by Nisi Shawl
As a woman writer and a feminist, I find myself wondering whether any man writer has ever named a woman writer or women writers as his literary mother(s) or primary influence. When has a critic—other than Delany—ever proposed such an attribution? Except perhaps in the romance and mystery genres, the line of literary descent for men writers is never traced directly through women. While a few science fiction critics—most of them British—have followed Brian Aldiss’s lead in claiming Mary Shelley as the first science fiction writer and thus as the mother of science fiction, they do not name her as a chief influence on a particular man writer. As a long-dead progenitor, Mary Shelley carries a certain cultural capital that can be claimed without fear of emasculation. But that’s a far cry from putting her into the direct lineage.
“I’m a favorite faggot ‘uncle,’” Delany continues,
who’s always looked out for mom and who, when they were young, showed the kids some magic tricks. But I have no more claim to a position on the direct line of descent than any other male writer. Sometimes they like to fantasize I do. But that’s just because they used to like me before they knew anything about real sex.
To the extent that they can accept mom and their bastard status—which I think Gibson does—these writers produce some profoundly interesting and elegant work. (“Mothers,” 177)
Over the years, in interview after interview, Delany has repeatedly countered his interlocutors’ insistence that his work be extracted from the various paraliteratures he has contributed to. For one thing, he has held that the parameters of a genre are determined not by its texts, but by the protocols of reading; and for another, he has argued that the desire for legitimacy is a snare and delusion that fundamentally misunderstands the operations of discourse. But here, deploying this figure of familial relations, Delany links the issue of legitimacy with the constant, mostly tacit refusal to acknowledge the presence and influence of work by women. This presence and influence, he suggests, creates anxiety. And that anxiety is all wrapped up with the problem of not being able to find and name the father. I believe this gives us a better understanding for why Bruce Sterling and others in the original Cyberpunk Movement so strenuously denied for much of the 1990s that cyberpunk with a small “c”—a good deal of which has been written by women—wasn’t the true cyberpunk, since real cyberpunk had existed only for a very brief window in the mid-1980s. And I would argue that this desire to narrowly define and limit cyberpunk parallels the unending brawl that goes on in fan and academic circles alike about what science fiction is—as though if only we could decide on a single, clear definition of what makes a text science fiction, then science fiction could finally boast its own proper name, the product of a single patrilineage rather than the non-bourgeois family Delany describes. Science fiction, Delany’s remarks on cyberpunk have convinced me, can only be a bastard form of writing because an unambiguous, unitary definition of what makes science fiction science fiction, which would be necessary for establishing legitimacy, is impossible.
In concluding his elaboration of cyberpunk’s bastard status, Delany restates the importance of the link:
To the extent they rebel against them—and the one point [Jeanne] Gomoll couldn’t seem to make was that this search for fathers is part of the same legitimating move that ignores mothers—the work becomes at its best conservative and at its worst rhubarbative[sic]—if not downright tedious. (“Mothers,” 177)
Here Delany has come full circle, returning to Jeanne Gomoll’s “An Open Letter to Joanna Russ,” a manifesto challenging Bruce Sterling’s erasure of the flowering of feminist SF in the 1970s, which he mentioned immediately before Tatsumi proposed his patrilineal reconstruction of SF. The first few times I read this, although I exulted that Delany had read Gomoll sympathetically, I grasped only part of it, the part that I already knew. Gomoll’s “Open Letter” asserted that Bruce Sterling’s characterization of late 1970s SF as “confused, self-involved, and stale” marked the first sign of feminist SF’s erasure from SF history. And indeed, his brief remark in the manifesto that is his introduction to Gibson’s collection of short fiction, Burning Chrome, would lead the casual reader to assume that not only did nothing interesting happen in the genre during those years, but also that cyberpunk was rebelling against something that was not in fact radically new. If Sterling had deigned to name feminist SF as what cyberpunk was rebelling against, the reader would have been left to wonder if the cyberpunks were about as revolutionary as the contemporaneous Reagan-supported contras who were also rebelling against a 1970s revolution. But since Sterling does not name names, the reader is not invited to link “confused, self-involved, and stale” with what Delany calls “the explosion of feminist SF,” and the manifesto instead follows the ancient pattern feminist scholars know well, the pattern that has repeatedly resulted in eliminating the work of women from historical memory.
