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Starboard Wine Notes on the Language of Science Fiction
In Starboard Wine, Samuel Delany explores the implications of his now-famous assertion that science fiction is not about the future. Rather, it uses the future as a means of talking about the present and its potentiality. By recognizing a text's specific "difference", we begin to see the quality of its particulars. Through riveting analyses of works by Joanna Russ, Robert Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon, and Thomas M. Disch, Delany reveals critical strategies for reading that move beyond overwrought theorizing and formulaic thinking. Throughout, the author performs the kinds of careful inquiry and urgent speculation that he calls others to engage in.
350 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1984
13 people are currently reading
157 people want to read
About the author
Samuel R. Delany
294 books2,201 followersSamuel Ray Delany, also known as "Chip," is an award-winning American science fiction author. He was born to a prominent black family on April 1, 1942, and raised in Harlem. His mother, Margaret Carey Boyd Delany, was a library clerk in the New York Public Library system. His father, Samuel Ray Delany, Senior, ran a successful Harlem undertaking establishment, Levy & Delany Funeral Home, on 7th Avenue, between 1938 and his death in 1960. The family lived in the top two floors of the three-story private house between five- and six-story Harlem apartment buildings. Delany's aunts were Sadie and Bessie Delany; Delany used some of their adventures as the basis for the adventures of his characters Elsie and Corry in the opening novella Atlantis: Model 1924 in his book of largely autobiographical stories Atlantis: Three Tales.
Delany attended the Dalton School and the Bronx High School of Science, during which he was selected to attend Camp Rising Sun, the Louis August Jonas Foundation's international summer scholarship program. Delany and poet Marilyn Hacker met in high school, and were married in 1961. Their marriage lasted nineteen years. They had a daughter, Iva Hacker-Delany (b. 1974), who spent a decade working in theater in New York City.
Delany was a published science fiction author by the age of 20. He published nine well-regarded science fiction novels between 1962 and 1968, as well as several prize-winning short stories (collected in Driftglass [1971] and more recently in Aye, and Gomorrah, and other stories [2002]). His eleventh and most popular novel, Dhalgren, was published in 1975. His main literary project through the late 1970s and 1980s was the Return to Nevèrÿon series, the overall title of the four volumes and also the title of the fourth and final book.
Delany has published several autobiographical/semi-autobiographical accounts of his life as a black, gay, and highly dyslexic writer, including his Hugo award winning autobiography, The Motion of Light in Water.
Since 1988, Delany has been a professor at several universities. This includes eleven years as a professor of comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, a year and a half as an English professor at the University at Buffalo. He then moved to the English Department of Temple University in 2001, where he has been teaching since. He has had several visiting guest professorships before and during these same years. He has also published several books of criticism, interviews, and essays. In one of his non-fiction books, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999), he draws on personal experience to examine the relationship between the effort to redevelop Times Square and the public sex lives of working-class men, gay and straight, in New York City.
In 2007, Delany was the subject of a documentary film, The Polymath, or, The Life and Opinions of Samuel R. Delany, Gentleman. The film debuted on April 25 at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival.
Delany attended the Dalton School and the Bronx High School of Science, during which he was selected to attend Camp Rising Sun, the Louis August Jonas Foundation's international summer scholarship program. Delany and poet Marilyn Hacker met in high school, and were married in 1961. Their marriage lasted nineteen years. They had a daughter, Iva Hacker-Delany (b. 1974), who spent a decade working in theater in New York City.
Delany was a published science fiction author by the age of 20. He published nine well-regarded science fiction novels between 1962 and 1968, as well as several prize-winning short stories (collected in Driftglass [1971] and more recently in Aye, and Gomorrah, and other stories [2002]). His eleventh and most popular novel, Dhalgren, was published in 1975. His main literary project through the late 1970s and 1980s was the Return to Nevèrÿon series, the overall title of the four volumes and also the title of the fourth and final book.
Delany has published several autobiographical/semi-autobiographical accounts of his life as a black, gay, and highly dyslexic writer, including his Hugo award winning autobiography, The Motion of Light in Water.
Since 1988, Delany has been a professor at several universities. This includes eleven years as a professor of comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, a year and a half as an English professor at the University at Buffalo. He then moved to the English Department of Temple University in 2001, where he has been teaching since. He has had several visiting guest professorships before and during these same years. He has also published several books of criticism, interviews, and essays. In one of his non-fiction books, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999), he draws on personal experience to examine the relationship between the effort to redevelop Times Square and the public sex lives of working-class men, gay and straight, in New York City.
