ways.” Indeed, as Ungar notes, Lacan’s algorithm is, to start with, an inversion of Saussure’s original, though Lacan also de-emphasizes the interdependence and complementary exchange within Saussure’s conception. For much more detailed discussion, see “Saussure, Barthes, and Structuralism” by Steven Ungar, in The Cambridge Companion to Saussure, edited by Carol Sanders (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 157–73. This detail is essentially irrelevant to The American Shore, and Delany and I discussed both Saussure and Lacan at length after I sent him an earlier draft of this introduction—he’s as familiar with the Course as with Lacan. I raise the point not out of a desire to “correct” that which doesn’t need correction (I expect Lacan knew exactly what he was doing, and I know Delany did), but merely because it, to my eyes, demonstrates the power of some of Lacan’s formulations on Delany’s thinking at the time. For anyone interested in the development of Delany’s thought, it might be a useful datum, though one that should be considered alongside Delany’s updated thoughts on Lacan in “The Kenneth James Interview,” in Silent Interviews (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1994), p. 242.
11. See the discussion of gravitic discourse below for why the language so commonly used to express the assumption is itself problematic.
12. S/Z, pp. 4–6.
13. Jacques Derrida, Dissemination [1972], trans. Barbara Johnson (New York: Continuum, 2004), p. 378.
14. An idea that Barthes, too, accepted, saying in S/Z, that “as nothing exists outside the text, there is never a whole of the text” (p. 6), but for Barthes the limitations imposed on the readerly text by its necessary intertextuality created a kind of wholeness (further evidence, for him, of the inferiority of the readerly text).
15. Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc., trans. Samuel Weber (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), p. 136.
16. Samuel Delany, Empire: A Visual Novel, illust. Howard V. Chaykin (New York: Byron Preiss Visual Publications, 1978).
17. See, for instance, “To Read The Dispossessed,” in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw; and “Some Presumptuous Approaches to Science Fiction,” in Starboard Wine, for a start.
18. I can’t resist quoting a comment from Delany on this point: “Even the banging of the shoe on the desk that you cite is to point out a fundamentally generic difference between them, not a difference in value. It’s like saying that a line of poetry is more onomatopoetic than the same words used as prose because—generically—poetry makes you pay more attention to the sound of words than prose does—and not because the words sound any different in either medium.”
19. Nabokov, Pale Fire, pp. 28–29.
20. S/Z, p. 10.
21. “Disch, Thomas M.” Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, 3rd ed. (online). Accessed November 27, 2012. Gollancz/SFE Ltd. Accessed December 12, 2012.
22. Douglas Martin, “Thomas Disch, Novelist, Dies at 68,” New York Times, July 8, 2008.
1
The Pretext
Concatenated texts—romans fleuves, interrelated series of novels and stories, stories and plays—appear from time to time in mundane fiction. Sometimes the connecting link is so tenuous as to constitute the merest ornamentation, a grace note to the text (as when the imprisoned Mersault, in Camus’s novel L’Etranger, comes upon a newspaper article that incidentally summarizes Camus’s play Le Malentendu); sometimes the links are forged of the unmalleable ore of naturalistic fiction: recurrent characters, settings, themes (as with the Forsytes, the Compsons/Snopeses/Sartorises, Leatherstocking, Tarzan, or the Thibaults).
If subjective time laid down through real history is the road on which mundane fiction travels, holding up now and again its Stendhalian mirror to view another roadside attraction, the tour de force of keeping, through several texts, to one lane of the highway is certainly intriguing, indeed laudable, even applaudable. But the possibilities of science fiction open up that highway into a boundariless plane, a whole prairie whose circling horizon is the limit of imagination itself, a prairie which quickly deliquesces into a roiling ocean of possibilities. The science fiction writer who returns, through several texts, to trace a single current in this ocean is, because of the oceanic context, involved in an undertaking of a very different order from the one-lane exploration of the mundane fictioneer.
The novel series in English language mundane fiction is rare and is usually connected with some feeling of provinciality (Faulkner, Powell, Cooper); and the mundane story series (e.g., Hemingway’s Nick Adams tales, Sherwood Anderson’s Winesberg) frequently carries with it as well the bad taste of editorial coercion, or at least the quotidian pressure to sell. Yet s-f authors as different as Laumer and Le Guin, Anderson and Aldiss, Russ, Niven, Zelazny, Farmer, Asimov, Anthony, Ballard, Bradley, Blish, Heinlein, Stableford, Moorcock, McCaffrey, Sturgeon, Andre Norton, “Doc” and Cordwainer Smith, Stanley G. Weinbaum, Stanislaw Lem, Zenna Henderson, Fritz Leiber, and Arthur C. Clarke have all produced either story-, novel-, or story-and-novel series.
In science fiction the creation of enchained texts bridges political opinion, aesthetic preferences, commitments to hard- or software, and spans all degrees of aesthetic merit. In science fiction the question is rather what writers have not at one time or another in their writing career chosen to interlink such a series, to generate such a set of texts within a single encompassing imaginative matrix. (Alfred Bester is one major name that comes readily to mind who has not left us, somewhere in his oeuvre, such a concatenation; C. M. Kornbluth is another.)
The explanation we sometimes read for the number of s-f series (“Well, readers buy series stories …”) attempts to establish a naive causality around the implicit commercial parameters of the field (“… therefore writers write them”). But we are aware just how strong the commercial parameters of s-f are. Such parameters’ mechanics are clear: because there is comparatively little money in science fiction, when commercial pressures work at all to contour a text or set of texts, they work (short of editorial tampering) in comparatively subtle ways1 and usually at several removes. Any explicit appeal to positive commercial pressures (negative ones, i.e., the pressures accruing from too little pay, contour another tale entirely), especially in a causal mode, is invariably aggrandizing mystification: to exaggerate the power of money in the field is to suggest that there is more money in the field than there actually is. The appeal defuses science fiction. In a capitalist society, to say, “These writers write for money …” makes the science fictional enterprise safe.
To say—and in so saying come far closer to spearing the thrashing, slippery truth—that this s-f writer writes out of some fanatical concept of ideology and that one out of an equally fanatical concept of aesthetics, that a third writes from ill-understood subconscious heavings that barely emerge into comprehensible prose, while another writes from a matrix of social prejudices and aesthetic rigidities, while still another writes to save the world from these same rigidities; and still others write from every combination of the above; and, though not much, they are all paid for it; and their collective fans hold hundreds of conventions a year, organized around their work, to which upon occasion many thousands come—this establishes a far more dangerous enterprise, a danger which “We write for money” is uttered, like a magic formula from the capitalist grimoire, precisely to subdue, to tame.
Science fiction readers like series stories; science fiction writers write them. But psychological synchronicity better explains the relation than any commercial causality: both readers and writers of s-f experience the field-effect of science fiction as a vast turbulence of “perhaps’s.” This turbulence is far stronger for science
