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ОглавлениеScience 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 from the sky nor inscribed once and for all in a closed system, a static structure that a synchronic and taxonomic operation could exhaust.”5 Because SF relies on différance, it cannot be stuck in a static structure such as a comprehensive definition. That does not mean, though, that the play of differences that create SF cannot be described. A mature criticism will seek to do just that, and will not bother with the futile pursuit of definitions.
Also futile is the pursuit of an origin, though not entirely for the same reasons (although if SF is, as Delany posits, a “field phenomenon” then locating any single origin is impossible). In the fourth “Exotext” of The American Shore, Delany offers a quick survey of many of the 17th- and 18th-century works various critics have claimed to be science fiction, and he rejects them as SF because they do not possess enough difference from the discourses of their day: “In brief, what we have throughout this whole period is a comparatively undifferentiated tradition of Prose Commentary, in which science and fiction are both struggling to separate themselves out, to establish themselves as separate modes, with separate criteria for judgment.” The nineteenth century’s voyages imaginaires and utopian novels “are works that simply try to resort to an undifferentiated discourse for instructive purposes, an endeavor which still locates itself in commentary rather than in fiction.”6 In Starboard Wine, Delany expands on these ideas, saying in “Dichtung und Science Fiction,” “For an originary assertion to mean something for a contemporary text, one must establish a chain of reading and preferably a chain of discussion as well.” In the “Letter from Rome” to Science Fiction Studies, he writes that “before any historical inquiry occurs a fundamental process takes place, a process so fundamental we are apt to lose sight of it.”
He describes this process through an extended metaphor of automobiles and transportation that is marvelous and resonant, but may not immediately make the point clear. The fundamental process is to determine what unites “the dullest Analog putt-putt tale” with such SF masterpieces as Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination, and what differentiates those two items from other (non-SF) texts. This is not only a process of identifying aspects within the texts themselves (“the engine” in Delany’s metaphor), but it is also a process of identifying the forces and systems (“the assembly-line development, the oil refineries, and the highway systems”) outside the texts that help constitute and support them in ways different from the forces and systems constituting and supporting other texts.
We know that for Delany it is SF’s language—how it is conceived and received—that differentiates SF from other types of writing, and in the essays about specific writers and, particularly, “Reflections on Historical Models” he locates at least some of the extratextual differences at play: the relationships between writers, editors, and fans; the discourse of fanzines and best-of-the-year anthologies; the exigencies of publishing during particular eras in particular cultural and economic environments. In an interview in Science Fiction Studies in 1987, he said, “There’s no reason to run SF too much back before 1926, when Hugo Gernsback coined the ugly and ponderous term ‘scientifiction’ which, in the letter columns written by the readers of his magazines, became over the next year or so ‘science fiction’ and finally ‘SF’.”7 To Delany, 1926 (or so) is a reasonable starting point for SF because that is the point at which it becomes a differentiated discourse, with texts that require their own ways of reading, and with systems of production and consumption for those texts that are not the same as for others. “To say that a phenomenon does have a significant history is to say that its history is different from the history of something else: that’s what makes it significant” (“Science Fiction and ‘Literature’”).
We need to consider Delany’s ideas about science fiction together as a group because they rely on each other. If we accept that SF is not a static system, but is instead an overdetermined phenomenon, then there is no point in searching for an originary text for SF, because overdetermined phenomena can have no single origin. If we accept that SF is an overdetermined phenomenon, then we know that it cannot be defined; however, it can be described. To describe something, we must be able to differentiate it from other things, and any history of the phenomenon must first be a history of difference. This is where the idea of reading protocols (ways of reading, codic strategies) is most useful, because it offers a theory that allows us to describe SF’s differences at a level where we can include works of widely varying qualities. But the concept of reading protocols is only a starting point for analysis, and a critic who considers it an end in and of itself risks creating an analysis that is flat, obvious, or irrelevant.
The path Delany maps is not the only one possible or valuable (he would, I expect, be uncomfortable claiming any One True Way for SF criticism), but it deserves more attention. We can begin to see the value in such attention by looking more closely at how some of the essays in Starboard Wine work together.
