Science Fiction and Difference:

      An Introduction to Starboard Wine

      —by Matthew Cheney

      Starboard Wine offers an extension (and in many ways culmination) of ideas Samuel R. Delany had begun to formulate, revise, and explore in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, which collected essays written between 1968 and 1977 (or, to add a different perspective, between the ages of twenty-six and thirty-five).¹ These are ideas about language, about reading, about difference, about history, about criticism, about literature, and about science fiction.

      Though subtitled “More Notes on the Language of Science Fiction,” we could also call Starboard Wine “Notes on the Theory and Practice of Science Fiction Criticism,” because more than in any of his previous books, Delany seems here to be calling for SF criticism to move away from certain practices, to aspire to greater rhetorical and historiographic complexity, and to take into account more recent literary theories than those of the Russian formalists or the New Critics. At the same time, he is demonstrating the kind of criticism he advocates.

      Starboard Wine’s first essay, “The Necessity of Tomorrow(s),” begins with autobiography—“an attempt to sketch out one lane along one of the many possible highways into the SF world.” This lane leads to a discussion of difference, and the various meanings that word possesses could be used as markers for nearly all of what follows in the book. Difference is what separates a science fiction text from other texts: a difference of representation and reference, a difference of reading strategies (protocols, codes), a difference of history. Science fiction is best described according to its differences, and any meaningful discussion of it will be a discussion of difference. Within such a conception, science fiction becomes a different way of reading and a different way of thinking. What “The Necessity of Tomorrow(s)” suggests, though, is that difference for Delany stretches well beyond the borders of science fiction.

      Throughout Starboard Wine, Delany is (mostly silently) applying Derrida’s idea of différance to the texts he encounters and the situations he describes.² Science fiction is made different from other texts by the play of its references, the techniques of conceiving and writing texts that utilize this play, and the habits of reading required for such texts to yield the most meaning. These differences do not determine quality—they are present in the best and worst science fiction—but in addition to these differences, the most aesthetically accomplished science fiction creates difference by allowing critical inquiries that would not otherwise be possible. It is this latter point that seems to me one of Delany’s great accomplishments, because through it he has linked Lukács’ statement that “the novel is the only art form where the artist’s ethical position is the aesthetic problem” with the particular aesthetics of science fiction in a way that allows—even requires—both close reading and ethical analysis.

      “Some Presumptuous Approaches to Science Fiction” offers a view of difference at the level of inspiration by suggesting that the process for coming up with an idea for a science fiction story is different from the process of coming up with an idea for a play, a historical novel, or a poem: “In general, science-fictional ideas generate when a combination of chance and the ordinary suggests some distortion of the current and ordinary that can conceivably be rationalized as a future projection.” Delany insists that “Science fiction is not about the future; it uses the future as a narrative convention to present significant distortions of the present.” The importance of this insight becomes particularly clear when (in “Disch, II”) Delany shows how SF’s prioritizing of the object rather than the subject allows for a different kind of cultural criticism from what is available to the fiction he calls mundane (“of the world”):

      [S]cience fiction, because of the object priorities in the way we read it, in the questions we ask of it, in the modes by which we must interpret it simply for it to make sense, is able to critique directly both particular institutions and the larger cultural object in general … The object priority in the reading conventions—which must begin with a consideration of some real institution simply to understand how the science-fictional one works at all—generates the criticism directly in the understanding (cognition) process itself.

      “Reading conventions” is an important phrase here, because it signals the transfer of difference between the object-oriented text (imagined via a different process than is used for other texts) and the reader of the text, who to make sense of what is read must use different strategies than would be used to read other types of writing.

      I suspect that if an average science fiction reader knows of Delany’s critical theories, they know of the idea of “reading protocols”—a term Delany used interchangeably with a few others, and seems mostly to have abandoned since Starboard Wine, but which has held on within the discourse of the science fiction fan community. (At every SF convention I’ve attended, I’ve heard the term used more than once.) The other concept in Starboard Wine that is likely to be familiar to many SF fans is an idea stated in “Science Fiction and ‘Literature’”: that any sentence from a non-SF story could conceivably appear in an SF story, but “there are many, many sentences in science fiction that would be hard or impossible to work into a text of mundane fiction.” I have seldom been comfortable with the way fans use these ideas, because often what they say seems close to what Delany’s imagined critic complains about in “Dichtung und Science Fiction”: “Underneath your critical terminology we hear the echoes of those illiterate, anti-intellectual, terrorist³ ravings: science fiction is not literature; science fiction is a privileged form of writing to be judged only by its own laws, against which the rest of world literature will be found lacking.” The problem is that most discussions of these concepts get stuck on the ideas themselves rather than what is far more important: how Delany uses them.

      Though there are occasional moments of SF-chauvinism in Delany’s essays, they are usually expressed with at least a touch of irony, and in any case they are rare. Delany uses his ideas of SF’s différance not to create a hierarchy of texts—difference does not imply superiority or inferiority—but rather to explore and describe the particular qualities various texts possess and the ways those texts may most profitably be read. He repeatedly chastises critics who assume that the label of “science fiction” can also be an evaluation of the aesthetic or social values for any text receiving the label. In “Science Fiction and ‘Literature’” he says that “Having adjudged a text science fiction, we have made no unitary statement, however vague or at whatever level of suggestion or implication, about its value.” SF is not an evaluative term, but other terms used in distinction from it (e.g. “literature”) are also not evaluative terms (though “mundane fiction”, despite its Latin heritage, does possess some negative connotations, a fact that may explain SF readers’ fondness for it, as it levels the playing field when the term “science fiction” has negative connotations in many contexts).⁴ Science fiction is neither better nor worse; it is different.

      While Delany’s basic idea of reading protocols has achieved general acceptance with many science fiction critics and fans, he differs significantly from them in his insistence that SF can be described but not defined, and in his approach to SF historiography. These ideas, though, rely on and extend from the more commonly accepted ones, and deserve more careful consideration than they have generally received.

      A definition of science fiction is impossible for many reasons (as Delany explains in various essays), but one of the most important is that a definition would require SF to be a fixed and constant item. In an interview with Julia Kristeva, Derrida said, “The activity or productivity connoted by the a of différance refers to the generative movement in the play of differences. The latter are neither fallen