Starboard Wine. Samuel R. Delany
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lumped it with Westerns and romances—and the “Jalna” books, the “Claudia and David” novels, and the endless biographies of Eleanor Roosevelt my grandmother, who felt “serious reading” was bad for you, was given by her indulgent children and grandchildren for birthdays, for Christmas, and even, sometimes, for funerals. But what else was I reading? I read James Baldwin’s early essays that were to be first collected in Notes of a Native Son, and I thought they were as wonderful as … well, as science fiction. I also read Richard Wright’s Black Boy and Chester Himes’s If He Hollers Let Him Go, and they seemed … well, history. They certainly didn’t take place in the world of freedom marches and integration rallies. Did they explain them? They certainly said that the condition of the black man in America was awful—somehow the black woman in these fictive endeavors got mysteriously shortchanged in a manner suspiciously similar to the way the white woman was getting shortchanged in the work of Wright’s and Himes’s white male contemporaries. (The black woman was somehow always the cause and the victim at once of everything that went wrong with the black man.) But Wright and Himes seemed to say as well that, in any realistic terms, precisely what made it so awful also made it unchangeable. And they said it with a certainty that, to me, dwarfed the moments of interracial rapprochement one found in books like John O. Killens’s Youngblood, no matter how much more pleasant Killens might have been for us youngsters to read. One began to suspect that it was precisely the certainty that no real change was possible that had made Wright and Himes as popular as they were with those strangely always-absent readers who establish books as classics. At least that’s what I seemed to read in them in a world that was clearly exploding with racial change from headline to headline.
Did the science fiction I read at the time talk about the black situation in America, about the progress of racial change?
Isaac Asimov’s famous “Robot” stories certainly veered close. The series, available today in four volumes (the short story collections I, Robot and The Rest of the Robots, and the novels Caves of Steel and The Naked Sun), deals with a future where humans and robots live side by side, though the prejudice and disdain the robot detective R-Daneel (one of the two main characters in The Caves of Steel) experiences is clearly an analog of some of the milder sorts of prejudice we experienced from whites. And Asimov’s “Three Laws of Robotics,” famous to young SF readers the world over, essentially amount to: Robots shall not harm, disobey, or displease humans—which, if you substitute white for human and black for robot, is clearly a white ideal of what the “good Negro” ought to be. And the stories, of course, gain most of their wit and interest from the ingenious ways the clever robots figure out to get around those laws without actually breaking them or getting into real trouble. Yet the stories touch on many other things beside, so that in the end the racial analog, rather than forming a central theme, seems more like a naked lightbulb on a loose cord, swinging back and forth, flickering on and off throughout the tales, sometimes illuminating the actions, sometimes clearly not in the least the concern of the writer.
Well, then, how does one read these tales today? I can only give you the way one black adolescent, who enjoyed science fiction very much, read these stories by a Russian-born Jew of liberal political leanings, who by that time had practically given up science fiction to write books and articles on popular science while teaching biochemistry at a Boston medical school.
It was precisely at those places in the story where the robot’s situation seemed to be most analogous to the situation of the American black that I always asked myself: Just exactly how does the situation of the robots in these stories differ from the reality of the racial situation of my world? After all, these were tales about robots living and struggling in a future world, tales whose whole delight lay in the fact that their world was different from our own. Under such a reading, the tales were certainly no less enjoyable. What I do think happened to me, from questioning the distinctions the more carefully the more strongly the similarities presented themselves to be viewed, is that I became a far more astute observer of our own racial situation than I might otherwise have been.
In the universities and high schools where science fiction is being used today as an aid to teach political science, sociology, and ecology, I hope stress is put on the difference between the science-fictional world and the real world: for those differences are precisely what constitutes the tales’ science-fictional aspect, and it is only their apprehension that can accomplish the mental honing the most outspoken advocates of science fiction claim it fosters.
In 1960 Robert Heinlein’s novel Starship Troopers took its Hugo Award for best SF novel of its year. It’s very much a boys’ book, a book about the way warfare can mature a young man—a tale hopelessly chauvinistic in the older sense of the word, rendered innocuous only by the similarity of its message to how-many ’40s and ’50s war movies and boys’ adventure books glorifying military life.
And yet it is science fiction—which means the distinctions are what concern us.
It’s a hundred years in the future. A hostile alien race has been discovered which is out to exterminate humanity, and a war is on between humans and aliens that must go to the death. The young man who narrates the story tells of his enlistment in the military, of the use of fantastic superweapons, of body armor that renders the wearer practically a superman, of genetically mutated dogs who can speak and who have human intelligence and who fight alongside special soldiers. Such close relations develop between dog and man that when the master is killed, the dog is simply put to death as a matter of course; or when the dog is killed, the master is retired and often permanently hospitalized, because the emotional ties are so great the partner remaining can only crack up. Women have universally been given the job of spaceship pilot, because their reflexes test out fractionally higher than men’s and their long-term endurance is better. It’s a galaxy of marvels, and our young recruit describes each one in an astonishingly effective way. Also, for an SF novel in the late ’50s, it was very long—almost 300 pages, well beyond the 157- to 197-page limit a disdainful paperback publishing industry set as the automatic tops for an SF novel in those days. Yes, things had certainly changed in this future world, this future war.
About two-thirds through the book, when our young hero, having survived the first 200 pages of dangers, is making the choice inevitable in such stories (whether or not to go on and take officer’s training), there is a brief respite from the adventures. And there, in the lull, the narrator, as he prepares for a date with a pretty pilot in training, describes how he goes into the bathroom to put on his makeup—for in this future world all men use makeup, and it has completely lost the associations that restrict it to femininity. As he looks in the mirror, he makes a passing mention of the nearly chocolate brown hue of his face—
And I did a strange double take.
The hero of this book, who for 200 pages now had been telling me of his daring exploits and intimate fears, was not the blue-eyed, blond hero of countless RKO Second World War films. He was not Caucasian at all—indeed, and it gets dropped in the next sentence, his ancestors were Filipino!
More to the point, among the many changes that had taken place in this future world that I had been dazzled by and delighted with, the greatest was that the racial situation, along with all the technological changes, had resolved itself to the point where a young soldier might tell you of his adventures for 200 pages out of a 300-page novel and not even have to mention his ethnic background—because it had, in his world, become that insignificant!
Only a handful of years later, a liberal white Doubleday editor was to push my 900-page attempt at a novel back across his desk toward me and ask: “How do you expect me to take seriously a novel in which I don’t find out that the main character’s colored until page 18? That’s very important. It should be on page one.”
But there, in that Heinlein novel, this simple fact, placed where it was, in concert with all the accompanying technological and sociological changes, suddenly detonated an image, brief and bright, of a world where the two nets, the two webs, the matrix of black society and the matrix of white society, had become interwoven in such a way that an equitable interchange of money, goods, information, and emotions had somehow come about—so that in this world the specificity