Search Results

Reading as Mediation: Urbanity in the Age of Information

Madhu Dubey

in Signs and Cities: Black Literary Postmodernism

Electronic technologies of information are profoundly transforming perceptions of urban form in the late twentieth century. Many of the terms used to describe postmodern cities—such as netropolis, ... More

Electronic technologies of information are profoundly transforming perceptions of urban form in the late twentieth century. Many of the terms used to describe postmodern cities—such as netropolis, teletopia, or cyburbia—are inspired by these new technologies, suggesting that cities are being reimagined less as visible territorial structures than as virtual circuits of information. This chapter focuses on Samuel Delany's novel Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (1984) because science fiction at its best can point a way out of technological determinism by prompting historical understandings of technology. It shows that Delany's novel takes up certain problems of representation specific to postmodern cities conceived as webs of information, and entertains a range of possible solutions to these problems by materializing them in multiple imaginary contexts.Less

Incorrect and Incomplete: Ross Mcelwee’s Fictions and Samuel Delany’s Lies

Jane Blocker

in Becoming Past: History in Contemporary Art

This chapter considers the historiographic philosophies of science fiction writer and memoirist Samuel Delany and documentary filmmaker Ross McElwee, especially their concern with the relation ... More

This chapter considers the historiographic philosophies of science fiction writer and memoirist Samuel Delany and documentary filmmaker Ross McElwee, especially their concern with the relation between fictional and factual accounts of the past. This chapter explores how their work productively skips in time and place to produce profound historical revelations about race and sexuality and the relation between history and the paternal.Less

Science Fiction Worlding and Speculative Sex

Alexis Lothian

in Old Futures: Speculative Fiction and Queer Possibility

Chapter 4 extends part 2’s analysis of queered and gendered black futurities to the realm of racialized queer masculinity, focusing on the work of Samuel R. Delany. His writing provides a bridge ... More

Chapter 4 extends part 2’s analysis of queered and gendered black futurities to the realm of racialized queer masculinity, focusing on the work of Samuel R. Delany. His writing provides a bridge between the discourse of “world-making” developed in utopian theories of queer performance and the idea of “world-building” common in science fiction studies. Delany’s fiction shows how the narrative tactics of science fiction, a genre whose most popular literary and media versions have tended to proffer timelines reliant on unmitigated heterosexuality, can turn against assumptions that the future must be straight, or at least arrived at through heterosexual reproductive logics. In Dhalgren (1974) and Stars in My Pocket like Grains of Sand (1984), speculative iterations of 1970s and 1980s public sex cultures use genre tropes to reimagine sexual and racial temporalities in response both to the histories of enslavement and to the beginning of the AIDS epidemic.Less

Fabulous, Formless: Queer Theory’s Dark Precursor

Tavia Nyong'o

in Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life

This chapter enlists Gilles Deleuze’s theory of the “dark precursor”—the manner in which the past prefigures its future without determining or representing it—to give a different account of the role ... More

This chapter enlists Gilles Deleuze’s theory of the “dark precursor”—the manner in which the past prefigures its future without determining or representing it—to give a different account of the role antinormativity plays in the past, present, and future of queer theory. By reading Samuel R. Delany’s early fictions as a pos-thumanist problematization of norms of race, gender, sexuality, and species being, and by understanding the problematic split between “afrofuturism” and “queer theory” in the 1990s, we regain a sense of how central blackness has been to the genesis of queer theorizing.Less

Far Beyond the Star Pit: Samuel R. Delany

Gerry Canavan

in Black and Brown Planets: The Politics of Race in Science Fiction

Gerry Canavan, in “Far Beyond the Star Pit: Samuel R. Delany,” approaches the “Far Beyond the Stars” episode of DS9 as a frame for analyzing Delany’s own experiences in science fiction by focusing ... More

Gerry Canavan, in “Far Beyond the Star Pit: Samuel R. Delany,” approaches the “Far Beyond the Stars” episode of DS9 as a frame for analyzing Delany’s own experiences in science fiction by focusing most directly on Delany’s early novella “The Star Pit” as an allegory for life under segregation. Drawing from Delany’s other SF and autobiographical writing, Canavan deconstructs the way the experience and imagination of race manifests in Delany’s lifelong exploration of systemized racism during a lauded career.Less

A Sociological Periplum

Heather Love

in Underdogs: Social Deviance and Queer Theory

This chapter revisits a textual crux in the history of sexuality studies: Joan Scott’s influential reading of Samuel R. Delany’s memoir, The Motion of Light in Water in her 1991 essay “The Evidence ... More