The writers Delany repeatedly discusses in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw and Starboard Wine are ones he considers among the best in science fiction: Robert Heinlein (1907–1988), Theodore Sturgeon (1918–1985), Joanna Russ (1937–2011), and Thomas Disch (1940–2008). They come from two different writing generations, two different histories: Heinlein and Sturgeon first built their reputations in the 1940s and by the 1950s were recognized (within the SF field, at least) as masters; Disch and Russ are of Delany’s own generation and first came to prominence in the 1960s. Taken as a group, they have explored the possibilities of science fiction as—if not more—fully than any other set of writers, and so they provide Delany with rich material to test his ideas.
The first writer discussed in depth here is Robert A. Heinlein, and it is a fitting beginning, because Heinlein contributed as much, if not more, to the distinctive language of science fiction as any other writer, both because of the era and environment in which he was writing and because of his own particular talents. Indeed, Delany claims, “In many respects Heinlein’s limits are the horizons of science fiction.” The discussion of Heinlein, though, is less one of limits (except regarding badfaith arguments) than of possibilities. One of Heinlein’s first novels, Beyond This Horizon, provided Delany with a sentence that he has used many times (e.g. in “Science Fiction and ‘Literature’”) to demonstrate a difference between science fiction and other texts: “The door dilated.”8 It is a sentence that metonymically suggests an entire technology if a reader is attuned to such a way of reading, and Delany has repeatedly celebrated similar prose techniques that Heinlein created or honed. But it is not just technique that Delany considers. The occasion of “Heinlein” is an introduction to his relatively neglected novel Glory Road, and it is the history of the neglect that provides the most powerful and far-ranging insights in the essay, because that history requires a discussion of Heinlein’s rhetorical methods, his work in general, and his place within the science fiction community. Heinlein’s texts possess difference because they are science fiction, but some of them have also created the differences that make them most science-fictional.
If “Heinlein’s limits are the horizons of science fiction,” then Theodore Sturgeon, and Delany’s essay exploring his work, provides an extension of those limits:
The corpus of science fiction produced by Theodore Sturgeon is the single most important body of science fiction by an American to date.
Robert Heinlein may be responsible for more technical innovations, more rhetorical figures that have been absorbed into the particular practice of SF writing; his influence is certainly greater. But if this is so, it is at an extremely high cost, both ethically and aesthetically.
Sturgeon’s body of work is, for Delany, “magnanimous and expansive,” characterized by wit, stylistic grace, and “accurate vision.” The accuracy of vision, the magnanimity and expansiveness, are what allow a movement—the movement of a compassionately visionary intelligence—beyond Heinlein’s horizons, and this accomplishment is ineluctably, inextricably aesthetic and ethical. As he argues this, Delany also situates Sturgeon within the circumstances of his era and environment, showing how attitudes toward productivity and rewriting were inscribed in the culture of SF, and the effect of those attitudes on Sturgeon’s stories and their reception.9
As insightful as his discussions of Heinlein and Sturgeon are, and as useful for demonstrating the value of his approach to analysis, Delany brings a larger array of critical tools to bear on Russ and Disch, the two writers whose work has most frequently been the focus of his use of contemporary structuralist and poststructuralist methods of analysis for science fiction.
“Russ” begins with a challenge: “Joanna Russ’s science fiction creates a peculiar embarrassment for anyone approaching our particular practice of writing with broadly critical intent.” Delany asserts that Russ is undervalued and misunderstood by critics and yet deeply (and variously) valued by other writers and by serious SF readers. The “embarrassment” of the critics is that their conception of SF, and the critical tools they use to describe and analyze it, are inadequate to the science fiction Russ writes. If Russ’s novels are excellent examples of SF, then a new critical model is needed for SF, because the ethical and aesthetic excellence of Russ highlights the ethical and aesthetic weakness of most SF and, thus, of the objects of study for most SF critics:
What is at stake—what any critical analysis of science fiction may seek to win—is the possibility of constituting a historical model richer and more self-critical than the one that governs “literary” readings, a model that becomes one with our rigorous inquiry: How may we read the SF text? … If we are to take such risks, risk such stakes, it is precisely our embarrassment at SF writers like Russ that we must face head-on.
