The Atheist in the Attic

by Samuel R. Delany

  The fact is, while it is always a personal pleasure to appear with her, Butler and I are very different writers, interested in very different things. And because I am the one who benefits by this highly artificial generalization of the literary interest in Butler’s work into this in-many-ways-artificial interest in African-American science fiction (I’m not the one who won the MacArthur, after all), I think it’s incumbent upon me to be the one publicly to question it. And while it provides generous honoraria for us both, I think that the nature of the generalization (since we have an extraordinarily talented black woman SF writer, why don’t we generalize that interest to all black SF writers, male and female?) has elements of both racism and sexism about it.

  One other thing allows me to question it in this manner. Last year at the African-American science fiction conference at Clark Atlanta University, where, with Steve Barnes and Tananarive Due, Butler and I met with each other, talked and exchanged conversation and ideas, spoke and interacted with the university students and teachers and the other writers in that historic black university, all of us present had the kind of rich and lively experience that was much more likely to forge common interests and that, indeed, at a later date could easily leave shared themes in our subsequent work. This aware and vital meeting to respond specifically to black youth in Atlanta is not, however, what usually occurs at an academic presentation in a largely white university doing an evening on African-American SF. Butler and I, born and raised on opposite sides of the country, half a dozen years apart, share many of the experiences of racial exclusion and the familial and social responses to that exclusion which constitute a race. But as long a racism functions as a system, it is still fueled from aspects of the perfectly laudable desires of interested whites to observe this thing, however dubious its reality, that exists largely by means of its having been named: African-American science fiction.

  To pose a comparison of some heft:

  In the days of cyberpunk, I was often cited by both the writers involved and the critics writing about them as an influence. As a critic, several times I wrote about the cyberpunk writers. And Bill Gibson wrote a gracious and appreciative introduction to the 1996 reprint of my novel Dhalgren. Thus you might think that there were a fair number of reasons for me to appear on panels with those writers or to be involved in programs with them. With all the attention that has come to her in the last years, Butler has been careful (and accurate) in not claiming that I am any sort of influence on her. I have never written specifically about her work. Nor, as far as I know, has she ever mentioned me in print.

  Nevertheless, throughout all of cyberpunk’s active history, I only recall being asked to sit on one cyberpunk panel with Bill, and that was largely a media-focused event at the Kennedy Center. In the last ten years, however, I have been invited to appear with Octavia at least six times, with another appearance scheduled in a few months and a joint interview with the both of us scheduled for a national magazine. All the comparison points out is the pure and unmitigated strength of the discourse of race in our country vis-à-vis any other. In a society such as ours, the discourse of race is so involved and embraided with the discourse of racism that I would defy anyone ultimately and authoritatively to distinguish them in any absolute manner once and for all.

  Well, then, how does one combat racism in science fiction, even in such a nascent form as it might be fibrillating, here and there? The best way is to build a certain social vigilance into the system—and that means into conventions such as Readercon: Certainly racism in its current and sometimes difficult form becomes a good topic for panels. Because race is a touchy subject, in situations such as the above mentioned Readercon autographing session where chance and propinquity alone threw blacks together, you simply ask: Is this all right, or are there other people that, in this case, you would rather be paired with for whatever reason—even if that reason is only for breaking up the appearance of possible racism; since the appearance of possible racism can be just as much a factor in reproducing and promoting racism as anything else: Racism is as much about accustoming people to becoming used to certain racial configurations so that they are specifically not used to others, as it is about anything else. Indeed, we have to remember that what we are combating is called prejudice: prejudice is prejudgment—in this case, the prejudgment that the way things just happen to fall out are “all right,” when there well may be reasons for setting them up otherwise. Editors and writers need to be alerted to the socioeconomic pressure on such gathering social groups to reproduce inside a new system by the virtue of “outside pressures.” Because we still live in a racist society, the only way to combat it in any systematic way is to establish—and repeatedly revamp—antiracist institutions and traditions. That means actively encouraging the attendance of nonwhite readers and writers at conventions. It means actively presenting nonwhite writers with a forum to discuss precisely these problems in the con programming. (It seems absurd to have to point out that racism is by no means exhausted simply by black/white differences: indeed, one might argue that it is only touched on here.) And it means encouraging dialogue among, and encouraging intermixing with, the many sorts of writers who make up the SF community.

  It means supporting those traditions.

  I’ve already started discussing this with Eric. I will be going on to speak about it with the next year’s programmers.

  Readercon is certainly as good a place as any, not to start but to continue.

  Editorial Postscript

  Since its first publication almost two decades ago, “Racism and Science Fiction” has become a classic in and out of the field. Asked if there is anything he would add or alter today (2017), the author answered:

  Not really. I said in the essay that when the numbers of black writers, women writers, gay writers, Asian writers reach a high enough recognizable proportion to start having economic heft, then there would be social divisions along those social lines. And now there are. That’s not, as they say, rocket science.