In 2007, Delany was the subject of a documentary film, The Polymath, or, The Life and Opinions of Samuel R. Delany, Gentleman. The film debuted on April 25 at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
November 23, 2023
Another research reread, focusing on ‘The Necessity of Tomorrow(s)’ (racism in SF) and ‘Some Presumptuous Approaches to Science Fiction’ (theory). Delany is as gregarious and as penetrating as ever:
These baker’s dozen disparate pieces discuss the past and the future of science fiction, those violences committed on our reading of science fiction texts by memory (and remembering) and desire (and although we have no English word re-desiring, desire itself is so closely allied to repetition that Freud could identify the two).
Matthew Cheney provides an excellent, fascinating introduction into Delany’s “new kind of criticism”, which is where “difference is what separates a science fiction text from other texts: a difference of representation and reference, a difference of reading strategies (protocols, codes), a difference of history.”
Of course, Cheney makes the useful connection to Derrida’s différance, and the (immense) fun Delany has poking at this bear of a structuralist theory. Despite its intimidating sub-title, ‘More Notes on the Language of Science Fiction’, following on from ‘The Jewel-Hinged Jaw’, this is a meandering, fun, occasionally maddening, sometimes obtuse and even irreverent, examination of a genre that remains a benchmark in SF criticism to this day.
These baker’s dozen disparate pieces discuss the past and the future of science fiction, those violences committed on our reading of science fiction texts by memory (and remembering) and desire (and although we have no English word re-desiring, desire itself is so closely allied to repetition that Freud could identify the two).
Matthew Cheney provides an excellent, fascinating introduction into Delany’s “new kind of criticism”, which is where “difference is what separates a science fiction text from other texts: a difference of representation and reference, a difference of reading strategies (protocols, codes), a difference of history.”
Of course, Cheney makes the useful connection to Derrida’s différance, and the (immense) fun Delany has poking at this bear of a structuralist theory. Despite its intimidating sub-title, ‘More Notes on the Language of Science Fiction’, following on from ‘The Jewel-Hinged Jaw’, this is a meandering, fun, occasionally maddening, sometimes obtuse and even irreverent, examination of a genre that remains a benchmark in SF criticism to this day.
August 1, 2021
Not as interesting structurally as an overall project as Silent Interviews: On Language, Race, Sex, Science Fiction, and Some Comics--A Collection of Written Interviews, though it is a bit more focused than The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction. Here we have Delany delineate from a number of angles a rather nuanced argument as to the reading protocols that fundamentally determine the way we read literature, poetry, and science fiction differently, and why the desire to see SF as literature, as has been the vogue move since it seems the 70s for some ill-informed academics, does a great disservice to the rich and differentiated history of SF as paraliterature (which history he goes on to delineate for us).
His most interesting argument runs that while any sentence that appears in a book of "mundane fiction" (which is to say, literature of the world as we know it—conventional fiction) could easily appear and be comprehensible within an SF text, not every sentence within an SF text if put into a work of mundane fiction would be readable or even understandable. Ergo, though Delany cautions against trying to subsume SF into the category of literature, he does suggest that SF as a more expansive way of writing/reading might not be a bad place for literature to be subsumed. It left me wondering how works that have seemingly done so would be read by Delany, books like Vollmann's You Bright and Risen Angels, or Laiseca's El jardín de las máquinas parlantes and Los Sorias.
Delany, as always, delivers, though never in the ways you would expect him. This is a great book as it relates to thinking about SF, but one that does not rest solidly upon any definitive conclusions—perhaps in that way it is all the more valuable. As he writes throughout the book: a genre can be described but never defined, and so likewise though he describes somewhat counterintuitive ways of thinking, they never ossify into the pedantic stuff of stale definition as so many thoughtful jottings dead on the page, a matter concluded. Instead, we as the reader are left churning in its wake, following on our own way even as the path before us dissipates.
His most interesting argument runs that while any sentence that appears in a book of "mundane fiction" (which is to say, literature of the world as we know it—conventional fiction) could easily appear and be comprehensible within an SF text, not every sentence within an SF text if put into a work of mundane fiction would be readable or even understandable. Ergo, though Delany cautions against trying to subsume SF into the category of literature, he does suggest that SF as a more expansive way of writing/reading might not be a bad place for literature to be subsumed. It left me wondering how works that have seemingly done so would be read by Delany, books like Vollmann's You Bright and Risen Angels, or Laiseca's El jardín de las máquinas parlantes and Los Sorias.