The “embarrassment” Delany notes is surprising, because it is not an embarrassment at what we might expect it to be: aesthetically and ethically simplistic texts. No, the embarrassment comes from the fact that great accomplishment demonstrates how simplistic models of SF have no way to account for such things. If SF criticism is to offer a model of study that is “richer and more self-critical than the one that governs ‘literary’ readings” then that model must be able to account for and encompass both the aesthetic and ethical excellence of Russ and the comparative lack of such excellence in most other SF writers. It would be easy to create a model of SF that vanquished the types of excellence Russ’s writing displays to the realm of other-than-SF (better-than-SF), and, indeed, we can see this model in operation again and again when books that might be “mistaken” for SF are claimed by advocates as something else, something more: serious works of literature.
It might seem that Delany has here backed us into a corner of contradiction where the aesthetic and ethical aspects of texts are simultaneously important and not important, but to escape such a contradiction we must remember that he never advocates for “science fiction” to be a valuative term; in saying that critics must deal with the “embarrassment” of Russ’s work he is saying something similar to what he does in the “Letter from Rome”: we need a model of SF that is capable of dealing with that “dullest Analog putt-putt tale” and with Russ. Criticism is, then, a process whereby the critic must first identify the constitutive differences of the text under discussion before moving on to ethical/aesthetic qualities and implications. “Russ” is an example of just this process—in arguing for a new critical model, Delany also creates one. His discussion of SF’s history and traditions (again arguing against going back much before 1926) leads to a discussion of Russ’s entry into the SF field, which is contrasted with that of a very different writer, Larry Niven, and his first story, “The Coldest Place” (a story both worthy of discussion and generally recognized as not being particularly good as a story). Delany locates a “textual memorial” to Niven’s story within Russ’s And Chaos Died, and his analysis of “The Coldest Place” shows how its science fictional features must be accounted for if the story is to make any sense whatsoever. More importantly, though, Niven’s story offers Delany the opportunity to discuss intertextuality within the science fiction field, and to show, via the relationship between “The Coldest Place” and And Chaos Died, science fiction’s particular (different!) use of the signifier/signified relationship. We then move on to a discussion of what makes And Chaos Died a difficult book for readers who have internalized certain protocols of SF (“the SF grid”), and discover that though the novel is in many ways unconventional science fiction, it maintains enough of the conventions of that overdetermined term to still fit within its precincts. The discussion moves from aesthetics to ethics in the fifth section of the essay, wherein Delany shows how Russ’s novels work as critiques of each other. Though he compares Russ to Camus, he also demonstrates how the ethical challenges her work presents are often ones that are more science fictional than not. The analysis of the characters’ homophobia, for instance, leads Delany to read the characters’ attitudes as metonyms for cultural change: “the institutional fear that characterizes most homophobia … seems to have evolved somewhat to an individual level, where today it is rather rare.” He critiques the conception of sexuality within the novel while also contextualizing it (“To uphold that homosexuality was only a disease, rather like a head cold—and not an ethical and moral besmirchment undermining all society—was at one time a crusading position”). He ends by proclaiming that Russ’s novels both subvert present models and offer alternatives (much as Delany’s own essay does). “But then,” he says, “science fiction has traditionally been at the forefront of the dramatization process by which new models for thinking about the world are disseminated.”
The two essays on Disch proceed differently from the essay on Russ for a number of reasons. The first essay, which was not included in the original edition of Starboard Wine, is the introduction to Fundamental Disch, a collection Delany edited in 1980. The second essay is a more complex and far-ranging version of the first. “Disch, I” gives us a fine introduction to Disch and to some of what Delany values in his work; “Disch, II” provides an opportunity for Delany to map many of his ideas about science fiction and ways of reading across the varied landscape of one particularly skilled writer’s oeuvre.
