Starboard Wine. Samuel R. Delany

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      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 of a person’s race was truly no longer the privileged information it is even today, suggesting as it does so much about experiences we may have had, about realities we may have known.

      The image was brief. And it was only an image—not at all an explanation of how to accomplish it. But it made me realize that up until then, with all the efforts going on about me to “improve the racial situation,” I really had had no image of what the “improved racial situation” was actually going to look like. Oh yes, equality was a word I knew; but what would it look like, feel like, smell like? How would I know it had actually come?

      I have many times revised that image of what such a racially improved world might look like from that first bright flash that Heinlein tricked me—and probably many other young readers, black and white—into experiencing. This was 1960; the rashest of the decade’s political leavening was still to come; and the backlashes of the ’70s were not envisioned.

      But one cannot revise an image until one has an image to revise.

      The philosopher and aesthetician Susan K. Langer, in the two volumes that have appeared of her three-volume study, Mind, devotes most of her argument to the proposition that this initial experience of the image, a vision of something not yet real, is the impetus for all human progress, scientific, social, or aesthetic. If you don’t see it, you can’t work for it.

      Image first. Then explanation.

      And if science fiction has any use at all, it is that among all its various and variegated future landscapes it gives us images for our futures … as did the Heinlein novel.

      And its secondary use, as in the Asimov stories, is to provide a tool for questioning those images, exploring their distinctions, their articulations, their play of differences.

      “Do you believe in that science fiction stuff?” I’m all too frequently asked.

      Well, if you mean it in the idiomatic sense—do I think that science fiction is a good thing and that people should read it?—then of course I do. Otherwise I wouldn’t write it.

      If, however, you mean, “Do you believe that all the things science fiction has ever talked about—flying saucers, colonies in space, aliens living on other worlds, cures for cancer, and cloned human beings—will really come about?” then I have to stop and explain something to you about your question.

      Let’s think of three good, exciting SF stories, all of them set in New York City in the year 2001.

      The first is about life in a New York City that has become vastly overpopulated. No more luxury apartments on Park Avenue and Sutton Place. All of them have been broken up with СКАЧАТЬ