Delany, as always, delivers, though never in the ways you would expect him. This is a great book as it relates to thinking about SF, but one that does not rest solidly upon any definitive conclusions—perhaps in that way it is all the more valuable. As he writes throughout the book: a genre can be described but never defined, and so likewise though he describes somewhat counterintuitive ways of thinking, they never ossify into the pedantic stuff of stale definition as so many thoughtful jottings dead on the page, a matter concluded. Instead, we as the reader are left churning in its wake, following on our own way even as the path before us dissipates.
November 1, 2012
The fact that the first Delaney I've read was one of his collections of criticism, rather than his science fiction, says more about me than about Delaney.
It would be too easy to deconstruct this: It is a collection of more-or-less short texts which makes no pretense to systematic presentation. Each was elaborated with a different audience in mind, with varying intents, at times polemical. At least at the stage of his career represented by this collection, his approach to literary theory appears to have been more instrumental than consistent--whatever comes ready to hand to elucidate a point of intuition he has earned through dialogue, experience and wide erudition, he will deploy.
The notion of genres of writing being determined and delimited not by thematic content or stylistic nous, but by the modes of reading elicited by the texts, has much to commend it. The ways he defines the "literary" and "science fictional" modes of reading is too prone to both theoretical disputation and empirical counterexamples. For example, can a text like James Baldwin's "Go Tell It On the Mountain" be said to call for reading in the modality of subjective representation, when much of the reading audience has no subjective experience of the world that it represents? Can it be said to relate to the world as "given," or must a reader (or at least, certain types of readers) engage in the kind of reconstruction of worlds that Delaney describes as a "science fictional" reading? And if the reader in question does not have at least a basic, and fundamentally sympathetic, historical and anthropological understanding of Harlem in the decades before the civil rights movement, or the norms and functions of church and spirituality among black Americans, would not that reader be just as much at sea as someone who doesn't know what an asteroid is, trying to parse "the monopole magnet mining operations in the outer asteroid belt of Delta Cygni"?
This is a quibble, though. The only reason I shaved off a star is that most of the book does not quite live up to the very high standard, of both style and substance, set by the first essay, "The Necessity of Tomorrow(s)". Throughout the book, one feels oneself to be in the presence of a first-rate mind--and as Fitzgerald once said of first-rate minds, they have their contradictions. Whether one is seeking an entry-point to an exploration of the history of science fiction, a series of meditations on various modes of fictional creation, or a manifesto for how literature can "[move], via these mediators, across the social net from person to person, find your way to this book and be refreshed.
It would be too easy to deconstruct this: It is a collection of more-or-less short texts which makes no pretense to systematic presentation. Each was elaborated with a different audience in mind, with varying intents, at times polemical. At least at the stage of his career represented by this collection, his approach to literary theory appears to have been more instrumental than consistent--whatever comes ready to hand to elucidate a point of intuition he has earned through dialogue, experience and wide erudition, he will deploy.
The notion of genres of writing being determined and delimited not by thematic content or stylistic nous, but by the modes of reading elicited by the texts, has much to commend it. The ways he defines the "literary" and "science fictional" modes of reading is too prone to both theoretical disputation and empirical counterexamples. For example, can a text like James Baldwin's "Go Tell It On the Mountain" be said to call for reading in the modality of subjective representation, when much of the reading audience has no subjective experience of the world that it represents? Can it be said to relate to the world as "given," or must a reader (or at least, certain types of readers) engage in the kind of reconstruction of worlds that Delaney describes as a "science fictional" reading? And if the reader in question does not have at least a basic, and fundamentally sympathetic, historical and anthropological understanding of Harlem in the decades before the civil rights movement, or the norms and functions of church and spirituality among black Americans, would not that reader be just as much at sea as someone who doesn't know what an asteroid is, trying to parse "the monopole magnet mining operations in the outer asteroid belt of Delta Cygni"?
This is a quibble, though. The only reason I shaved off a star is that most of the book does not quite live up to the very high standard, of both style and substance, set by the first essay, "The Necessity of Tomorrow(s)". Throughout the book, one feels oneself to be in the presence of a first-rate mind--and as Fitzgerald once said of first-rate minds, they have their contradictions. Whether one is seeking an entry-point to an exploration of the history of science fiction, a series of meditations on various modes of fictional creation, or a manifesto for how literature can "[move], via these mediators, across the social net from person to person, find your way to this book and be refreshed.
June 29, 2014
Тази (заедно с The American Shore), а не много по-често цитираната The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, е най-силната книга на Дилейни върху жанра.
