Starboard Wine. Samuel R. Delany
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20th Century Studies at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, where I had a chance to try out a dense and difficult book as a study text on a class of alert, adventurous students as well as on a number of faculty members who were interested in the teaching and criticism of science fiction. That book was The American Shore: Meditations on a Tale of Science Fiction by Thomas M. Disch—“Angouleme” (Dragon Press; Elizabethtown, 1978). Somewhat to my surprise, it was those most receptive to and appreciative of the theoretical complexity of the Shore who were most persuasive in their arguments that I must take on the job of becoming my own popularizer. I must say here that in no way do these essays present a systematic popularization of the thinking in The American Shore. Still, a number of the ideas to be found here can be found in kernel in that more difficult book. A number of others, new here, have been presented—here—in such a way as not to contradict any of the ideas put forth in the previous work. Although these essays are not a systematic introduction to The American Shore, needless to say, reading them will certainly leave one better prepared to grapple with it. My thanks go, then, particularly to Teresa de Lauretis for articulating the necessity of popularization most clearly. Thanks as well go to Catherine McClennahan, Tom Moylan, and Mary Kenny Badami for their questions, attentions, and insights. My gratitude also goes to Ralph Cohen, of New Literary History, who argued me out of the use of the term genre from a theoretical standpoint, and to Brian Aldiss, who slew any further possibility of its use by some hard-headed and intelligent observations.* My thanks go to David Jackson, formerly of the Studio Museum in Harlem, who invited me to deliver there “The Necessity of Tomorrow(s)” in winter 1978. Victoria Schochet, formerly of Analog Magazine, submitted “Science Fiction and ‘Literature’” to an astute editorial going-over, when that magazine first published the piece in spring 1978; this resulted in major clarifications as well as my first and rather humbling realization that professional science fiction editors might be honestly interested in what an SF writer had to say about a real and pressing situation; I am grateful for her time, effort, and insight. My thanks go to Robert A. Collins for inviting me to deliver “Dichtung und Science Fiction” at the Conference on the Fantastic at Florida Atlantic University in 1982. My thanks go also to Darko Suvin, who first suggested I write the essay “Russ,” and to Jane Weedman, who gave me an opportunity to deliver it at the Comparative Literature Symposium at Texas Tech University in January 1983. Equal thanks also go to the organization committees of Anonycon, Minicon, Norwescon, Balticon, and Torque for having me as guest of honor, where versions or sections of pieces here were tried out as guest-of-honor speeches. To all the editors of Science Fiction Studies, Robert Philmus, Charles Elkins, and Darko Suvin, I am inexpressibly grateful. My thanks go also to David Hartwell, who, besides acting as editor and publisher of this entire collection, first requested the pieces “Heinlein” and “Sturgeon” as introductions to volumes in his library reprint series for Gregg Press in, respectively, 1979 and 1977. Michael Skloff submitted the entire manuscript to an astute and conscientious editorial mediation for which it would be impossible to thank him enough. Patrick Nielsen Hayden was helpful with points of fact, for which I am grateful. With all the aid I have received, doubtless there still remain lapses, if not in fact, then in focus and style. But these are my own.
Samuel R. Delany July 2011
*A conviction that lasted just long enough to write the essays in this book, whereupon, fortunately, it reversed.
Starboard Wine, An Author’s Introduction
These baker’s dozen disparate pieces discuss the past and the future of science fiction, those violences committed on our reading of science fiction texts by memory (and remembering) and desire (and although we have no English word re-desiring, desire itself is so closely allied to repetition that Freud could identify the two). Despite their thrusts forward and backward, some of these meditations on practice and potential take off, especially in the last third of the book, from a present position of uncharacteristic rigor—that is to say, a theoretical rigor uncharacteristic of most contemporary SF criticism, fannish or academic, formal or informal. At the same time, especially in the first half, autobiography is rampant.
There is some reason to believe that in other areas of our universe certain constants, such as the speed of light or the direction of time, may be quite different from what they are likely to be throughout our local galaxy. Because facts result from the encounter of consciousness with landscape, a fact too far removed from the landscape that produced it often becomes problematic, if not downright suspect. The social landscape is far more variable and volatile than the physical one; and science fiction, like all aesthetic productions, is a social phenomenon: the autobiography is here to ground the rigor, not to relieve it.
With that as prologue, let me tell a tale.
One late autumn afternoon some years ago, as I was coming down the stone steps outside my apartment building, I glanced up 82nd Street toward Columbus Avenue. In Central Park, two blocks away, the sun had found some leaves to snag on. It was cool, but not cold enough to button my jacket.
And walking toward me (I didn’t stop; I didn’t frown; I kept walking toward him, a bigger and bigger grin catching up my face) was a friend I hadn’t seen for six years.1
Living in Connecticut now, he’d gotten my address from a mutual San Francisco friend; and on this, his third trip into the city, he’d come to look me up.
As I was free for the day, and as it was the first time my friend had been in New York with someone who actually lived here, the afternoon turned into a round of Upper West Side, then Village, bars; then dinner in a downtown Indian restaurant with a pale gold Pakistani beer; at last a night trip across upper New York Bay on the Staten Island Ferry.
At the deck rail, looking over the wrinkling waters at the heap of lights mounding the Staten Island shore, my friend pointed to some other lights out in the haze, within which, on the dark, one could imagine the turning tugboat that owned them. “You know what those lights mean?”
“The ones on the mast? Yes,” I said. “Two lights on the mast and it’s a tug with one barge; three lights mean it’s a tug with two barges. Four, and it’s got three —”
“No, I didn’t mean those lights,” he said. (When I’d last seen him, he’d worked as a salad assistant in the galley of a Matson Line steamship on another coast.) “I mean the other lights. Down there.”
“Down where?” I asked.
“There. Below the mast. Look: on each side of the boat there’s a beacon. The red light means it’s the port side. And a green light would mean you were seeing the starboard side. When I worked on the boats out of San Francisco, they gave us two ways to remember which was which. Red is on the left side of the ship, the port side, and red stands for the heart—on the left side of the body. They other way is just to remember that red stands for port, and port wine is red.”
Out on the night water, the tug, with her single mast-light, completed her turn and started off through the fog, her red light occluded, her starboard beacon revealed now, growing a dimmer and dimmer green.
He repeated: “Port wine is red …”
Over the next minutes we watched the green light drift into invisibility while our boat pulled toward the bright windows and chained ramps of the Staten Island terminal.
As friendships will, this one went on to some new highs, then hit some lows; I haven’t seen my friend now in over a year. The memory, then, suffices.
But what I have been doing a lot since then is writing about science fiction. This book contains some of the more recent pieces.
Years ago in San Francisco—indeed, in the months when my friend and I first met—I had written, “Science fiction is about events that have not happened,”2 and somehow this admission that science fiction concerned things that do not exist stirred a very specialized academic circle in a very small but distinct way. In matters written, this