Stars in His Pocket Like Grains of Sand

July 30, 2015 11:15 PM

Science Fiction grandmaster Samuel R. Delaney interviewed by SF Signal, with a very long answer in part 2, and by The New Yorker where he talks about race, recent Hugo controversies being nothing new, and the past and future of science fiction.
posted by Artw (26 comments total)

MetaFilter: Because I’m your faggot uncle

(a missed title opportunity from part 2)

Thank you for these. I love the way he plays with the questions' attempts to pin and disect by offering a scalpel and cutting to the bone.
posted by kokaku at 12:32 AM on July 31, 2015 [1 favorite]

That SF Signal interview is wonderful. Because of Delany's answers, of course, rather than the predictable and lazy questions. Though who can say if we would have gotten such a fantastic riff from Delany in the second part if that hadn't been the case?

With this as prologue, now I move a step closer to your specific question: a kind of question I have never enjoyed is the questions about my own fiction. For openers, because it’s something you can never be objective about, there’s no objective comment you can make. But like the others, because such questions come again and again, you try to put together answers that are relatively harmless—that is to say, in my case, to deflect the question on to the nearest abstract topic, which is writing itself.

Delany voices here and throughout the second part what I've always thought when we see (many) artist interviews, whether they be writers or musicians or, particularly, actors. "What was it like to work with XXX?". "Do you have a favorite anecdote from YYY?". "What are you doing next?". Lazy, paint-by-numbers questions that require no knowledge or background research or effort on the part of the interviewer and, of course, tend to elicit no effort or interest on the part of the interviewee. So you end up with canned answers to canned questions and you forget the whole thing the instant it's over.

Unless you're interviewing someone as brilliant as Delany and he doesn't play along and gives you a great answer displaying what you might have gotten if you'd bothered to ask something that hasn't been asked a million times before. What if you'd asked Delany what he saw as the function of art in society and how science fiction fits into that framework rather than questions about who he thought would win in a fight between Kirk and Han Solo or whether it was super awesome to work with Bradley Cooper (ok, that's a bit unfair to this interviewer's questions which were bland rather than ridiculous but eh). Look at the kind of answer he gives when you don't bother to ask original questions! Imagine if you asked insightful ones!

Now I should go re-read some Delany. Maybe Trouble on Triton or Babel-17?
posted by Justinian at 1:36 AM on July 31, 2015 [1 favorite]

Anybody else ever have one of those dreams where they have shelves of books that don't exist and then almost break down crying when they wake up? Delany's The Splendor and Misery of Bodies, of Cities features prominently in my dream library.
posted by Justinian at 1:38 AM on July 31, 2015 [8 favorites]

Now I should go re-read some Delany. Maybe Trouble on Triton or Babel-17?

Dhalgren, surely.
posted by Joseph Gurl at 1:49 AM on July 31, 2015

This is the part where I embarrass myself and admit I never liked it as much as the other two.
posted by Justinian at 1:59 AM on July 31, 2015 [1 favorite]

Justinian: I'm of two minds about this.

I want this second volume so so so much. I've had that dream. I pulled the book down off the shelf and none of the text was intelligible and I spent much of the rest of the dream trying to find the magic glasses that would let me read the book until things got way too strange in that dream world way.

But.....

I've had that intense connection with someone that lasted a very short time before it ended without much warning or explanation and that has never been resolved.

In some ways, having that story suspended exactly where it is, especially after Marq's amazingly eloquent soliloquy just toward the end... It's like literature made into poetry for me. The bell that toned in my soul when I read Stars for the first time is still ringing.
posted by hippybear at 2:03 AM on July 31, 2015 [4 favorites]

I'm in the odd position of being fond of Nova, loving Triton the way you do with certain books that in a sense define you to yourself, and actively disliking everything else Delany has written, and more so over as the years have passed... but Triton is such a marvel I probably reread it every other year and could probably quote passages verbatim.
posted by jokeefe at 3:01 AM on July 31, 2015

Ugh, now I want to know what a good question to ask is, in his mind.
posted by gryftir at 3:02 AM on July 31, 2015

Plug for another Best Delany Book: About Writing. It's at or near the top of my list of favorite books about writing. Thoughtful, lyrical, and rewards rereading.
posted by cupcakeninja at 3:11 AM on July 31, 2015 [4 favorites]

I have read sci-fi my whole life, and I never bothered to learn much about the authors. That meant I couldn't have preconceptions about the work based on the author, and had to evaluate the story on its own merits.

