Starboard Wine. Samuel R. Delany

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 an ethical and moral besmirchment undermining all society—was at one time a crusading position”). He ends by proclaiming that Russ’s novels both subvert present models and offer alternatives (much as Delany’s own essay does). “But then,” he says, “science fiction has traditionally been at the forefront of the dramatization process by which new models for thinking about the world are disseminated.”

      The two essays on Disch proceed differently from the essay on Russ for a number of reasons. The first essay, which was not included in the original edition of Starboard Wine, is the introduction to Fundamental Disch, a collection Delany edited in 1980. The second essay is a more complex and far-ranging version of the first. “Disch, I” gives us a fine introduction to Disch and to some of what Delany values in his work; “Disch, II” provides an opportunity for Delany to map many of his ideas about science fiction and ways of reading across the varied landscape of one particularly skilled writer’s oeuvre.

      In “Disch, II” Delany presents a sustained argument for his view that science fiction gives priority to the object, in contrast to other types of fiction that give priority to the subject. Only science fiction is different in this way. “How would the world of the story have to be different from our world in order for this to occur? is the question around which the play of differences in the SF text is organized.” This idea goes back to the idea of subjunctivities in “About 5,750 Words” in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, where science fiction was differentiated not only from “naturalistic fiction” but also from fantasy. Naturalistic fiction is read with the understanding that the events of the story could have happened, whereas “Fantasy takes the subjunctivity of naturalistic fiction and throws it into reverse … the level of subjunctivity becomes: could not have happened.” SF, though, is different: “These objects, these convocations of objects into situations and events, are blanketly defined by: have not happened.” Delany’s ideas, frames of reference, and terminology changed significantly between 1968, when he wrote “About 5,750 Words,” and 1980, when he wrote “Disch, II,” but the underlying idea remains the same: SF is different from all other types of fiction, and one of its differences is in how the reader must construe the relationship between the world in the story and the world outside the story.

      Disch proves to be useful for such exploration because he has written in the three modes Delany wants to separate—science fiction, fantasy fiction, and mundane fiction—and the discussion allows Delany one of his most nuanced analyses of these ideas, because now he has texts that are multifaceted enough to provide a stronger test of his model than the more conventional fiction of Heinlein and Sturgeon. As the essay shows, the model survives the test intact, and allows Delany to add some caveats to any interpretation of his ideas that would turn them into strangleholds:

      to call a story science fiction, mundane fiction, or fantasy in these pages is simply a shorthand way to indicate that one set of reading conventions (that of science fiction, mundane fiction, or fantasy) is called up so quickly and strongly by the particular story that it would take something of an act of will—for me—to read it by either of the other sets.

      Some stories, he admits, “suggest a fantasy reading here, an SF reading there. But that should be no cause for distress. Simply sit back and enjoy the mental play as you shift back and forth between reading conventions.”

      The analysis of reading conventions, though, only takes up a few pages of the essay; much more space is given to an exploration of differences of subject/object priority, of history, and of the possibilities within different types of texts for cultural critique. The discussion of reading conventions is necessary to an understanding of these ideas, but it is only a piston in the engine that is science fiction.

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