from Jaq that he was far too soused, advanced, by resolute demonstrations from Puk that Jaq’s tadger was not, through frolic to hard fuckery is now reprised as mawmsey croodling, the two well-fucked and well-fadged in the after, snuggling still socketed. Warm breath on the back of his neck, canty in Jaq’s couthy embrace, Puk yawns as he drumbles how their socketing feels designed.

  Getting back is a blur: a stumbling carouse along Steiner to cadge a hitch, Jaq’s brainpop scheme, from one of the nightcarters offloaded now at Bradshaw Market, headed back out through the subrurals, and ever resolute to grant passage on request, ever a seat kept free in their skimcart, in memory of the flight from Phobos’s shattering, a custom deep as oath: never again to have no room for one asking transport; Puk on Jaq’s lap squirming drunk and hyper to grope and clumse Jaq’s doublet free from a ferntickled shoulder, to show it—see?—his Phobian ancestry; midway in the weavy stagger after being dropped, along the long empty winds through forestry pitch black either side, paths carved in the gleam of asphalt below, the star-strewn and fob-scythed vault above, stumbling and tumbling in a crash into thick burdock, lying on his back, looking up at the vastation of that abyss, atramentine and asparkle; puking at the side of the road; being Nearly there, nearly there; taking a slug of rum from a flask magicked by Jaq from who knows where; being recovered and rannigant again enough, when at last they made it to the stead, that he flailed free of sensible steerage toward Jaq’s room, and went crash splashing prancing off in a run through undergrowth like a kidster in surf, to their oak and elm, calling Jaq to him like a mutt, cracking up at it; and the two clambered up into the treehouse to flop in a tangle, frisky Puk wrappling Jaq back out of laze and into lusty yen.

  So they fucked wild, Puk astride at first, then turned, to his hands and knees, to be tupped under Jaq’s hunching thrusts, hips and shoulder and fists of hair yanked back, for the prick to ram jam bam and cram him, till he felt it fill him, and he’d swear to Cock, the jism spouted into and through him and out his own spurting prick.

  And now, here they lie on their sides, snuggling still socketed, Puk blissed to feel Jaq inside and around him as he gazes out at dawnlight through the door of the treehouse.

  Yen is, Jaq has savvied him, the hacceity of the human. Spinoza by way of Davenport by way of Sifu Renart.

  Real Mothers, a Faggot Uncle, and the Name of the Father: Samuel R. Delany’s Feminist Revisions of the Story of SF

  L. Timmel Duchamp

  The stories a discipline or genre tells about itself reflect its values and anxieties as well as determine the shapes and even limits of its future.1 Four particularly vexed nodes of controversy pervade the stories that writers, critics, and fans tell about science fiction, surfacing constantly in its discourse at cons, in print publications, and online, particularly in the SF blogosphere. These four points of controversy include a preoccupation with the question of SF’s legitimacy; an obsession with establishing a monolithic definition of set texts for patrolling the genre’s border; the search for a definitive story of SF’s origins and lineage; and the failure to integrate the work of women into the genre’s narratives about itself. Over the years, Samuel R. Delany has weighed in on all four; but to date, his analyses bearing on them have not been significantly heeded, perhaps because doing so would entail a radically different way of thinking and talking about the genre. In this paper I will discuss these points of controversy and then examine Delany’s in
sights into them and his outline for a radically different story of SF that would lay these issues to eternal rest.

