The American Shore. Samuel R. Delany
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de force of keeping, through several texts, to one lane of the highway is certainly intriguing, indeed laudable, even applaudable. But the possibilities of science fiction open up that highway into a boundariless plane, a whole prairie whose circling horizon is the limit of imagination itself, a prairie which quickly deliquesces into a roiling ocean of possibilities. The science fiction writer who returns, through several texts, to trace a single current in this ocean is, because of the oceanic context, involved in an undertaking of a very different order from the one-lane exploration of the mundane fictioneer.
The novel series in English language mundane fiction is rare and is usually connected with some feeling of provinciality (Faulkner, Powell, Cooper); and the mundane story series (e.g., Hemingway’s Nick Adams tales, Sherwood Anderson’s Winesberg) frequently carries with it as well the bad taste of editorial coercion, or at least the quotidian pressure to sell. Yet s-f authors as different as Laumer and Le Guin, Anderson and Aldiss, Russ, Niven, Zelazny, Farmer, Asimov, Anthony, Ballard, Bradley, Blish, Heinlein, Stableford, Moorcock, McCaffrey, Sturgeon, Andre Norton, “Doc” and Cordwainer Smith, Stanley G. Weinbaum, Stanislaw Lem, Zenna Henderson, Fritz Leiber, and Arthur C. Clarke have all produced either story-, novel-, or story-and-novel series.
In science fiction the creation of enchained texts bridges political opinion, aesthetic preferences, commitments to hard- or software, and spans all degrees of aesthetic merit. In science fiction the question is rather what writers have not at one time or another in their writing career chosen to interlink such a series, to generate such a set of texts within a single encompassing imaginative matrix. (Alfred Bester is one major name that comes readily to mind who has not left us, somewhere in his oeuvre, such a concatenation; C. M. Kornbluth is another.)
The explanation we sometimes read for the number of s-f series (“Well, readers buy series stories …”) attempts to establish a naive causality around the implicit commercial parameters of the field (“… therefore writers write them”). But we are aware just how strong the commercial parameters of s-f are. Such parameters’ mechanics are clear: because there is comparatively little money in science fiction, when commercial pressures work at all to contour a text or set of texts, they work (short of editorial tampering) in comparatively subtle ways1 and usually at several removes. Any explicit appeal to positive commercial pressures (negative ones, i.e., the pressures accruing from too little pay, contour another tale entirely), especially in a causal mode, is invariably aggrandizing mystification: to exaggerate the power of money in the field is to suggest that there is more money in the field than there actually is. The appeal defuses science fiction. In a capitalist society, to say, “These writers write for money …” makes the science fictional enterprise safe.
To say—and in so saying come far closer to spearing the thrashing, slippery truth—that this s-f writer writes out of some fanatical concept of ideology and that one out of an equally fanatical concept of aesthetics, that a third writes from ill-understood subconscious heavings that barely emerge into comprehensible prose, while another writes from a matrix of social prejudices and aesthetic rigidities, while still another writes to save the world from these same rigidities; and still others write from every combination of the above; and, though not much, they are all paid for it; and their collective fans hold hundreds of conventions a year, organized around their work, to which upon occasion many thousands come—this establishes a far more dangerous enterprise, a danger which “We write for money” is uttered, like a magic formula from the capitalist grimoire, precisely to subdue, to tame.
Science fiction readers like series stories; science fiction writers write them. But psychological synchronicity better explains the relation than any commercial causality: both readers and writers of s-f experience the field-effect of science fiction as a vast turbulence of “perhaps’s.” This turbulence is far stronger for science fiction than it is for mundane fiction.
Before such oceanic turbulence the need for coherence becomes far stronger than before mundane fiction’s pavic2 calm. The s-f series story answers that need in both the writer and the reader. The resultant cash flow is a secondary, if supportive, effect—not a primal cause.
“Angouleme” is the third written story in such an s-f series.
1. The comparison is specifically with movie, television, and “manufactured” best-seller writing, where a writer is paid a sum, frequently hundreds of times that which an s-f writer commands for equal wordage, basically to suffer the abuse entailed in becoming, essentially, an advisory scribe to an hysteric committee which decrees, sometimes page by page, what will and what will not be in the text, and which commands enough advertising funds to then parlay the practically lifeless product to some sort of profit.
2. Pavic, paved over or relating to pavement.
2
The Refused Text
We shall flex the text with a number of carets, marginally cardinalled for later reference. At the base of the print-line they should not be obtrusive; the average reader seldom looks at more than the top half of the print—it contains quite enough information to read with. The only ambiguities are v/y, :/;, and O/Q; contextual order is usually strong enough to prevent confusion.
Our lexias will sometimes not constitute “complete units of meaning” in the standard grammatic sense; but they will roughly enclose lengths of language that more or less strongly support our subsequent co-textual statements.
Thomas M. Disch’s
ANGOULEME1
There were2 seven Alexandrians involved in the Battery plot—Jack, who was the youngest and from the Bronx, Celeste DiCecca, Sniffles and MaryJane, Tancred Miller, Amparo (of course), and of course, the leader and mastermind, Bill Harper, better known as Little Mister Kissy Lips. Who was passionately, hopelessly in love with Amparo. Who was nearly thirteen (she would be, fully, by September this year), and breasts just beginning. Very very beautiful skin, like3 lucite. Amparo Martinez.4
Their first, nothing operation was in the East 60’s, a broker or something like that. All they netted was5 cufflinks, a watch, a leather satchel that wasn’t leather after all, some buttons, and the usual lot of useless credit cards.6 He stayed calm through the whole thing, even with Sniffles slicing off buttons, and soothing. None of them had the nerve to ask, though they all wondered, how often he’d been through this scene before. What they were about wasn’t an innovation. It was partly that, the need to innovate, that led them to think up the plot.7 The only really memorable part of the holdup was the name laminated on the cards, which was, weirdly enough, Lowen, Richard W. An omen (the connection being that they were all at the Alexander Lowen School), but of what?8
Little Mister Kissy Lips kept the cufflinks for himself, gave the buttons to Amparo (who gave them to her uncle), and donated the rest (the watch was a piece of crap) to the Conservation booth outside the Plaza right where he lived.9
His father was a teevee executive. In, as he would quip, both senses.10 They had got married young, his mama and papa, and divorced soon after but not before he’d come to fill out their quota. Papa, the executive, remarried, a man this time and somewhat more happily. Anyhow it lasted long enough that the offspring, the leader and mastermind, had to learn to adjust to the situation, it being permanent.11 Mama simply went down to the Everglades and disappeared, sploosh.12
In short, he was well to do. Which is how, more than by overwhelming talent, he got into the Lowen School in the first place.13 He had the right kind of body though, so with half a desire there was no reason in the city of New York he couldn’t grow up to be a professional dancer, even a choreographer. He’d have the connections for it, as Papa was fond of pointing out.
For the time being, however, his bent was literary and religious rather than balletic.14 He loved, and what seventh grader doesn’t, the abstracter foxtrots and more metaphysical twists of a Dostoevsky, a Gide, a Mailer.15 He longed for the experience