Other Aliens
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By the end of the story, the friendship, without having been invalidated, no longer exists: the main character has lost his friend and his arm—they have not ridden off into the sunset together, like Tonto and the Lone Ranger, or Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook. At the time that was also fairly unusual. And there are two female characters who, while not much in light of the women’s movement that was to bloom from 1968 on, were nevertheless conceived in opposition to the stereotypes outlined above. Clumsy, immature, with as many awkwardnesses as there are pages, and with almost as many typographical errors—one even survives from an earlier printing into the current reprint that you read: on page 22, paragraph 11, lines 2–3: “metal breasts” should be “metal beasts”—The Jewels of Aptor was still the first published novel of a very young genre writer, an original paperback, which, in its year-end royalty report, the following winter, had distributed, before returns, more than ninety-two thousand copies—and garnered a generous review from P. Schuyler Miller in John W. Campbell’s Analog magazine. This was enough to earn out the advance against royalties.
In the terms you ask the question, The Jewel-Hinged Jaw (specifically the revised edition currently in print) collects essays written between 1968 and 1976. And it contains a letter that should have been dated 1974, from London, written in the months after my daughter was born (she is now forty-two) and I was re-writing Trouble on Triton, and, just before her birth, my novel Dhalgren had been sold to Frederik Pohl of Bantam Books. The current revised edition of Jaw ends with a hefty (forty pages) appendix (“Midcentury”) written in 2003, in an attempt to do some contextualizing of the 1950s in the United States, a decade [that] all of the essays contained in the book should be understood as some sort of reaction to.
EVENSON: Speaking of The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, I’ve read both the 1977 version and the 2009 revision. It’s interesting to me how it’s changed, and interesting as well the way in which the later version has numbered chapters, so it seems more like a deliberate progression. In revising it, do you find it’s a question of imagining your way back to your younger self? Or of extracting the book from one time and context and giving it a new life in another? Or? There’s a great energy in the earlier version (with the inclusion of “Shadows,” among other things), but it is much more diffuse. Whereas the later version strikes me as more shaped and integrated.
I’m particularly curious about the movement of “Letter to a Critic” to the appendix. In the first version, it opens the book and seems almost a battle cry. In the revised edition, it’s the very last thing we read. Is that because you feel that many of the issues it raises are no longer as crucial? Needed to be understood as a historical moment rather than your current aesthetic?
DELANY: It’s more than a matter of “not crucial.” It was a call to arms in 1977, followed by a scattershot overview of what was going on in the world of the personal, the political, and the critical in this country, at least as I was aware of it at the time, and what was providing inroads to change. (That’s what “Shadows” was for me.) Without the historical context, those issues as talked about in “Letter to a Critic”—based on a real letter to critic Leslie Fiedler, which, along with several others, got me my first real academic job as a visiting professor at SUNY Buffalo, in 1975—don’t make sense.
Between the time that the essay was first written, before I even went to London, and the time it was published, the US copyright laws (in 1976) were completely revised. If you didn’t live through the change—and live through it as a rational adult in the United States on both sides of it (or spend three months studying the difference in those laws, before and after) you can’t even know what the piece is talking about. Literary life in a city with seventy-nine major publishing companies (all multimillion-dollar businesses), with a handful of paperback houses and a few big hardcover houses doing all the original SF is so completely different from literary life in a city with five publishing conglomerates, as New York had by, say, 1986, there are no socioeconomic correspondences that allow you to make the imaginative leap from one to the other. The social context between 1977 and 2009 has changed so radically that most people today, unless they are specialists in the history of American publishing and writing, assuming they are under fifty, which is where most readers still tend to cluster, simply can’t bridge it.
Edmund White’s collection of essays Arts and Letters (2004) opens with an early essay that was among the most radical pieces of non-fiction written on the situation of the gay man in America in the middle sixties. When I gave it to my gay graduate students in 2008, to them it seemed politically troglodytic. That’s because they couldn’t conceive of a world where, if, in a department meeting in 1965 you had suggested that you teach a class in gay studies, not only would it not have been accepted, but whether you were gay or straight, probably you would have been assumed to be dangerously psychotic and you might be seriously assumed to have been insane—as if you had proposed a class in sexual carryings-on of schizophrenic black women over the age of sixty-two who had been confined to mental hospitals for more than twelve years. (In 1965, both male homosexuality and lesbianism, despite the Kinsey Reports Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, were still considered diseases and would continue to be for more than another decade.) The response would have been, rather, what sort of person would propose such a tasteless and absurd notion, not whether anyone thought it a good or a bad idea.
That was hard for people under thirty at that time to wrap their heads around.
The universities of most of the 1960s were universities without black studies, without gay studies, without women’s studies, film studies, or SF studies of any sort. By the eighties all of those were at least nascent, however—though we still could not pass an equal rights amendment or sustain the repeal of the death penalty, even though that last was for several decades legally set in place.
I’ve been in four countries in which coins have become practically worthless—Greece and Turkey in the 1960s, England, and now the United States. Only yesterday, I heard that several banks have discontinued counting coins for their customers to change for paper.