  The first two points of controversy seem to be permanent features of the landscape for most writers, fans, and critics of SF; hardly a day goes by when one or the other of them is not hotly discussed in the SF blogosphere.2 Although the legitimacy and definition and labeling issues are typically treated as separate, they are implicitly connected. On the one hand, anxiety about the perceived illegitimacy of science fiction vis-à-vis “mainstream literature,” (as it is called in the genre) and, often, ressentiment toward those who dismiss SF as a “ghetto” frequently manifest themselves in attempts by fans and writers to exclude and expel and keep tight control over definitions and labels. On the other hand, groups of writers within the genre often create new labels for characterizing their own and their friends’ fiction, either to position it as a high(ly) literary—and thus more legitimate—exploitation of the forms of SF, or to distinguish it as radically new and more sophisticated than previous SF texts. Similarly, critics, as Delany noted in his “Exhortation to SF Scholars,” use the proposal of a system of definition “as an initializing mark of mastery that empowers all further discourse to proceed”—as critics “in every other area of literary-critical studies” rarely do. (“Exhortation” 5)

  In the US from the 1920s through the early 1950s, SF was published chiefly in pulp magazines and comics. In his introduction to Microcosmic God, Vol.2 of Theodore Sturgeon’s collected stories, Delany quotes Sturgeon’s account of how his stepfather, Argyll, reacted when young Ted bought his first SF magazine (a 1933 issue of Astounding):

  I brought it home and Argyll pounced on it as I came in the door. “Not in my house!” he said, and scooped it off my schoolbooks and took it straight into the kitchen and put it in the garbage and put the cover on. “That’s what we do with garbage,” and he sat back down at his desk and my mother at the end of it and their drink. (“Forward” xxii)

  Delany attributes Argyll’s attitude, that SF is trash, to the “moral rigidities” of the pre-World War II era, when pulp magazines and comics were viewed as a “pernicious influence of an evil antiart.”(xxiii) Delany notes that when in 1946, “on the other side of the Second World War,” his parents found him reading a Batman comic, although his father was appalled, comics “were allowed in the house with only comparatively minimal policing.” (xxiii)

  The genre may have produced a significant number of what Jonathan Lethem calls “Great Books” in the decades since Argyll Sturgeon characterized SF as “garbage,” but for many, the attitude that SF is “trash” has apparently not altered significantly. When in early 2006 David Izkoff, the new science fiction reviewer for the New York Times, published his first review along with a reading list titled “Science Fiction for the Ages” that he said was a list of personal favorites, he expressed a sense of shame about being seen to read SF in public. What “truly shames me,” he writes, “is that I cannot turn to any of these people [fellow passengers on the subway], or to my friends, or to you, and say…you should pick up this new work of science fiction I just finished reading, because you will enjoy it as much as I did.” Shame seems a peculiarly strong choice of word, given the explanation he offers:

  I cannot do this in good conscience because if you were to immerse yourself in most of the sci-fi being published these days, you would probably enjoy it as much as one enjoys reading a biology textbook or a stereo manual. And you would very likely come away wondering, as I do from time to time, whether science fiction has strayed so far from the fiction category as a whole that, though the two share common ancestors, they now seem to have as much to do with each other as a whale has to do with a platypus. (“Geek to Me”)

  Although some welcomed the possibility that the New York Times Book Review actually intended to publish a regular SF column rather than the occasional short piece by Gerald Jonas the Times had previously allotted to SF, the language, tone, and underlying assumptions implicit in Itzkoff’s first column provoked controversy in the SF blogosphere.3 SF writers, critics, and fans have an acute sensitivity to the anxieties attending ghetto status, and few missed the peculiarity of Itzkoff’s use of the word shame, which rendered his apparent anxieties about being associated with the genre stark and—for some—even offensive. Mathew Cheney, for instance, not only mocks Itzkoff’s anxieties—

  I have a hard time mustering up much of a response beyond, “Boo, hoo,” because if the poor boy is wandering through the subways in search of “social standing” for the books he reads, there’s no hope for him at all and he needs to get one of those expensive Manhattan shrinks to work through it with him. (Cheney, March 5, 2006)

  but also parses the passage quoted above to expose the nature of Itzkoff’s anxieties:

  So there are two things in the world, “fiction” and things that are unreadable by people on subway cars. There is also this person called you, and you don’t enjoy reading biology textbooks or stereo manuals. This is a marvelous move, because here the equation is “you = Dave Itzkoff” and so the insecure writer has turned the world into himself. Clearly, his inner child, disappointed with the world, is acting up.