This chapter revisits a textual crux in the history of sexuality studies: Joan Scott’s influential reading of Samuel R. Delany’s memoir, The Motion of Light in Water in her 1991 essay “The Evidence of Experience.” Scott’s essay articulates a powerful critique of traditional empiricism, and is an important document in the movement called the linguistic turn, when scholars in the social sciences turned to interpretive paradigms drawn from the humanities to challenge the positivism of their disciplines. Through this exchange, Delany became a key figure in the anti-foundationalist field of queer theory. The chapter presents another version of Delany, framing him as a social historian and empirical researcher, invested in documenting marginal sexual worlds. It points to the figure of the periplum, or nautical map, drawn from his 1999 book Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, to suggest the urgency of this task of knowledge production for him. By situating Delany as an inheritor of the deviance studies tradition, the chapter attempts to historicize queer theory in relation to the linguistic turn, and suggests that a fuller appreciation of Delany’s documentary poetics will allow us to broaden the purview of the field.Less

Fantasies of Blackness and Racial Capitalism

Mark C. Jerng

in Racial Worldmaking: The Power of Popular Fiction

This chapter traces sword and sorcery’s re-emergence as a popular genre in the 1960s and 1970s during the era of U.S. Civil Rights movements. It shows how strategies for reproducing racism despite ... More

This chapter traces sword and sorcery’s re-emergence as a popular genre in the 1960s and 1970s during the era of U.S. Civil Rights movements. It shows how strategies for reproducing racism despite changing political sensibilities are constructed through the genre of sword and sorcery. These strategies go hand in hand with soon-to-be dominant re-imaginations of free market economics by economists such as Milton Friedman and Gary Becker. The chapter analyzes the work on the economics of discrimination in relation to Samuel Delany’s use of sword and sorcery to reflect on how race gets used to imagine market processes. Delany’s Nevèrÿon series adds another dimension to understandings of racial capitalism by focusing on race as economic utility.Less

Beige

Will Stockton

in Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory beyond Green

This chapter is an exercise in beige ecocriticism that takes as its object of analysis a novel that also fuels its theorization, Samuel Delany’s The Mad Man (1994, revised and expanded in 2002). The ... More

This chapter is an exercise in beige ecocriticism that takes as its object of analysis a novel that also fuels its theorization, Samuel Delany’s The Mad Man (1994, revised and expanded in 2002). The Mad Man—which shows no interest in the color beige per se, but which readily lends itself to thinking simultaneously about brown, yellow, pink, and white—traces out threads in the biosocial fabric into which certain sexual practices involving urological and scatological waste, homeless and nonwhite bodies, are woven. Queer pasts, presents, and futures form, within the novel, against the discourses of sexual health and normality that knit together heterosexist ecologies and sometimes incorporate “healthy” homosexual lives, which are ostensibly monogamous and therefore “safe.” The Mad Man’s pornographic representations of “insane” gay sex apocalyptically reveal how these discourses simplify intricate patterns in the biosocial fabric and distort the map of the sexual landscape that we negotiate, often unconsciously, all the time.Less

The Fine Details: Torture and the Social Order

Darieck Scott

in Speaking about Torture

This chapter considers Samuel Delany’s contention in “Pornography and Censorship” that censorship of representations of the suffering and pleasures of human bodies is directly related to the practice ... More

This chapter considers Samuel Delany’s contention in “Pornography and Censorship” that censorship of representations of the suffering and pleasures of human bodies is directly related to the practice of political torture. Arguing that a humanist inquiry into censorship cuts to the basic question of who we are as Americans, it explores the content and publication history of Delany’s Hogg, a novel that had difficulty securing a publisher because of its pornographic depictions of violence, sexual torture, and rape. What the relentless sexual violence of Hogg helps to expose is a collective refusal to acknowledge the violence of the everyday, especially as it is deployed against women, children, and persons of color. In its curiously blasé narrative voice, Hogg provides a less censored vision of who humans are: both an ego fleeing with such aversion from pain that one of its chief pleasures is to inflict it on others and a non-egotistical, receptive entelechy that embraces without judgment the pains and pleasures of all others.Less

Everybody Loves a Winner: 1964–1968

F. Brett Cox

in Roger Zelazny

The chapter discusses Zelazny’s career from 1964 to 1968, the period that saw publication of most of the work that made his early reputation. The chapter argues that the short fiction of this period ... More

