Science Fiction

Science Fiction - Delany's Territory

Well, as noted, I'm a huge fan of Samuel R. Delany's work.

He is incredibly prolific, but I've read just about all of his SF, many of his essay books and much of his literary/SF criticism, along with a few (!) of his books which are autobiographical in nature. .

Early Delany is lyrical, very comfortable with the SF genre and conventions, and always challenging. In these books, he is a story teller first, but starts to blend in his various and polymorphic interests which even in these early days include myth, linguistics, philosophy and structuralism. Babel 17 and The Einstein Intersection are the Nebula winning classics of this epoch.

For me, things start to change with Nova and the short work he does around this time, such as "We In a Rigorous Power's Employ" and "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones". Here, the work is finely crafted, the characters memorable and the viewpoints push out on the bounds of the late sixties culture, but never dip into the stereotypes that were so typical of this period in places like the mainstream media.

Then, there is Dhalgren. I first read this in a rush during two weeks while I was at an empty campus in the middle of the winter in Troy, New York. I bought it in late December 1974 and was hooked immediately. It seemed so right to be reading this book about a near deserted city while being on the empty campus -- if you strip a cityscape of most of its people, what is left takes on a wholly different character. The paperback version I have is 879 pages and unfortunately, is missing many corrections to typos which Delany got into the later printings. Dhalgren was a book which was a very sharp commentary on its time (the late sixties and early seventies), but in its post-apocalyptic settings and tone, was one of the only books in recent years that explicitly foretold of times when huge tragic events might happen in major cities. But, Dhalgren is much more than that.

If you want to have some sense of what young people were doing in the late sixties-early seventies, Dhalgren is a pretty accurate guide in my estimation. I've now read the book several times and continue to get new insights from each reading. Its also an exploration of what may happen if you strip away the norms of a culture and the many varied reactions to this, which range from people who cannot cope in the least, to ones like "Kid" who swim with the tide and transform themselves in ways they had never anticipated. In a self-penned essay under non de plume K. Leslie Steiner (published many years later in The Straits of Messina - Serconia Press), Delany suggests that the critics that liken it to Joyce's Finnegan's Wake might be better drawn to that other big book of the era, Mann's "The Magic Mountain". In both cases, a protagonist is thrown by circumstances into a radically different and in-bred culture that is set far apart from the rest of society, but which echoes in many ways (however twisted) the larger society outside these smaller realms.

After Dhalgren, Delany moved back to what was ostensibly more traditional SF, a book he calls in later editions, "Trouble on Triton". Here, the genre conventions of space travel, interplanetary politics, and faraway cultures which veer away from Terran mores come into play. Yet, as the surface is scratched, the conventions are twisted during the course of the book to become almost unrecognizable. Here, Delany explores a favorite theme, gender, in a world where the choice of sex and types of partners is totally in one's own control, as today's trends of cosmetic surgery, youth drugs and other such treatments are followed through to ends which most non-SF readers are not accustomed to contemplating and which will probably even now offend some readers. Here as well he also begins to include various fragments of additional text and "informal remarks" of an academic bent which are dubbed "A Critical Fiction". These additional texts have interplay with the main text and serve to either complement or perhaps undermine the mainstream of the novel. In my first reading, I recall devouring all of this and just seeing these parts as filling in a somewhat bigger picture in the fascinating future culture which Delany has invented for this novel. Actually, I just looked at my copy and see the note: "This helps to explain Triton in the context of a greater metaphor". QED.

About a year after I read Triton (the original title), I met Chip at an SF convention in Buffalo, which was conveniently on the way to Toronto. The evening confirmed much of what I knew already, that he has a wide reaching intellect that is comfortably foraying across a wide range of disciplines. In this setting, he was very comfortable, chatting with former students from an earlier teaching sojourn and treating new acquaintances like my friends and I as people that were worth getting to know. I recall talking with him about Triton and mentioning that I found the "metalogic" that Bron Hellstrom was using to tie in pretty well with some of the things I was studying in my field of systems analysis. At the time I was reading about the work of Forrester and Donella Meadows of MIT, thinking this was what systems analysis saw about. I still think that Forrestor's work on systems is insightful (i.e. .particularly in the way that systems will tend to behave in a way which will consistently surprise those who simply view a system as a sum of parts), but the "systems analysis" I did within an MIS department within a Burroughs subsidiary for seven years proved to be much more mundane.

I also asked Chip if he was working on any more science fiction and he said that he had started something new. Well, it was about two years before the fantasy series of intertwined stories called "Tales of Neveryon" were to come out. This was the first in a series of books which are about many things, but play more in the genre of fantasy than SF. However, a few years later, another SF novel did emerge, "Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand", so perhaps he had begun that book at the earlier point before moving on to the lands of Neveryon, or as it has been called, a "A Children's Garden of Semiotics".

(More to come ...)

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