Or, as Delany puts it, the manifesto ignores cyberpunk’s mothers. “You’re omitting,” he’s just told his interviewer,
the Russ/Le Guin, McIntyre, and [Joan] Vinge axis, without which there wouldn’t be any cyberpunk. Is it this macho uncertainty that keeps on trying to make us black out the explosion that lights the whole cyberpunk movement? without which we wouldn’t be able to read it? without which there would not be either the returning macho or the female cyberpunk characters who stand up to it? (“Mothers,” 177)
Here Delany cites two kinds of relations between cyberpunk and feminist SF, one positive or productive, the other reactionary or negative. Easiest to grasp is his claim for the positive relation, such that cyberpunk’s production of Molly in Gibson’s Neuromancer and other female characters like her needed the rich development of female characterization found in feminist SF of the 1970s.12 The second kind of relation that Delany notes, the negative or reactionary, I did not immediately grasp. Delany’s perception, here, is informed by Nietzsche’s insight, developed by Foucault and Derrida among others, that mere rebellion is in a profound sense reactionary, necessarily reiterating and reinforcing the very terms one wishes to escape. And so, given the inherent structure of rebellion—viz., that it is dependent on and is in some sense generated by the very thing it opposes—to the extent that cyberpunk rebels against its mothers, Delany is saying, cyberpunk’s “returning macho” renders the work conservative, possibly rebarbative, and perhaps even downright “tedious.”
Gibson, Delany says, “is the one who most responds to the recent (and by no means completed) feminist history of our genre, and in an extraordinarily creative way—in a way similar to the way that Varley responds to it, too. Shirley and Sterling might take a lesson.” Delany then elaborates on the positive influence of feminist SF in facing up to what he characterizes as the crucial test of all novels: the creation of believable women characters.
I would like to back up here, to return to the parenthetical remark Delany made when talking about the conservatism of the “returning macho.” “The one point that Gomoll couldn’t seem to make,” he says, “was that this search for fathers is part of the same legitimating move that ignores mothers.” This “one point” that Delany speaks of, of course, is the most extraordinary point of the entire interview. Even if Jeanne Gomoll had been able to make that “one point” back in 1986, it may be that Samuel R. Delany would have been the only reader to get it. But it’s a point that I think some of us are now ready to get, a point, if taken to heart, that could change the stories we tell about SF profoundly. First, the continual marginalization of the work of SF by women in accounts of SF by critics, writers, and fans has more to do with the genre’s anxious desire for legitimacy and need to disavow the bastard status of SF than with any actual marginality of that work to the genre. Second, critics’ endless, impossible wish to construct a monumental history that everyone will recognize and defer to is another form of the genre’s endless, anxious search for fathers in particular and legitimacy in general. I have elsewhere argued against creating a monumental history of feminist SF in favor
of pursuing what Foucault and Deleuze call “genealogies,” which are not lineages, but multifarious connections establishing wild relations between works that might have only the most tenuous of generational connections. It strikes me that an SF criticism more interested in pursuing such genealogies than in constructing the foundations and building blocks of a monumental history would be considerably more interesting and revealing—though it obviously wouldn’t allay the anxiety of those obsessed with constructing a legitimate line of literary descent through unquestioned generations of fathers. And finally, if the genre were able to rid itself of its anxious concern with legitimacy, the constant bickering over defining the particular quality or elements of an SF text would cease.
Why do I say that I think many of us are ready now to take Delany’s point? I was greatly heartened reading The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, edited by Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn, which was published in 2003. In her introduction to the volume, which seeks to give an overview of the history of science fiction, Mendlesohn declines to define SF, except to say that it is “less a genre than an ongoing discussion…SF is a built genre. It is its history.” Second, the anthology, for the most part, takes little interest in the legitimacy issue. Third, many of its chapters attempt to integrate the work of women into its discussion—and although the chapters that don’t integrate SF by women treat women writers as irrelevant to the main discussion, they at least mention more than only one or two token women, as critics who cannot bring themselves to see women as ever having seriously influenced the development of the genre normally do.