The more I learn about many of these authors these days, the less impressed I am by them -- and my earlier policy is confirmed. But Delaney is an exception, and I look forward to learning more about him and his views, outside his sci-fi writing.
posted by wenestvedt at 3:54 AM on July 31, 2015

Jo:

I keep thinking the opposite way, I love Dhalgren, but my love just starts from there, including the difficult pornography. What did you think of his two volumes of autobiography?
posted by PinkMoose at 5:15 AM on July 31, 2015

I've been warming up for a re-read of the Neveryon books, myself.
posted by aught at 6:42 AM on July 31, 2015

Something that has struck me in recent years is how Delany's style, when being interviewed, is surprisingly reminiscent of Gene Wolfe's; while their politics and personal attitudes on many subjects are radically different, both men are deep thinkers who tend to reshape the formulaic questions that have been posed to them into fodder for serious reflection. There's a avuncular / professorial / grandfatherly sense of restrained impatience tempered with genuine good humor, and a sense of trying to teach the run-of-the-mill interviewer something real about the subject he or she is clearly only superficially-informed about, without being contemptuous (let's say, at worst, a mild and justified condescension). I mean, they're two of the smartest and most well-read writers in genre writing, so I guess it's not such a surprise to see similarities.
posted by aught at 7:20 AM on July 31, 2015

PinkMoose, I loved those two volumes of autobiography and recommend them to everyone!
posted by elizilla at 7:34 AM on July 31, 2015

> Now I should go re-read some Delany. Maybe Trouble on Triton or Babel-17?

Dhalgren, surely.

I hated Dhalgren with a passion, and I was a huge Delany fan (who loved Babel-17 to pieces). I'm not saying everybody should hate it because I did, I know it has passionate fans, but a lot of people don't care for it, and "surely" is a bit strong.
posted by languagehat at 7:42 AM on July 31, 2015 [5 favorites]

Dhalgren is so difficult - emotionally and in terms of form - that I think you really need to want to read it specifically, rather than just wanting to read Delany or to read an important SF novel. I've read most of it by skipping around. There's an event at the early mid-point of the novel (elevators, if that helps those who have read it) that I just can't read through. Maybe someday I will, but right now it is just so horrifying that I can't get any further.

Delany has definitely gotten saltier as he's aged - he can be a bit sharp in his earlier interviews but not quite like this one. I don't think I'd want to start asking him questions, since he seems prone to terrible attacks of the frankies and I'm not sure I'm ready for that.

That New Yorker article is weird - it seems to be trying very hard to normalize Delany for the non-SF/non-gay-SF-reader crowd. Like it's providing a genealogy of Delany-ness to normalize what he writes about - of course he writes about [sex things], he learned about this in the fabled, seedier era of 70s-80s New York. (The New Yorker is developing real imperialist nostalgia for Old NYC, but then so is everyone else.)

I have his latest one, but I haven't even tried to start. Partly because it's ridiculously huge, partly because I think I'm afraid he's going to die soon [although he's only 73 - he could be chugging along for another twenty years, really, and he seems to be one of those very rare writers with long careers who don't seem to diminish or slow down over time], and if I read his last books now and then he dies then there will never be any more Delany ever. If I always have some unread Delany around, it's like he will never really die.

Delany is just about the only writer whose writing about sex I like and find reassuring.

Something else - I use italics a lot in my internet writing, and that's straight-up a habit I got from reading Delany's interviews. I didn't start doing it on purpose, but I found that reading a lot of his interviews in a row made me start hearing a lot more emphasis on words, and I started to hear the emphasis I wanted in my words when I was typing.

My favorite Delany right now is "Time Considered As A Helix of Semi-Precious Stones". It's so melancholy and complex and - for a story that has lots and lots of setting, a very chatty narrator and a large helping of sixties camp - there's simply a tremendous amount of important feeling that is present but unsaid.

