Studying the Works of Samuel R. Delany
by Jeffrey Allen Tucker, Ph.D.

When I tell people that my most recent research has been on works of African-American Science Fiction, I often get responses that range from the incredulous--"You mean, there is such a thing?"--to the ridiculous: "You mean, like Homeboys in Outer Space or Dionne Warwick’s Psychic Friends Network, right?" As a literary scholar, my interests have less to do with inane TV sitcoms and 900-number services than with the works of one of the most gifted and unique minds of our contemporary era, Samuel R. Delany.

Once, Delany was something of an unknown in African-American Studies. If I mentioned to another scholar in the field that I worked on "Delany" it was automatically assumed that I meant Martin Delany, the 19th-century abolitionist, black nationalist forerunner, and author of Blake or The Huts of America (1861-2). Today, "Delany" more often triggers thoughts of the first major African-American voice in science fiction (SF), who has since become the genre’s foremost theoretician and one of today's most consistently interesting intellectuals. Born and raised in Harlem, Samuel Ray Delany, Jr. (a.k.a. "Chip") is a member of one of the more famous families in African-American history. Delany's paternal aunts, Sarah Elizabeth and A. Elizabeth Delany recently earned recognition for their collection of memoirs entitled Having Our Say (1993). His uncle was Judge Hubert T. Delany, the Harlem Renaissance figure who served with the Court of Domestic Relations in New York. Delany's father ran a funeral home in Harlem, and his mother was a librarian who fostered a love of reading and writing in her son. It was at summer camp and in high school that Delany discovered SF in the form of pulp magazines and the novels of Theodore Sturgeon, Robert A. Heinlein, and Robert E. Howard, among others. Ace Books published one of his first manuscripts, The Jewels of Aptor, in early 1962; Delany was all of 19 years old. Delany has since edited SF, poetry, and critical journals and written SF and theoretical criticism, an autobiography, and numerous fictional works. He has won multiple Hugo and Nebula Awards--SF’s top honors--as well as the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement in Lesbian and Gay Publishing. For the past seven years Delany has been professor of comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Such a distinguished resume, however, did not prevent a rather frustrating dialogue that I experienced a few Christmases ago back home in Kansas City. An uncle, inquiring as to the nature of my graduate research asked me, "So just what are you doing up there at Princeton?" When I explained that I was writing on the first major African-American SF writer, my uncle replied, "Oh no, we (meaning African Americans) don’t do that. We leave that kind of stuff (SF) for white folks." I had no idea as to how to reply and let the matter drop, but his words indicated that for many people--black as well as white--science fiction and African-American culture are mutually exclusive. However, such assumptions seem odd given that the narrative of African-American history resembles something by H.G. Wells or George Lucas. Consider: A group of beings is invaded by an alien race, captured, and taken across vast distances to a "New World," where they are enslaved and later liberated following a near-apocalyptic war. Both past and recent black experiences have had all-too-fantastic features, as Mark Dery writes in a preface to an interview with Delany:

African Americans, in a very real sense, are the descendants of alien abductees; they inhabit a sci-fi nightmare in which unseen but no less impassable force fields of intolerance frustrate their movements; official histories undo what has been done; and technology is too often brought to bear on black bodies (branding, forced sterilization, the Tuskegee experiment, and tasers come readily to mind).

What makes the perceived split between black and SF cultures even more puzzling is the presence of SF themes in Black musical culture: The straight-outta-Saturn jazz of Sun Ra, Parliament/Funkadelic’s cosmic slop of rocking funk, and Afrika Bambataa’s interplanetary search for the perfect beat are some of the noteworthy examples of black music’s incorporation of futuristic and fantastic elements. And there is anecdotal evidence that black participation in SF conventions and consumption of SF merchandise has increased in recent years. So how does one account for the imagined gap between Black culture and SF?

Such a presumption is understandable given that for much of its young history in America--from the pulp magazines of the 1920s and 30s to the "Golden Age" and the emergence of the SF novel in the 40s and 50s, and even in the "cyberpunk" sub-genre of the 1980s--SF as a genre has been dominated by white (and male) authors, editors, characters, and readers. Enter Delany in the 1960s, aiming SF’s refractive gaze on issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, and psychology, producing results that were alternately subtle and daring. It would not be an overstatement to say that Delany helped to open doors for a variety of subsequent SF authors, including black writers such as Octavia Butler, Charles Saunders, and Stephen Barnes. It is this trailblazing role that contributes to my research’s investigation of postmodernism.