January 24, 2015
Delany continues to develop his argument for the difference (and différance) between mundane fiction/literature and science fiction/paraliterature in an extremely detailed, well researched and well-argued way, while at the same time providing insights into the way science fiction is often read or misread by academics and non-SF readers and elucidating and highlighting important points and ways of reading of the bodies of work of Joanna Russ, Thomas Disch, Theodore Sturgeon and Robert Heinlein. I added quite a lot of SF classics to my reading list, if nothing else. He also makes several critiques of critics' attempts, both from within and from without the field, to make a comprehensive history of science fiction and the fallacies they fall into, while at the same time providing his own impromptu history of contemporary science fiction from the 1920s to the time of writing of this book (late 70s and early 80s). An interesting and important distinction is made between what modern SF is influenced by and all the attempts by critics to chart its progress against works like Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Frankenstein, Lucian's works, Gulliver's Travels and finally Jules Verne's adventure novels and Herbert Wells' "romances of the future". This is mandatory reading for anyone with more than a passing interest in the field and its history, and its a crying shame it's not more popular than it is, because even if we disregard its worth in the SF critical discourse, it is EXTREMELY readable. Yes, it is often highfalutin but is still quite more readable than a lot of academic criticism, which I have read at least a bit of, even if for uni assignments. Read it!!!
Want to read
February 20, 2008[continued from above]
First, let's turn to an earlier volume of Delany's criticism, "Starboard Wine," in which he claims that "even the most passing mention by an sf writer of, say, '...the monopole magnet mining operations in the outer asteroid belt of Delta Cygni,' begins as a simple way of saying that, while the concept of mines may persist, their object, their organization, their technology, their locations, and their very form can change - and it says it directly and clearly and well before it offers any metaphor for any psychic mystery or psychological state. Not to understand this object-critique, on whatever intuitive level, is to misread the phrase."
Ken James included that quote in his Introduction as part of a survey history of the essay form. By his analysis, the genre has a dual origin in the "spectacle of self," as presented by Montaigne, and the aphoristic dogmatism of Bacon. Citing Barthes, James argues that "spectacle discourages critical consideration of 'motives' and 'consequences' as it treats the spectator to the brief illusion of a 'univocal' moral order. Aphorisms, similarly, derive much of their authoritative force from their implicit affirmation of such an order [...] because their seemingly 'pithy' declarations discourage further inquiry into their authorizing context." This complicates the 'sticks and stones' chant, because, while it undeniably serves a resistant role for some, it also relies on the 'catchiness' common to aphorisms. According to James, Delany's essays succeed in straddling such contradictory tendencies by moving from one method of analysis to another, and then back again with the more nuanced understanding and insight gained from such moves.
For example, Delany starts his essay "Wagner/Artaud" by recounting an anecdotal experience with one of Wagner's operas before moving into a detailed and historicized representation of the lives of these two artists, who had such very different conceptions about what it means to create art in the world. By the end of the (85 page) essay, Delany has reconsidered his own interpretation of his own participation in the staging "Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg," now presenting the all-encompassing chaos of backstage productions as a corrollary to Artaud's Theater of Cruelty, rather than the totalizing implications of Wagner's spectacle. "The simple thematic opposition," says James, "of Wagner as the Elder God of the discourse of 'High Art' to Artaud as the deranged Trickster God of postmodernism has begun to crumble under the weight of the analytical pressure Delany has applied to it." Signs of this pressure appear in the form of "ironies and subversions" that "pile up" at the end to show how:
"When we go into a theater, when we sit down and the house lights dim as we fix our silent attention on the stage, we are in Wagner's theater.
We are not in Shakespeare's.
We are not in Moliere's or Racine's.
We are not in Mozart's or Beaumarchais's.
We are not in Goethe's or even Hugo's.
We are wholly in Wagner's."
While Delany has just led us (cajoled us? coerced us? enticed us?) through an account of how Wagner invented the very conventions of house lights that dim and silent, attentive audiences, he has also shown us the life that led one person to create those norms, the historical standards that they subverted, and (perhaps most importantly) the consequence that every artist (Artaud included) has had to reckon into their accounts of how theater can stay a dynamic, vital, and engaged form.
It's not as easy as simple reversals a la Brecht, where "I'm rubber and you're glue / everything you say bounces off me and sticks to you," and Wagner is always the one saying, the pronouncer of verdicts, the establisher of edicts. Nor is it as basic an inversion as "I know you are but what am I?" as the Situationists would have it, where theater itself - its very boards and rafters - become raw material for barricades and bonfires. Wagner himself, according to his autobiography and the reports of others,
participated in the Dresden uprising of 1849, supplying grenades to Bakunin and
providing surveillance and intelligence from a beseiged tower, and finally built his own
opera house on the grounds of the incinerated old one.