The title of this paper speaks of “the story of SF,” but Delany would be the first to tell us that there is no one single story of SF; my use of “story” is plural in spirit. What sort of stories do I imagine could be told were SF critics to value the pearls Delany has been casting our way for the last quarter of a century? Let me offer a few examples. Were critics to accept the challenge implicit in his reference to “the crucial test of a novel” (that is, creating plausible female characters), surely one of the stories about SF that would demand to be told would entail an account identifying SF writers for whom the writing of novels—in the sense Delany intends—has been important, and how and why it became so, and what formal difficulties the writers faced in forging an SF novel, and so on. Such a question would demand a genealogical rather than monumental approach to SF history; and surely an analysis that did not integrate the work of women writers into its main discussion would strike everyone as peculiar.
Another possible story to tell about SF would take up the important aesthetic question of how affect works in SF. In his Black Clock interview, Delany says “that one thing that makes Sturgeon such a great writer is that he’s not afraid to risk sentimentality. He’s not afraid of that big emotional gesture.”(Erickson, 74) As Delany continually insists, science fiction is different from literature, and one of the things critics need to be doing is seeking to elucidate those differences. Is the place of the “big emotional gesture” different in science fiction than it is in mainstream literature? Given the difference in the treatment of subjectivity and psychology in science fiction from that typical of literature, it would seem likely. I think learning something about that difference could provide powerful insight into the aesthetics of SF.
A third example: in Delany’s Diacritics interview, he asserts that like minor literature, paraliterature “refracts, contests, and agonizes with this other ‘unbiased’ literature, calls it to task, puts it in question, and, with violence, appropriates, desecrates, ignores, falls victim to, and brilliantly recuts the multiple facets of its conventions.” (213) Delany alludes to Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s noting this of black literature; and certainly feminist critics have devoted considerable attention to this relation of women’s writing to so-called “unbiased literature.” But of course in order for critics to pay attention to this relation in SF texts, they would first need to put aside their collective anxiety over legitimacy.
Perhaps Delany’s most comprehensive suggestion for creating richer, more interesting stories about SF is his proposal, in his Paradoxa interview “Inside and Outside the Canon,” for a methodology for studying paraliterary genres that emphasizes the material productions of their discourse. Delany notes that “we need lots of biography, history, reader-response research—and we need to look precisely at how these material situations influenced the way texts (down to individual rhetorical features) were (and are) read. In short, we need to generate these markers from a sophisticated awareness of the values already in circulation among the readership at the time these works entered the public market.” (About Writing, 359) What would such a study look like? Well, I think a first step toward it would look something like Larbalestier’s The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction.
Indisputably, Delany has helped feminists to revise the stories they tell about science fiction. The only real question for me is whether these revisions will ever be integrated into the main body of science fiction criticism and permanently change the kinds of stories the genre of science fiction tells about itself.
Notes
1. My thanks to Josh Lukin for his thoughtful reading of an earlier version of this paper and his excellent suggestions for rewriting it.
2. There have been exceptions, but they are rare. Alan DeNiro’s “The Dream of the Unified Field” stands out (and explicitly recognizes Delany’s exhortations against formal, rigorous attempts to define science fiction).
3. A range of reactions can be found in the March 2006 archive of Locus Online’s letter column. Numerous blogs also featured discussed Itzkoff’s review, including Matt Cheney’s The Mumpsimus (“Dave Itzkoff’s Inner Child Is Not Happy,” March 5, 2006), which parses Itkoff’s implicit assumptions and tone (and which Itzkoff himself alluded to in a later column).