The chapter discusses Zelazny’s career from 1964 to 1968, the period that saw publication of most of the work that made his early reputation. The chapter argues that the short fiction of this period demonstrates Zelazny’s remarkably rapid mastery of his craft while establishing his reputation for lyrical and allusive prose. There is detailed discussion of Zelazny’s novels And Call Me Conrad and Lord of Light, which stand as early examples of his interest in recasting mythology and considering issues of rebellion and political violence. Analysis of these works is placed in the context of his increasingly high public profile within the science fiction community and strong reputation among fellow writers, culminating with his decision in 1969 to quit his day job and write full-time.Less

Paradox and Paratext: Picturing Narrative Theory

David Wittenberg

in Time Travel: The Popular Philosophy of Narrative

Chapter 4 discusses the way in which time travel fictions manipulate the narratological pairing of fabula (underlying story material) and sjuzhet (reorganization of story material in plot). Focusing ... More

Chapter 4 discusses the way in which time travel fictions manipulate the narratological pairing of fabula (underlying story material) and sjuzhet (reorganization of story material in plot). Focusing chiefly on Samuel R. Delany's novella Empire Star, the chapter shows (a) how narratives generally presume the “truthful” or “historical” priority of the fabula over the sjuzhet—Wittenberg terms this presumption a “postulate of fabular apriority”—and (b) how time travel paradox stories subvert such a postulate, literalizing what Delany calls a “multiplex” perspective on potentially incompatible narrative lines. In turn, a time travel story reveals that the “natural” ordering of fabula and sjuzhet relies essentially on paratext, the physical or visual medium in which narrative lines are laid out or juxtaposed. The chapter concludes with a discussion of some illustrated editions of Empire Star, showing how the reader/viewer's multiplexity both requires and suppresses the diagrammatic layer of paratext; once again, time travel stories are a “narratological laboratory” for testing such theoretical categories.Less

Erectile Destruction: Samuel R. Delany and Thomas Pynchon1972

George Cotkin

in Feast of Excess: A Cultural History of the New Sensibility

This chapter looks at novels marked by various types of excess. In Pynchon’s great work Gravity’s Rainbow, the reader is assaulted with erudition, puns, and possibilities. At the same time, the ... More

This chapter looks at novels marked by various types of excess. In Pynchon’s great work Gravity’s Rainbow, the reader is assaulted with erudition, puns, and possibilities. At the same time, the excess is directed toward logical ends, and it mimics, in a fashion, the insanity connected with the Second World War and the potential for nuclear annihilation. The book also, within the context of the mainstreaming of pornography and excess in films premiering during in 1972, deals with domination and submission in sexual relations. Such themes appear raw in Delany’s novel from this period, Hogg, which features the varieties of sexual practice—including the grossest. His major science fiction novel from this period, Dhalgren, is about identity, community, and destruction, as well as the potential for liberation, with a storyline that is meant to lead one down various blind alleys of comprehension, in the mode of postmodernism. They were exploring transgression with abandon, as were others in this period, such as film director John Waters.Less

“Postscribble”: An Afterword

Gwyneth Jones

in Joanna Russ

This “Postscribble” covers Joanna’s retirement, from 1994 to her death in 2011; her few contacts with science fiction, notably a telephone interview with Samuel Delany in 1996; the publication of her ... More

This “Postscribble” covers Joanna’s retirement, from 1994 to her death in 2011; her few contacts with science fiction, notably a telephone interview with Samuel Delany in 1996; the publication of her long-prepared feminist work “What Are We Fighting For?” (1997); her growing respect for socialist politics; and her realization, expressed in the introduction for Clare Fraser’s Revolution, She Wrote (1995), that feminism as a single-issue activism is sterile. Joanna was never afraid to change her mind! A retrospective discussion of her achievements in sf, her fearless journey through the twentieth century’s gender politics, her honors, and her legacy concludes the study.Less

Conclusion: Dwelling-in-Traveling, Traveling-in-Dwelling

Susan Fraiman

in Extreme Domesticity: A View from the Margins

Cites James Cliffords’s notion of traveling-in-dwelling and dwelling-in-traveling to describe a liminal space where the sheltered and unsheltered meet. Reads Samuel R. Delany’s graphic memoir, Bread ... More

Cites James Cliffords’s notion of traveling-in-dwelling and dwelling-in-traveling to describe a liminal space where the sheltered and unsheltered meet. Reads Samuel R. Delany’s graphic memoir, Bread & Wine: An Erotic Tale of New York (1999), for its love story between a professor and a homeless man. Concludes with comments on an emblematic image from Catherine Opie’s “Domestic” series: a lesbian couple and their daughter that both invokes and revises traditional notions of home as a place of everyday comfort and routine.Less

Afterword

F. Brett Cox

in Roger Zelazny

The afterword summarizes Zelazny’s posthumous publications while noting the falling off of academic criticism of Zelazny’s work. It also notes several signs of increased interest in Zelazny’s work ... More