In “Disch, II” Delany presents a sustained argument for his view that science fiction gives priority to the object, in contrast to other types of fiction that give priority to the subject. Only science fiction is different in this way. “How would the world of the story have to be different from our world in order for this to occur? is the question around which the play of differences in the SF text is organized.” This idea goes back to the idea of subjunctivities in “About 5,750 Words” in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, where science fiction was differentiated not only from “naturalistic fiction” but also from fantasy. Naturalistic fiction is read with the understanding that the events of the story could have happened, whereas “Fantasy takes the subjunctivity of naturalistic fiction and throws it into reverse … the level of subjunctivity becomes: could not have happened.” SF, though, is different: “These objects, these convocations of objects into situations and events, are blanketly defined by: have not happened.” Delany’s ideas, frames of reference, and terminology changed significantly between 1968, when he wrote “About 5,750 Words,” and 1980, when he wrote “Disch, II,” but the underlying idea remains the same: SF is different from all other types of fiction, and one of its differences is in how the reader must construe the relationship between the world in the story and the world outside the story.
Disch proves to be useful for such exploration because he has written in the three modes Delany wants to separate—science fiction, fantasy fiction, and mundane fiction—and the discussion allows Delany one of his most nuanced analyses of these ideas, because now he has texts that are multifaceted enough to provide a stronger test of his model than the more conventional fiction of Heinlein and Sturgeon. As the essay shows, the model survives the test intact, and allows Delany to add some caveats to any interpretation of his ideas that would turn them into strangleholds:
to call a story science fiction, mundane fiction, or fantasy in these pages is simply a shorthand way to indicate that one set of reading conventions (that of science fiction, mundane fiction, or fantasy) is called up so quickly and strongly by the particular story that it would take something of an act of will—for me—to read it by either of the other sets.
Some stories, he admits, “suggest a fantasy reading here, an SF reading there. But that should be no cause for distress. Simply sit back and enjoy the mental play as you shift back and forth between reading conventions.”
The analysis of reading conventions, though, only takes up a few pages of the essay; much more space is given to an exploration of differences of subject/object priority, of history, and of the possibilities within different types of texts for cultural critique. The discussion of reading conventions is necessary to an understanding of these ideas, but it is only a piston in the engine that is science fiction.
Two of the later essays in Starboard Wine, “Dichtung und Science Fiction” and “Reflections on Historical Models,” present first a summing up and synthesis, and then an opening up, an offering of new and different possibilities for SF criticism beyond those explored here.
The title of “Dichtung und Science Fiction” echoes Goethe, whose autobiography, Dichtung und Wahrheit, is often translated as Poetry and Truth. But along with poetry, dichtung also contains an idea of falsity and imagination, and so in Delany’s title we have various implications within the word as well as implications within the allusion, which makes truth into a shadow.10
Many of the ideas we have previously encountered in Delany’s essays are touched upon, reiterated, or given particularly precise enunciation in “Dichtung und Science Fiction.” What is new is a history of pedagogy related to poetry, a history that then becomes a theory of reception and response, of movements and rebellions, continuities and incoherencies. Part of the poetic task is to give us not just meanings, but new meanings: “the release of new meanings in existing words and syntax through the organization of verbal contexts that may be as experimental or as traditional as the poet can tolerate.” Poetry enriches the signified by letting the signifier do more.
More than once in these essays, Delany has claimed that science fiction is closer to poetry than it is to other sorts of fiction. His description of what poetry does and how it can be read follows along the lines of his description of science fiction, and there is no need in “Dichtung und Science Fiction” for him to connect all the dots, because his point is clear to anyone who has been paying attention. Instead of belaboring the obvious, Delany moves on to explore his ideas of SF’s peculiar history, to challenge originary claims, and to repeat his view that the most useful history is one able to discover actual lines and forces of influence before it sets off to encompass everything. He has already shown how this can work with poetry, and by showing it with science fiction, he suggests even more than he says—most of all, he suggests that by pursuing other sorts of historicizing and theorizing, SF critics have distracted themselves from a universe of significant insights.