In some ways I love the new editions and new covers for his work - a lot of them are really beautiful, and it's nice that as my old copies fall apart I can get sturdier new ones. At the same time, I think it's dumb that the covers are so often clearly about de-SFing the work - this is literature, not some dumb space-babes-and-lasers fantasia. I say that if you aren't brave enough to read a pulp copy of Babel-17 on the bus for fear of what people think, you don't deserve any Delany at all.
posted by Frowner at 8:45 AM on July 31, 2015 [2 favorites]

Nest of Spiders has some of the best discussions of Spinoza I have read, and as a theologian interested in language, I have read ALOT of discussions of Spinoza wank. It's kind of amazing, this SF porn epic, and then this huge thwack of Spinoza in the middle.
posted by PinkMoose at 9:40 AM on July 31, 2015 [1 favorite]

Babel-17 is a story about language, it is safe. Dhalgren on the other hand...
posted by bdc34 at 9:53 AM on July 31, 2015

> Babel-17 is a story about language, it is safe. Dhalgren on the other hand...

Right, everyone who doesn't share your taste in Delany is cowardly and sex-averse. Got it.
posted by languagehat at 11:24 AM on July 31, 2015 [1 favorite]

Babel-17 is a story about language, it is safe. Dhalgren on the other hand...

...Is a story about language.

Right, everyone who doesn't share your taste in Delany is cowardly and sex-averse. Got it.

Um. You know, bdc34 didn't actually say that, but it's interesting (read: kinda crappy) you felt compelled to put words in their mouth to make that point.

As someone who admires Dhalgren and who has been talking to people about it for close to 40 years, I actually find most often it's the experimental prose style, the lack of clear genre trappings like space ships and other planets (which you find in most of SRD's earlier novels), and the violence, pretty much in that order, that people react most strongly against, rather than the explicit sex, though admittedly every once in a while there is some guy who doesn't like having to read the gay sex scenes.
posted by aught at 11:40 AM on July 31, 2015 [1 favorite]

(The New Yorker is developing real imperialist nostalgia for Old NYC, but then so is everyone else.)

That's a curious way to put it. I think many would see the billionaire property developers and chain franchise corporations, with the abetting of conservative mayors like Giuliani and Bloomberg in the post-9/11 law & order at all costs era, as the imperialists wiping out the perhaps seedier but also more authentic character of mid-to-late-20th c. NYC.
posted by aught at 11:48 AM on July 31, 2015

Speaking of Hugo controversies, today's the last day to submit your 2015 ballot.
posted by Lentrohamsanin at 11:56 AM on July 31, 2015 [1 favorite]

Imperialist nostalgia is precisely the nostalgia of the imperialists for the thing they destroyed. There's a book of the same title by a left-wing anthropologist, Reynardo Rosaldo. I read it a long, long time ago so I only remember snippets, but they've been useful snippets. "Oh, old New York, back when it was seedy and authentic before my condo was even built on the rubble of this affordable housing, let's make a movie about it", that kind of thing.
posted by Frowner at 11:57 AM on July 31, 2015 [1 favorite]

Imperialist nostalgia is precisely the nostalgia of the imperialists for the thing they destroyed.

Ah, I get it; sorry I misunderstood you.
posted by aught at 12:01 PM on July 31, 2015

From the interview:

The truth is that most of the questions most interviewers are drawn to ask is some version of “What did X, Y, or Z—presumably in this or that work—mean?” ... Sometimes, to the young, you might want to give a nudge in one direction or another. But you know also, every time you do that, you are still sabotaging your own work. If the reader can’t—with less or more effort—figure it out on his or her own, nothing meaningful has happened.

I can't help but respect this position, but I often wish Delany was a little less firm about it, or at least more willing to take those questions as "What did X mean to you?" Not because his answers would have any special authority -- once the book is written, he's just one interpreter among others, albeit one with a unique relation to the text -- but simply because it can be interesting and enlightening to understand an author's intentions. His comment at the beginning of the interview about the opening of The Jewels of Aptor is a great example: it's still a striking opening today (and I love that Delany's oeuvre begins with this complex act of interpretation), but my reading of it is enriched by knowing that little bit more about what Delany was aiming for.
posted by Gerald Bostock at 1:20 PM on July 31, 2015

> Um. You know, bdc34 didn't actually say that, but it's interesting (read: kinda crappy) you felt compelled to put words in their mouth to make that point.

OK, fair enough. I thought that was the obvious reading, but if I'm wrong, I apologize. I'd sure like to know what the ellipses were supposed to represent, though. Once again, I would urge people to just say what they mean and skip the "'"irony"'".
posted by languagehat at 2:27 PM on July 31, 2015 [2 favorites]