  “Discourse in an Older Sense”

  Samuel R. Delany interviewed by Terry Bisson

  You recently completed a novel, Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders, almost as long, every bit as challenging, and seemingly as ambitious as Dhalgren. What’s it about? Isn’t the “Great American Novel” a young writer’s game?

  Well, it was published on my 70th birthday and, yes, was celebrated with a conference, Delany at 70, at the University of Maryland. But—paradoxically—it was published by a very small press (Donald Weise’s Magnus Books) that never seemed to have copies available over the next few years. Thus are the paradoxes of achieving age and what may (or may not) be artistic maturity (or the old-age dodderings of an artist who has gone on babbling long past the time he might have done better to shut up because he’s only destroying his—or her—own reputation: which are certainly many of us) in a marginal genre in this age.

  It’s about two working-class garbagemen, one from the area, one transplanted from the big city in Atlanta, who meet, become lovers, and live and work on the Georgia coast together for the rest of their lives.

  It’s got a lot of what I learned about relationships from the twenty years I’d been with Dennis, and the eight years I’d been with Frank Romeo—and even the thirteen years I’d been with Marilyn Hacker.

  As well, I got the same thousand-dollar advance for this 804-page novel as I got for my first 148-page book, The Jewels of Aptor, back in 1961. Now, consider the inflation over those fifty years. Or the fact that this was the first novel I’d called “science fiction” in thirty years, though I’d published a number—including Hogg, The Mad Man, and the series Return to Nevèrÿon that a number of critics think is my best work (its actual worth I don’t know and can’t know, even if you try to tell me)—in between time that had made me more money, certainly.

  You dedicated your Paris Review interview to the late Joanna Russ (1937–2011). Were you friends? Why was she, is she, important to you? (I’m writin
g this query on her birthday.)

  She was a brilliant writer at the sentence level. She was a brilliant thinker at the social level—and she was a great believer in doing everything from an oppositional stance, as well. Yes, we had a great deal of simpatico from the first time we met at Terry Carr’s for dinner, during which she didn’t tell me she had just finished a novel that I would receive in galleys in only a few weeks: Picnic on Paradise (a.k.a. Picnic in Paradise, Russ’s original title). Friends? Well, we never saw a great deal of one another, but for more than a decade we had a correspondence that reached Victorian proportions. Yes, I think of her as my friend, though there were moments when I strained that friendship.

  What’s the source of “The Atheist in the Attic?” I know you are a scholar of literary history, but this seems a little off that grid.

  Not really (my answer to both implied statements: I’m “not a scholar” and it’s “off the grid” only in terms of which grid you mean). Spinoza is the philosopher whose name lurks behind Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders. Eric struggles with reading him, there on the coast of Georgia, for many years. (I remember rereading Ethica in my doctor’s office for an in-office procedure where a microwave generator was shoved up my butt to take care of my enlarged prostate, a couple of years before I came down with actual prostate cancer.) I struggled too, though I had a whole library of auxiliary readings to help me. From that auxiliary reading, the Nadler and the Bennett and the Stuart Hampshire, and the various anthologies that were once in my very threatened library along with Wiki online—I managed to put together that very small and slight novella, during a very fraught time in my life, just before my library was finally lost … or at any rate mostly rendered inaccessible.

  I used my own struggles with the text over several years as the fictive basis for Eric’s on the Georgia coast—with the difference that I had not promised any transgender black seminarian that I would persevere through three readings the way Eric did in order to hook him on the experience. “Did I succeed in creating a believable fiction?” and “For what percentage of my readers?” are questions I will never know the answers to.

  Kim Stanley Robinson often compares historical fiction with Fantasy and SF, in that in both you have to create as well as populate a world. Do you find similarities in the two genres as well?

  Yes. And the further away in time you get in both cases, the more the discursive differences have to be faked. These are genres in which nothing can be real except by accident, though reality it still the aesthetic effect you are trying for.

  You are considered one of the members of SF’s “New Wave.” Were you ever part of the London crowd?

  On a couple of occasions, in the mid-1960s: for my first visit to Europe, which ended with a trip to London, and my second trip over the subsequent Christmas and New Year’s, to stay with John Brunner; and then again in the 1970s, when I actually moved to London for a couple of years, when my daughter was born in Queen Charlotte’s Maternity Hospital in Hammersmith, where I was a more or less interested visitor, and where I did my last rewrite of Dhalgren and wrote Trouble on Triton, before coming home pretty much permanently for many years. But paradoxically, I never considered myself a part of the London SF crowd. I was there because my wife had asked me to come, and her own relation to that crowd was somewhat problematic.

  Your debut novel, The Jewels of Aptor, was postapocalyptic and also ecclesiastical in its way. Was A Canticle for Leibowitz an influence? Or was atomic disaster just in the air in those days?

  From Hiroshima through the Cuban Missile Crisis and beyond, atomic war was a pervasive fear in this country. It was what the “Cold War” was about. (Full disclosure: I always found A Canticle for Leibowitz all but unreadable.)