Also new in “Dichtung und Science Fiction” is Delany’s elaboration of the problematic relationship between concepts of style and greatness. Here he uses the example of translation to much effect, showing that the first translators of many of the Russian, German, and French writers, though their translations deeply influenced English-speaking modernists and helped establish some of the ideas of “greatness” enshrined in New Criticism and elsewhere, were not able to be faithful to the excellence of their sources’ style, and so “greatness” must lie outside of style, despite the stylists’ claim.11 While Delany argues that SF is different from mundane fiction, he also argues that the assumptions of some schools of literary evaluation—the same ones advocating a hierarchy where there is literature and there is everything below it—are based on obviously false premises. Such an argument adds support both to his contention that terms such as literature should be used descriptively rather than evaluatively and to his contention that analysis cannot stop with style alone, but must include other elements of aesthetics, as well as history and ethics.
While “Dichtung und Science Fiction” is at various times concerned with how SF might be taught, described, written, read, evaluated, and contextualized, by the end of the essay, Delany shows that all of these tasks are related, that many of them rely on each other, and that all of them need to be done well so that SF can remain something distinct, different, heterogeneous, and potentially subversive: “We are trying to preserve a certain freedom at a social level where the greatest threat to freedom is not direct forbidding of options but rather the homogenization of all options out of existence in the name of tolerance and acceptance.”
“Reflections on Historical Models” builds from this idea by asserting that the significant, option-making differences between science fiction and mundane fiction are differences not only of texts, but of histories. The histories are not only matters of what was published when and by whom, but of the forces that created and sustained different types of relationships between writers, editors, publishers, and readers. Once again, Delany links the way texts are read to the contexts in which they are read, saying after a brief overview of his idea of different ways of reading:
These distinctions in reading protocols, in their complex summation, are to my mind the measure of the distance between science fiction and literature.
In light of the sociological distinctions, however, the distinction in reading protocols does not seem such a lonely fact.
Delany works to show that homogenization is a danger not only to a history of both literature and science fiction, but to the history of science fiction itself. He demonstrates this at length by insisting that the term “New Wave” is usually used by fans, critics, and historians to lump together—to homogenize—very different tendencies within 1960s SF. By not paying closer attention to those differences, important distinctions (such as those between the goals and achievements of Judith Merril’s reprint anthology England Swings S-F and Harlan Ellison’s original anthology Dangerous Visions; between Michael Moorcock’s editorship of New Worlds and Cele Goldsmith’s of Amazing and Fantastic; between such British writers as J. G. Ballard and M. John Harrison and American [then] expatriates such as Thomas M. Disch and James Sallis) are entirely lost within the history recounted. And if such homogenization can occur with such recent texts and writers, imagine what distinctions have been lost for earlier histories! This idea connects to Delany’s argument against calling texts written before 1926 science fiction, because the argument there is that such texts cannot be differentiated from other discourses of their day, and that no line of influence can be shown between most of them and science fiction. Here, the argument is that careless terminology is eliding lines of influence and causing the loss of important differentiations between discourses.
“Reflections on Historical Models” also builds from the concept of pluralities that was introduced in “Science Fiction and ‘Literature,’” where one of SF’s strengths—indeed, one of the attributes that kept it from ossification—was its plurality (heterogeneity) of styles, theories, and values. Delany notes that the writers associated with John W. Campbell’s editorship of Astounding from 1937 on maintained different theoretical stances that allowed a critique of the philosophy of “science-as-it-was-then-popularly-conceived” within SF. Such theoretical plurality, such critique, prevents SF from having “a simple, uncritical attitude toward science as an explorative philosophy.” Good SF criticism must, then, be able to separate “the philosophy of science (a critique of which science fiction dramatizes by representing a range of sociological situations) from the social uses of science.”
Its pluralities have allowed SF to be an excellent tool for cultural critique, a counterbalance to the popular imagination, and a force for the integration of various ideas and ideologies in a world of growing divisions. For such tendencies to be understood, appreciated, and deconstructed, science fiction’s history must be studied with critical acumen, and the historians and critics must take care with their conceptual models, must be aware of both what they show and what they hide, or else they will unknowingly perpetuate mystification and falsity.