Delany's deconstructions - of his own method as well as of his subjects' - demonstrate a
different sort of dialogue. That's not new – transparency of technique is a well-worn demand – but the resolution of the details that he lends to his descriptions, plus the lucidity with which he shifts from context to theory to empirical evidence, all together serve to give the work of reading his work a singularly rewarding experience.
What characterizes that is harder to name.
[continued below]
First, let's turn to an earlier volume of Delany's criticism, "Starboard Wine," in which he claims that "even the most passing mention by an sf writer of, say, '...the monopole magnet mining operations in the outer asteroid belt of Delta Cygni,' begins as a simple way of saying that, while the concept of mines may persist, their object, their organization, their technology, their locations, and their very form can change - and it says it directly and clearly and well before it offers any metaphor for any psychic mystery or psychological state. Not to understand this object-critique, on whatever intuitive level, is to misread the phrase."
Ken James included that quote in his Introduction as part of a survey history of the essay form. By his analysis, the genre has a dual origin in the "spectacle of self," as presented by Montaigne, and the aphoristic dogmatism of Bacon. Citing Barthes, James argues that "spectacle discourages critical consideration of 'motives' and 'consequences' as it treats the spectator to the brief illusion of a 'univocal' moral order. Aphorisms, similarly, derive much of their authoritative force from their implicit affirmation of such an order [...] because their seemingly 'pithy' declarations discourage further inquiry into their authorizing context." This complicates the 'sticks and stones' chant, because, while it undeniably serves a resistant role for some, it also relies on the 'catchiness' common to aphorisms. According to James, Delany's essays succeed in straddling such contradictory tendencies by moving from one method of analysis to another, and then back again with the more nuanced understanding and insight gained from such moves.
For example, Delany starts his essay "Wagner/Artaud" by recounting an anecdotal experience with one of Wagner's operas before moving into a detailed and historicized representation of the lives of these two artists, who had such very different conceptions about what it means to create art in the world. By the end of the (85 page) essay, Delany has reconsidered his own interpretation of his own participation in the staging "Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg," now presenting the all-encompassing chaos of backstage productions as a corrollary to Artaud's Theater of Cruelty, rather than the totalizing implications of Wagner's spectacle. "The simple thematic opposition," says James, "of Wagner as the Elder God of the discourse of 'High Art' to Artaud as the deranged Trickster God of postmodernism has begun to crumble under the weight of the analytical pressure Delany has applied to it." Signs of this pressure appear in the form of "ironies and subversions" that "pile up" at the end to show how:
"When we go into a theater, when we sit down and the house lights dim as we fix our silent attention on the stage, we are in Wagner's theater.
We are not in Shakespeare's.
We are not in Moliere's or Racine's.
We are not in Mozart's or Beaumarchais's.
We are not in Goethe's or even Hugo's.
We are wholly in Wagner's."
While Delany has just led us (cajoled us? coerced us? enticed us?) through an account of how Wagner invented the very conventions of house lights that dim and silent, attentive audiences, he has also shown us the life that led one person to create those norms, the historical standards that they subverted, and (perhaps most importantly) the consequence that every artist (Artaud included) has had to reckon into their accounts of how theater can stay a dynamic, vital, and engaged form.
It's not as easy as simple reversals a la Brecht, where "I'm rubber and you're glue / everything you say bounces off me and sticks to you," and Wagner is always the one saying, the pronouncer of verdicts, the establisher of edicts. Nor is it as basic an inversion as "I know you are but what am I?" as the Situationists would have it, where theater itself - its very boards and rafters - become raw material for barricades and bonfires. Wagner himself, according to his autobiography and the reports of others,
participated in the Dresden uprising of 1849, supplying grenades to Bakunin and
providing surveillance and intelligence from a beseiged tower, and finally built his own
opera house on the grounds of the incinerated old one.
Delany's deconstructions - of his own method as well as of his subjects' - demonstrate a
different sort of dialogue. That's not new – transparency of technique is a well-worn demand – but the resolution of the details that he lends to his descriptions, plus the lucidity with which he shifts from context to theory to empirical evidence, all together serve to give the work of reading his work a singularly rewarding experience.
What characterizes that is harder to name.
[continued below]
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June 28, 2013814.54 D3379 2012
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