I mention this because when, on September 12, I first moved to Pennsylvania, I came with six cartons of metal money, collected from pockets over full with pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters that I’d hoped to cash in. They are still under a table in the dining room of the house where I had been living, and I expect those will end up in a landfill even faster than many of my books, which somehow I am hoping to preserve intact for awhile. And there’s still half a carton of coins in my current Philly apartment. Thinking seriously about what that might mean is what’s truly exhausting about analyzing our society.
EVENSON: I want to return to the question of “science fantasy” since, as you rightly point out, several of your works might best be called that. That mode was my entry into the field, through people like Michael Moorcock, M. John Harrison, Gene Wolfe, and Terry Brooks, among others. There’s something like a palpable shock when reading, say, Moorcock, you suddenly realize that what you’ve thought of as a fantasy realm may in fact be a sort of far future. That term, science fantasy, seems to me to have fallen out of critical currency, though it’s a very useful one, I think. I wonder if as the term falls away or begins to be used primarily historically, writers will stop seeing it as a viable aesthetic possibility.
In any case, in your criticism you make a distinction between mundane fiction, fantasy, and SF, in terms of their relation to the event. The first concerns events that could have happened; the second, events that could not have happened; the last, events that have not happened. How does science fantasy negotiate this relation to the event? By alternation? Does it have a double-voiced relation to the event? And does it qualify as a sort of SF or as a kind of straddling genre or is it simply specific to individual work?
DELANY: Science fantasy means simply that there are elements of both in the social background of the story, if not in the foregro
und, and not necessarily clearly distinguished. (Arthur C. Clarke once said, with great insight, that any truly unknown technology will be indistinguishable from magic to the people who don’t know it already.) It was the failure of that kind of rhetorical description of genres—events that haven’t happened, events that couldn’t happen—that led me to the much more detailed examination of the rhetorical surface of the text that I undertook in my book-length essay on Tom Disch’s short story “Angouleme” in The American Shore, which concerns itself far more with rhetorical similarities between texts—the overwhelming similarities between good SF and good literature—as well as the specifically discursive differences signaled by particular rhetorical figures (e.g., the various catalogs, of objects or of names, the slug, the various voices of the text, e.g., the Voice of History, the Voice of Science Fiction … phrases that might be literal in one genre and the same words metaphors—or even dead metaphors—in another) that work differently in one or another genre, SF or literature.
EVENSON: In the revised edition of Starboard Wine you suggest that the best SF “conscientiously misrepresents the world.” I love that phrase. Can you speak about the importance of writing as misrepresentation? How does one ensure that that misrepresentation is conscientious? Are there writers working today who you feel are particularly good at this?
DELANY: The fact is, I haven’t been reading much science fiction—or, to be completely honest, too much of anything. The things I’ve been writing about in my Facebook posts are a far better index to what I’ve been thinking about. I oscillate between the cultural significance of objects in my world and what’s going on around me. I hope that’s why people like them—because they reflect the things that actually concern me.
I know this is supposed to be an interview about science fiction, but—as is so often the case—my mind doesn’t necessarily follow the paths that are expected of it.
EVENSON: Thinking about both your Facebook posts and your recontextualizing of older books of essays as you’ve republished them on Wesleyan, I think one thing you’re doing is trying to give context. There was often a context originally (passively?) there for readers, but as we get further away from a particular historical moment, it’s lost. How crucial do you feel context is to understanding, say, your early essays, or early novels, or even why certain writers such as Robert Heinlein or Theodore Sturgeon were so important to you?
DELANY: I think I had a great deal of sympathy for the problems of contextualization—because of my own New York life in Harlem, the newly burgeoning new Bohemia in the East Village, the life in my various school situations, Dalton, the Bronx High School of Science, and the trajectory of various universities that I have negotiated since. I don’t pretend to understand myself, and the times are too “interesting” for anyone to thoroughly understand them. But we can at least try to keep the focus on one part or the other sharp.
EVENSON: I’ve noticed as a professor the way in which students sometimes are unaware of the work that was the most influential for me, and don’t respond to it the same way as I did when they read it. That’s sometimes due to the fact that those writers have been so effective that they’ve genuinely changed the discourse of a genre. I’d argue that Heinlein is like that, and probably Sturgeon as well—later writers have climbed on their shoulders. Can these writers be appreciated now to the same degree they were when they were first published? Does giving a context for them help? I remember my parents—who were not really SF readers—reading Stranger in a Strange Land when I was a kid. I think today it’s hard to imagine what a huge (and broad) impact someone like Heinlein had.