  The implication here is that you is not a “geek,” which is what a person who enjoys such novels as Counting Heads is. Geeks are outsiders, they are not normal, they exist on the margins, they are part of a freakshow, they have no social standing or political clout, and they don’t read the New York Times. And they’re taking over the world and making science fiction unsafe for the rest of us.

  Except the thing Itzkoff calls “science fiction” (or “sci fi”) doesn’t exist. It doesn’t exist as an opposite to the ridiculous “fiction” category he creates (since that doesn’t exist, either), and it doesn’t exist because all sorts of things get published as science fiction…I’m not denying there isn’t plenty of SF that is, well, geeky. It’s not the stuff that appeals to me, but I actually admire it a lot…Why should it have to be as appealing to the masses as The Da Vinci Code? This is to confuse quality with popularity, and that’s a deadly confusion. (Cheney, March 5, 2006)

  Cheney goes on to examine Itzkoff’s list of his ten favorite SF books, noting that it includes nothing “geeky” (or “hard”), and expresses amusement that “Itzkoff’s choices and preferences suggest he is as crippled by nostalgia as the people who complain that SF hasn’t been any good since the death of John W. Campbell.” To me, however, Itzkoff’s list suggests something rather different (besides sexist ignorance of work by women writers). Apart from The Twilight Zone Companion, his list carefully selects titles that have the status of being “classics” or are written by authors who’ve achieved recognition in mainstream literary circles (works of the sort Delany characterizes as “borderline cases” in his Diacritics interview): Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz; Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle; Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange; Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49; Jonathan Lethem’s Gun, with Occasional Music: A Novel; China Miéville’s Looking for Jake; Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle; Ray Bradbury’s R is for Rocket; and Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen. Rather than being simply non-“geeky,” Itzkoff’s list reflects a desperate wish to exhibit sufficient distinction in his taste to disavow the very stigmatization Cheney mocks him for fretting over.

  There’s nothing novel in Itzkoff’s tactic: it resembles another tactic deployed by SF critics to render SF legitimate, viz., that of drafting works of high literature that are “borderline” SF into the SF canon with the hope of redeeming it. Novels like Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tail, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, George Orwell’s 1984, though arguably science-fictional (especially when judged by the criteria of one or another formal definition of SF), are not usually shelved in the SF sections of bookstores
and were not themselves written with reference to other works of SF. While it makes sense to consider such novels as works of genre to the extent that they bear an intertextual relation to works of SF, because such novels have high prestige and recognition value outside the genre, critics often tend to claim them as markers demonstrating the worth and value of works of science fiction regardless of their provenance or significance for the genre.

  But just as SF critics wish to identify high literary work as SF to win respectability of the genre by association, so do high literary critics wish to identify brilliant works of SF as literary and dissociate them from the genre. Thus, when an SF author who has been clearly associated with the genre produces work that achieves recognition in the literary sphere, critics claim that the work “transcends” the genre. A typical example can be found in Steve Erickson’s interview of Delany in Black Clock:

  A lot of your work, particularly in the late Sixties and going into the Seventies, seemed intended both to transcend the conventions of science fiction and at the same time to embrace what we’ll call, for lack of something better, the “mainstream.” But as your biographies have it, you grew up not necessarily reading a lot of science fiction but a lot of more classical literature. (Erickson, 73)

  Erickson’s question is clearly meant to prompt Delany to disavow not only his classification as an SF writer but also the influence SF has had on his fiction. Delany responds by talking about how emotionally powerful his experiences reading SF as a child were. A few questions later, Erickson tries again: “So you didn’t feel caught up by a dual impulse to transcend the genre on the one hand and embrace it on the other.” This time Delany overtly attempts to set Erickson straight: