Starboard Wine. Samuel R. Delany

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СКАЧАТЬ and six to a room is the minimum anywhere in the city; the maximum can’t even be published. Packs of armed marauders roam the streets openly wherever food is rumored to be stored. Supermarkets? They no longer exist: their shelves have been pulled down and the homeless camp out in the buildings. A few large central food supplies—one at Battery Park, one at Bryant Park, one at Morningside Park, and another at St. Nicholas Park—are ringed with guards. The supplies are dropped in by helicopters daily; the lines weave around for miles as people queue up to get their rations, but it’s inefficient and there’s no assurance that you can make it home safely, even if you wait the necessary hours to get your government allotment of the few handfuls of dried seaweed, soybean meal, a container of milk and another of honey that the law says must go to each person every day.

      It’s a very grim story, but it could be a very exciting one.

      Now let’s think of another, also set in New York in 2001.

      Over the years, the city has become almost abandoned. (As indeed much of Harlem is today.) In the rest of the country, through solar energy, miniature circuitry, increased transportation efficiency, and ecological advances, it is possible for everyone to live more happily in rural areas. New towns have sprung up all over the deserts of the South and Northwest, while the big cities of the Eastern Seaboard now lie more or less abandoned. Only a few groups of people have come into the city, or stayed. They seek homes in the empty ruins. Most of them are families of individualists and are well educated, including doctors and engineers. They have taken over some of the remaining public buildings, built their own farms in the city’s parks, installed their own solar heaters, and turned the subways near them into sewers. These few communal groups live, in their own way, a rather magnificent, if eccentric, life, making their own clothes, their own music, stories, games.

      But one day the government decides to pull down the remains of the city. “You’ve got to go,” they say.

      “We won’t go,” is the reply. “You abandoned all this. Nobody lives here now except us. We made it ours and we intend to keep it!”

      “No, we want to pull down the place and turn it into another few small towns….”

      National Guards come in; perhaps there are even bombings. But the people who live there have their own methods of retaliation: they have their own planes, and towns across the country begin to be bombed as well. A war of national guardsmen and entrenched guerrillas begins in the deserted streets of New York….

      Such an underpopulated New York City could make just as exciting a setting for an SF story as the overpopulated New York City described in the previous scenario.

      But let’s imagine a third SF story, again set in New York in 2001.

      By 1985 a birth control method has been discovered that could be given to both men and women, once, at puberty—and it remains effective for the rest of one’s life. To have children, both the prospective mother and father merely have to take a pill to counteract the method, and pregnancy can ensue. The nation’s population is stabilized. Slowly the big cities of the country get themselves together, and with the decreased population and economic pressures the cities become the clean and elegant living arrangements they were once envisioned as. By 1995 the school population has been cut in half. Educational overcrowding is a thing of the past. And most education, anyway, is carried on in private study groups which children choose on their own and which they attend on Mondays and Fridays, the public school week now cut down to Tuesdays through Thursdays. But with the increased space, leisure, and good living, a certain languor comes in. Persons with really new ideas are suddenly seen as threatening to this fine way of life. Almost all the changes consist of new freedoms people may now indulge in. Yet every time someone comes up with a really new idea, people say, “Next thing you know they’ll be wanting to cut the birth control methods out.”

      In this world, a group of young psychologists, men and women, living in one of the elegant mansions that dot the rolling greenery that has been planted over the former site of the St. Nicholas Houses, decide that they—and just they—should try, as an experiment, living for ten years without the universal birth control methods, merely to record and explore what it was like. With so few people, it should be no threat at all. Most of these young psychologists were born in 1978, 1979. But the older ones remember what the overcrowding was like, remember the tenements and the rats and the garbage on the streets—and a great split starts between the older generation and the younger….

      This is just as good a 2001 story as the previous two.

      Now there’s no way that all three could happen at the same time in New York City in the year 2001.

      Yet all three could make good SF stories, fun to read and conceivably enjoyable to write. And my experiences as a black growing up in the very real New York City of the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s will certainly contour my particular vision of each of my three tales.

      Which one do I actually believe?

      I think aspects of all of them are possible; other aspects of all of them strike me as impossible.

      And if I did sit down to write an SF story right now, set in New York in 2001, it would probably be different from them all.

      Science fiction is a tool to help you think; and like anything that really helps you think, by definition it doesn’t do the thinking for you. It’s a tool to help you think about the present—a present that is always changing, a present in which change itself assures there is always a range of options for actions, actions presupposing different commitments, different beliefs, different efforts (of different qualities, different quantities), different conflicts, different processes, different joys. It doesn’t tell you what’s going to happen tomorrow. It presents alternative possible images of futures, and presents them in a way that allows you to question them as you read along in an interesting, moving, and exciting story.

      Science fiction doesn’t give you answers. It’s a kind of writing that, at its best, can help you learn to ask questions—or, as perhaps the greatest modern SF writer, Theodore Sturgeon, has put it, to ask the next question—in a world where both doing and not doing, thinking and not thinking are, for better or worse, different actions with different consequences.

      There are a number of questions I’m asked so often that, before we get into a general question-and-answer session, I just might use them to prompt you with.

      Is there a sizable bunch of stories that might be considered specifically “black” science fiction?

      To date, no. There isn’t.

      Out of a dozen science fiction novels I’ve published in the last fifteen years, two have had specifically black central characters (Nova, The Einstein Intersection), one has had an Oriental central character (Babel-17), one has had a half-breed American Indian central character (in my most popular novel, Dhalgren), and two have had specifically white central characters (Triton, Empire Star); the others have been set far enough in the future so that I thought it was reasonable to presuppose a general racial interblending until everyone looked … well, more or less like me.

      Could there be a specifically black science fiction? There could be if there were more black SF writers.

      How many black SF writers are there?

      Currently there’s me; I’ve been working in the field for just over a decade and a half.

      There’s Octavia Estelle Butler, whose first novel was published four years ago, and who was once my student at the Clarion SF Writers Workshop.

      There’s СКАЧАТЬ