DELANY: Neither of my parents were SF readers at all. In fact, my sense of them was that they weren’t big readers at all. But they had a family respect for education. My father had been born on the campus of a black Episcopal college, St. Augustine’s, where most of his older sisters and brothers at one time taught. But among all the doctors, dentists, teachers, and lawyers, he only barely got away with a high-school degree. My mother had two years of college that had been interrupted by the pressures of the Great Depression of the 1930s. And she’d gone to work for the WPA. My academic yearnings leaped over my parents, as it were, to the rest of my family. I needed Heinlein and Sturgeon, and was lucky enough to find them in one genre. I needed Disch and Russ—and Roger Zelazny, for that matter. I needed Katherine MacLean and Alfred Bester, and was able to find them there in the same magazines and paperbacks, sold from the same racks in the same bookstores. I needed Guy Davenport and Susan Sontag and was surprised when they answered my basic fan letters civilly, once I got up the gumption to write them. I was surprised when I found a neighborhood where there were writers socially close enough for me to find things like the Theater for the New City and the Judson Poets’ Theater and the St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery Poetry Project for my nourishment. I had an education in prose and poetry, that seemed exciting enough at the time—which still seems, now and again, to be going on, however eccentric, however idiosyncratic. I worry about my tenacity. I used to write hoping I would be making texts I might want to read later. And I don’t know whether that’s what I’ve actually done, in anything. It all sounds and feels like the uncertainties of age—which is probably what it is. But I still find people who are interesting, even when, for a day or a month, writers don’t seem so. Then I find ideas that can command my attention. And I talk to more people …
My next two books to see print will be the first volume of my collected journals, in five volumes at least; at least I hope so. After that Dover will return a 2007 novel to print, Dark Reflections, which won an award—the Stonewall Book Award, back in 2008, which still means something to me. And Wesleyan has contracted to bring out an until now unpublished 1989 collection of letters—Letters from Amherst: Five Narrative Letters. I am humbled that, after all this time, they felt it still was interesting enough to publish.
I don’t need “speculative fiction” to talk about any of these, in the same way that I don’t need “creative nonfiction,” just as I myself don’t really need literature to talk about them either—though I certainly have learned most of what I know (and probably all of what I intuit about writing) from it and the genres of poetry, film, art, and music in so many forms over the years, not to mention the novel and the drama, through what my own notions of the best art for this one reader vouches safe. But the larger and grander terms are for others to assign to these texts, not me. I can do with “letters,” “science fiction,” “comics,” “nonfiction,” “pornography,” “sword and sorcery,” “memoir,” “fiction,” “movies.” Precisely the terms that carry value, and carry it most nakedly, I feel I have to earn—and, indeed, earn again and again, with each new printing, with each new reader, with each person who looks at a comic-book page or turns on a DVD. As time passes, artists get fewer and fewer readers, most of them. (MacArthur winner Guy Davenport is my favorite contemporary writer. At his death, in January 2005, probably I could name twenty-five people who felt the same. Today, eleven years later, while I think a number of these people might probably still agree, how many people can I name who have actually read a story by him in the last year? None, for certain. And that includes myself. If someone told me that not a single Davenport collection of stories had sold since I last taught A Table of Green Fields three years ago, I would be unhappy and think the universe blatantly unfair, not only to Davenport but more so to the readers who might get so much out of reading him. But I couldn’t be surprised. Thus it would be naive of me—or any writer—to assume that anything better will happen to anyone else.)
Here are a few short works that I think can function as turn-ons to flog you toward writing again if somehow you’ve slipped away:
Ann Lauterbach, The Given & the Chosen (2011)
Hugo von Hofmannsthal, The Lord Chandos Letter (1902)
Laura Bohannan, Shakespeare in the Bush (1961)
They are among the most pleasurable brief works on writing that I have read.
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nbsp; EVENSON: For those readers who are coming to your large body of work for the first time, where would you suggest they start, what books do you see as a good entrée into the world of Delany? And what books do you feel really represent your deepest vision the most?
DELANY: Well, I am two writers: one is a critic who writes about creative writing and science fiction and some specific writers as examples of some of those notions. As far as my SF criticism is concerned, a small galaxy of texts that you might look at consists of my initial academic offering, “About 5,750 Words.” It’s a popular place to begin—if (and only if) you immediately go on to look at some critical pieces I’ve written that think against it, as it were, that take you further on: “Three Letters to Science Fiction Studies,” at the end of my collection Starboard Wine and “Reflections on Historical Models,” which follows in that same book. Without those two, however, I don’t think the earlier piece is anything other than a not-very-interesting five-finger exercise.
Another galaxy of longer critical texts that I hope work well together are the essays “Alyx: Joanna Russ,” followed by “Letter to the Symposium on ‘Women in Science Fiction,’” and “To Read The Dispossessed.” This last is, in effect, my unnecessarily tentative coming-out letter to a number of science fiction writers, all of whom, with one exception (James Tiptree, Jr.) had known I was a gay man for years.
Finally, the essays “Sturgeon,” “Russ” (both in Starboard Wine), and “Racism in Science Fiction,” which you can find online, leave you pretty much ready to attack what, for better or for worse, are my two major critical endeavors, The American Shore, a book-length reading of an SF short story by Thomas M. Disch, and “Atlantis Rose …” (in a revised edition that will likely see print in a year or so; till then the unrevised version in Longer Views will have to do), which is a biocritical study of Hart Crane.