Starboard Wine. Samuel R. Delany

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