The afterword summarizes Zelazny’s posthumous publications while noting the falling off of academic criticism of Zelazny’s work. It also notes several signs of increased interest in Zelazny’s work since 2010 including a rise in posthumous publications and reissues, a spark of interest in adapting Zelazny’s work for television, and the testimony of a new generation of writers profoundly influenced by Zelazny’s fiction. The afterword concludes by reiterating its argument against dismissing Zelazny’s career as early brilliance followed by a steep decline and suggesting that both the commercial work and the more artistically ambitious stories were equally deliberate and were, in the end, different expressions of the same impulse: to write exactly what he wanted to write, exactly how he wanted to write it.Less

The Zug Effect

Brian Willems

in Speculative Realism and Science Fiction

The Zug effect is part of only certain moments in science fiction which are open to representing ambiguity. Thus the book offers a different definition of sf because it focuses on the roles of ... More

The Zug effect is part of only certain moments in science fiction which are open to representing ambiguity. Thus the book offers a different definition of sf because it focuses on the roles of ambiguity and the unknowable in the genre; thus it will lead to a different set of questions and answers. In other words, rather than foregrounding the way sf extrapolates current scientific facts into future plots, this book searches out objects which resist incorporation into any past, present or future scientific understanding. Such objects are key for speculative realism because they indicate an independence from human thought or perception. Authors such as Joanna Russ, Damon Knight, Samuel Delany and Kim Stanley Robinson are used to develop this argument.Less

Waiting for the Barbarians: Science Fiction

Mark Storey

in Time and Antiquity in American Empire: Roma Redux

The final chapter moves to the future-oriented narratives of American science fiction, broadly conceived as a mode of representation committed to the imagination of alternative lifeworlds. The ... More

The final chapter moves to the future-oriented narratives of American science fiction, broadly conceived as a mode of representation committed to the imagination of alternative lifeworlds. The chapter opens with the Roman fragments of Michael Crichton’s Westworld and the remains of New York City in late nineteenth-century dystopian fiction in order to outline the paradoxical relationship between historical representation and the imagination of an imperial (or decolonized) future. The chapter then moves to its three key writers, Isaac Asimov, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Samuel R. Delany. While each of them offer quite differently fantastical visions of antiquity’s place in the logics and aesthetics of the future, they all find connections through their employment of the ancient figure of the “barbarian” and its role in imperial philosophies and politics.Less

AI and Cyberpunk Networks

Anna McFarlane

in AI Narratives: A History of Imaginative Thinking about Intelligent Machines

Cyberpunk science fiction broke new ground in terms of AI representation; William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984), the ur-text of cyberpunk, introduced the term ‘cyberspace’, and this spatialized ... More

Cyberpunk science fiction broke new ground in terms of AI representation; William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984), the ur-text of cyberpunk, introduced the term ‘cyberspace’, and this spatialized metaphor for data creates an environment that can be inhabited by AIs, rather than an idea of the AI being located in one ‘body’, or in one static place. This chapter explores the possibilities opened by this innovation and by cyberpunk’s continued interrogation of AI as a phenomenon that is dispersed throughout networks, particularly focusing on William Gibson, in the Afrofuturist movement through a reading of Samuel R. Delany’s Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (1984), and on the work of writers who have been characterized as ‘post-cyberpunk’, such as Cory Doctorow, who shows how algorithms and artificial intelligences can have unexpected, international, and economic consequences.Less

Home of the Extraterrestrial Brothers: Race and African American Science Fiction

in Solar Flares: Science Fiction in the 1970s

The fifteenth century saw the emergence of complex notions of race, essentially coinciding with European exploration of the Americas. Rather than delve into existing material conditions, science ... More

The fifteenth century saw the emergence of complex notions of race, essentially coinciding with European exploration of the Americas. Rather than delve into existing material conditions, science fiction prefers to use metaphor to deal with race. Jewish-American writers, from Jack Dann to Isaac Asimov, Robert Silverberg, Carol Carr, Harlan Ellison and Avram Davidson, have made significant contributions to science fiction, but their ethnic or racial identity is not evident in the presumed socio-economic location of most of readers, writers, and editors. Most African Americans have been seemingly absent from American science fiction. This chapter explores some of the novels by Samuel R. Delany and Octavia E. Butler, the two most significant African American science fiction writers from the 1970s. It also considers some of the African American science fiction music and films of the period. The chapter first examines science fiction's attempt to tackle race relations through metaphor or indirectly in novels by Silverberg, Philip K. Dick and Gardner Dozois, as well as in the Planet of the Apes movies.Less