  Many people now assume it’s under control, though some of the reported behavior of our current popular minority president makes it seem still a possibility. Often, it’s only after the fact that we know for sure when such crises (have) happen(ed).

  You wrote a critical appreciation of SF, The Jewel-Hinged Jaw. I wrote the cover copy (!) on the first edition back in the 1970s, but I can’t recall what the title signified.

  Not the first hardcover edition, but the first paperback edition (David’s own very small company, Dragon Press, published a hardcover edition before you got to it at Berkley Books)—and I remember it well. It was the smartest cover copy I’d yet had on a paperback book, and I told David Hartwell to thank you personally for it. For one thing, you’d read the book. That put you notably ahead of most paperback copywriters, at least those who had anything to do with science fiction.

  I remember when you came out of the back office and we first said hello to each other, in the office.

  The title was not explained in the book. You just had to recognize it. It was from a line in Thomas M. Disch’s Camp Concentration: from Sacchetti’s poem, “The Hierodule,” when Disch describes the black idol of language/knowledge/art, which is presumably supposed to speak the truth:

  Behold! Behold the black, ungrainèd flesh,

  The jaw’s jeweled hinge that we can barely glimpse …

  So, no, you probably didn’t and don’t recall what the title signified, unless you’ve been rereading Disch’s novel with your literary antennae alert to explaining precisely that conundrum.

  In the standard bildungsroman, the young artist lights out from the provinces for London or Paris. You took a subway to Washington Square and Greenwich Village, and then moved into the Lower East Side (alphabet city and the East Village) because the Village proper was too expensive. What was the appeal?

  When I was thirteen or fourteen and not sure whether I was going to be a writer or a musician, or even what kind of musician—a folk singer or a composer of serious, avant-garde music—I was drawn to the Village like so many others, as a place where it would be easier to experiment with art and sexuality both.

  Washington Square looked entirely different. The fountain and the layout of the park and the restrooms were entirely other from what they are today, and kids came down to the square on the weekend. There was already a bohemian tradition associated with the area, and had been one since the whole thing was an ethnic Italian neighborhood, with its coffee shops and New York University and bookstores and experimental off-off-Broadway theaters.

  So did Tompkins Square.

  You and the poet Marilyn Hacker have had a lifelong relationship. How did that begin?

  We met on our very first day of high school, at the Bronx High School of Science Annex Building, at the other end of the city. We were friends from then on. My parents had sent me to the Dalton School (and before that Horace Mann–Lincoln) in the center of the city on the east side. But soon we were on that axis that ran through the city—and Marilyn had gotten an early admission into NYU and hadn’t liked it; so I went to City College, after my father died and I had managed to graduate from Bronx Science without showing up for my high school graduation.

  Like any other life, it was a combination of personal forces, neighborhood forces, and larger forces that are always easier to read after the fact than before.

  I had a condition that I didn’t even have word for until my wife discovered it in an article when we were both twenty-one: dyslexia.

  The dyslexia is part of a larger condition that my daughter—who is a doctor—only explained to me some months ago: Adult Attention Deficit Disorder (AADD). There are drugs for it that I’ve never tried because I never knew I had it until relatively recently. I spoke to a good friend who has a form of the latter and discovered that he’d tried the drug—which is speed—and hadn’t liked the effect, so he’d discontinued it. Since I am twenty years older than he is, would I have the same reaction? I simply don’t know.

  In the Imaginary Index to Delany, published by Tyndale House in 2011, there is no entry for Dr. Johnson. What’s your beef with the Old Tory?

  First, I’ve never heard of Tyndale House’s Imaginary Index to Delany—so I imagine you’re making a joke.r />
  Let’s just say that I imagined that I was. I was interested in your opinion of Samuel Johnson. Your opinion of his opinions.

  I’ve written about Johnson and recently prepared an essay for a new collection (or rather a letter-essay), where I discussed him and his refutation of Bishop Berkeley, by—rather notoriously—kicking a rock. One of the things I have written, however, is that there is so much knowledge available today that there can be no such thing anymore as a classical education that we can expect more than a relatively few people to share.

  Some people’s information is other people’s misinformation and even disinformation. That is pretty much the contemporary condition. When we say that the same forces that put Obama in office also put Trump in office, eight years later, but at work on a very differently structured political field, what exactly are we saying?

  Larry McCaffrey and other critics claim that your Return to Nevèrÿon series “undercut[s] the premises” of the genre [sword and sorcery]. That sounds sort of sneaky. What about your more academic treatises and lectures?

  They become less and less academic as I get older: I try to write as clearly as I can. But I roam through genres, letters, lectures, interviews, journals, Facebook posts, and various kinds of fictions.

  You won a Hugo for an early memoir, The Motion of Light in Water, about your time as a young, gay writer in the East Village. Then there was your novel, Dark Reflections, about an older gay writer walking the same streets. Anything of interest happen in between?