"Postmodernism" is a very confusing term, and not everyone who has an understanding of it thinks that what it represents is a good thing. It would take many more pages--or a graduate seminar--to address this subject fully. However, responses to/critiques of cultural contexts that have ignored or overlooked racial difference have been identified as "postmodern." Delany’s entry into SF’s previously all-white cultural terrain can therefore be interpreted as a postmodern intervention. From this vantage point, my work begins by identifying the presence of people of color in three of Delany’s early novels--Babel-17 (1966), The Einstein Intersection (1967), and Nova (1968)--and interpreting these representations as commentary about the idea of "difference" itself. I have extended this approach in an analysis of Dhalgren (1975), a lengthy, spiraling, post-apocalyptic novel that explores race, sexuality, and madness. A key segment of my research focuses on the treatment of slavery in the sword-and-sorcery series entitled Return to Nevèrÿon, which also introduces its readers to semiotics or the theoretical relationship between words and things. And since postmodernism is not only a discourse concomitant with the assertion of race, but also a tool for investigating the meanings of race, I interpret Delany's autobiography, The Motion of Light in Water (1988), as a postmodern text in that it problematizes traditional notions of blackness, illustrating the differences that sexuality and artistic endeavor make to the quality and character of racial identity.

Discussing "identity" is an endeavor as important and as potentially volatile as nuclear physicists’ work with similarly highly charged, theoretical particles. Identity, particularly racial identity, is a sensitive issue because for most African-Americans we need something called "blackness" around which we can organize socially and politically, from which we can start to create a sense of self, which for so many years of our history was kept from us in this country. Anything that disrupts that sense of racial self threatens to disrupt our world, which perhaps explains my uncle’s refusal to consider the possibility of African-American SF writer. The problem with the assertion "African-Americans don’t (do) X." is that anyone could replace the "X" with anything they wanted--"play golf," "go to college," "vote"--in order to limit the scope of black endeavor and identity. But of all the things that I have learned studying African-American literature, perhaps the most important lesson has been that there are many ways to be black, not just one or a few. And if SF is "the literature of possibilities," perhaps Delany was envisioning alternative ways of being for African Americans when he spoke these words at the Studio Museum of Harlem: "We need images of tomorrow, and our people need them more than most."

NOTES

1. Mark Dery. "Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose." Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture. Durham: Duke UP, 1994. 179-222. 180.

                    2. For more on "Afrofuturism" and music, see Dery p. 182.

                    3. Ibid. 187-188.

4. For more on this subject, see Thulani Davis, "The Future May Be Bleak, But It's not Black." The Village Voice 1 Feb. 1983: 17-19; and Charles R. Saunders, "Why Blacks Don’t Read Science Fiction." Brave New Universe: Testing the Values of Science in Society. Ed. Tom Henighan. Ottawa: Tecumseh, 1980. 160-168.

5. See Wahneema Lubiano. "Shuckin' Off the African-American Native Other: What's 'Po- Mo' Got to Do with It?" Cultural Critique 18 (1991): 149-186.

6. Samuel R. Delany. "The Necessity of Tomorrows." 1978. Starboard Wine: More Notes on the Language of Science Fiction. Pleasantville: Dragon Press, 1984. 23-35.

Jeffrey A. Tucker earned his Ph.D. in English in 1997 from Princeton University and A.B. and M.A. degrees in English from the University of Missouri-Columbia in 1988 and 1990.  His dissertation, "A Sense of Wonder: The Postmodern Projects of Samuel R. Delany," was finished during a New England Board of Higher Education Dissertation Fellowship at the University of New Hampshire.  Dr. Tucker is coeditor (with Judith Jackson Fossett) of Race Consciousness: African-American Studies for the New Century (New York University Press, 1997).  His article, "'Can Science Succeed Where the Civil War Failed?' George S. Schuyler and Race," appeared in that edited volume.  In the fall of 1997, Dr. Tucker joined the Ohio University Department of English where he teaches the African American literature course sequence.

Reprinted with kind permission from Ohio University College of Arts and Sciences Forum V. 15, Spring 1998.

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