Throughout Starboard Wine, then, Samuel Delany argues with passionate reason for a new kind of criticism, and throughout his arguments he demonstrates some of the ways such a criticism (still rare now, nearly thirty years after the book was first published) can bring insight to the worlds of science fiction and all fiction—the worlds they enlighten, envision, and engender. Our task is to read deeply, to think carefully, to argue fiercely, and to live up to the example set for us.
1. Between The Jewel-Hinged Jaw and Starboard Wine sits The American Shore, a booklength study of Thomas M. Disch’s sixteen-page short story “Angouleme,” wherein some of the ideas Delany offers in Starboard Wine about science fiction’s language and history are applied word by word and line by line to Disch’s story. The American Shore is a tour de force of both critical reading and writing, and, as Delany says in his acknowledgments herein, “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.”
2. For those of us who are not familiar with French, Jonathan Culler is helpful: “The verb différer means to differ and to defer. Différance sounds exactly the same as différence, but the ending ance, which is used to produce verbal nouns, makes it a new form meaning ‘difference-differing-deferring.’ Différance thus designates both a ‘passive’ difference already in place as the condition of signification and an act of differing which produces differences” (On Deconstruction, Cornell University Press, 1982), 97.
3. Delany’s use of the word terrorist a few times in Starboard Wine may now, in an era when the term has gained as much connotative weight as any word can bear, seem even more hyperbolic than it did when the book first appeared. It echoes Barthes’s (or his translator, Annette Lavers’s) use of the word in “Blind and Dumb Criticism” (Mythologies, Hill & Wang, 1957/1972): “In fact, any reservation about culture means a terrorist position. To be a critic by profession and to proclaim that one understands nothing about existentialism or Marxism … is to elevate one’s blindness or dumbness to a universal rule of perception, and to reject from the world Marxism and existentialism: ‘I don’t understand, therefore you are idiots’” (35).
4. I dislike the term mundane fiction, but discussing Delany’s ideas of textuality and difference without using it becomes frustratingly awkward, and so, unable to offer an alternative, I resort to it throughout this introduction.
5. Positions by Jacques Derrida, translated by Alan Bass (University of Chicago Press, 1981), 27.
6. The American Shore (Dragon Press, 1978), 233, 236.
7. “The Semiology of Silence” in Silent Interviews (Wesleyan University Press, 1994), 26.
8. In “Heinlein,” Delany uses Beyond This Horizon for a brief mention of the difference between science fiction and 19th-century utopian stories—though it’s only a passing remark in the essay, it is one worth noting, because it will be relevant to other essays.
9. While reading Delany’s account of SF writers bragging about how little they revised, and how this differs from the attitude of other sorts of writers, I thought of Ben Jonson stating that Shakespeare’s fellow actors “have often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare that in his writing, whatsoever he penned, he never blotted out a line.” Jonson (a rather different sort of writer) scoffed that, “My answer hath been, ‘Would he had blotted a thousand’ … but he redeemed his vices with his virtues.” (The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Quotations, edited by Peter Kemp, Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 272.
10. The title may also call up for the informed reader memories of the immensely detailed descriptions of nature and the world within Goethe’s text. Or we may think of Goethe’s pose of objectivity, his writing of himself in the third person, which is just the sort of thing a critic with a bent towards poststructuralism could enjoy unpacking.
When he wrote “Dichtung und Science Fiction,” Delany had been reading, in addition to Goethe, the American poet Charles Olson’s Beloit Poetry lectures, Poetry and Truth (presented at Beloit College in Wisconsin, March 25, 1968, and reprinted in Muthologos, Vol II, by Charles Olson and edited by George Butterick [Four Seasons Foundation: Bolinas, 1979]). Olson’s critical work was important for Delany and he quotes from it a number of times, e.g., at the opening of his afterword to his novel Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand.
11. Tangential to Delany’s point, but nonetheless worth considering, is whether the stylistic differences imposed on, for instance, Dostoyevsky and Kafka by their translators helped ease acceptance of those writers by “taming” their styles enough to make them feel more familiar than they would have had they been more accurately translated.
