Starboard Wine. Samuel R. Delany

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      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.

       Starboard Wine

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