4. Ray Davis’s response to Lethem’s piece (“Things Are Tough All Over”) focuses on another aspect of Lethem’s argument, viz., that SF has become less conducive to the production of “Great Books” than it was previously, while, conversely, since the 1970s, the mainstream has become more hospitable to Great Books. Davis notes that Lethem misses the point that Delany has often made, that what Lethem calls “the mainstream” is as much a genre as SF is. In Lethem’s essay, Davis argues, “the mainstream” is “that place where all can be judged by their writerly merits rather than (as in SF) by nostalgic prejudices… .I agree with Lethem that the SF genre’s markets provide limited freedom for production of Great Books, and that the strictures continue to tighten. I regretfully disagree that an equivalent number of Great Books will appear in mainstream fiction markets as they disappear from a fading SF genre, any more than (to switch media) an equivalent number of Great TV Movies showed up to offset the loss of Great B Pictures.”
5. See Michael Swanwick’s “A User’s Guide to the Postmoderns,” which defended John Kessel, James Patrick Kelly, Connie Willis, and others against the attacks of Bruce Sterling’s “VincentOmniaveritas.”
6. On November 1, 2006, as a writer participating in a reading of work from ParaSpheres: Extending Beyond the Spheres of Literary and Genre Fiction at the University of California at San Diego, I found myself included in a discussion of “New Wave Fabulism.” During the Q&A following our reading, Anna Joy Springer, who had organized the reading, said that “so much of the work we need” is getting “thrown away into the genres.” (The UCSD library owns an audio cassette recording of the event, including the Q&A.) Ken Keegan, the editor of ParaSpheres, writes in an essay at the end of the volume, “There are really at least three different kinds of fiction: genre, literary (in its realistic, character-based sense), and a third type of fiction that really has no commonly accepted name, which does have cultural meaning and artistic value and therefore does not fit well in the escapist formula genres, but which has non-realistic elements and settings that exclude it from the category of literary fiction.” (633) After a rather convoluted discussion about various labels, Keegan c
oncludes “By presenting this fiction as neither literary nor genre, but rather as something else, we are avoiding the pitfalls of claiming literary status for these works.” (637) And yet: during the Q&A at UCSD, Keegan suggested that “New Wave Fabulist” work “transcends” genre.
7. The scale of “hardness” has purportedly to do with “scientific” accuracy and level of scientific detail, but, as feminist critics point out, is chiefly concerned with whether the author is male, the narrative casts the hero as a can-do, by-his-bootstraps booster of technology, and excludes narratives that challenge naturalized social relations and conventions. Although some fans have tried to argue that only “hard SF” qualifies as SF at all, it is more typical for writers, fans, and critics to see “hard SF” as at the core of the genre and “soft” SF as on the margins. (Not, of course, that many people agree about what is relatively “hard” and what is relatively “soft.”) In 1989, for instance, in an inflammatory essay titled “The Rape of Science Fiction,” Charles Platt blamed “the so-called New Wave” for initiating the softening (and thus weakening) SF with the result that in the 1970s “a new soft science fiction emerged, largely written by women: Joan Vinge, Vonda McIntyre, Ursula LeGuin, Joanna Russ, Kate Wilhelm, Carol Emshwiller. Their concern for human values was admirable, but they eroded science fiction’s one great strength that had distinguished it from all other fantastic literature: its implicit claim that events described could actually come true.”(46)
8. According to the head-note in the reprint of the interview in Silent Interviews, the text of the interview “began as an interview conducted and recorded by Takayuki Tatsumi at Lunacon, in Croton, New York, in April 1998.” Delany then “rewrote the transcription over the next month” and it was published in Science Fiction Eye vol. 1, no.3.
9. Since Delany corrected and amplified some of his answers after the interview had been completed, it is impossible to be certain that Delany in fact made the assertion that feminist SF had influenced cyberpunk which Tatsumi then ignored, but Delany’s colloquial rejoinder, “Well, again, you’re indulging in that same cyberpunk nervousness” suggests that he did. My conversation with Delany immediately following my presentation of an earlier version of this paper at the Delany Symposium confirmed my impression. Delany remarked that his coming up with the conceit of the illegitimate family relations during the interview was a pleasure to remember, since it was, he said, one of those wonderful, rare instances of esprit d’escalier.