Einstein Intersection

Foreword

Foreword BY N E I L C A I M A N Two misconceptions are widely held about written science fiction. The initial misconception is that SF (at the time Delany wrote TheEinstein Intersection many editors and writerswere arguing that Speculative Fiction might be a better use of the initials , but that battle waslost a long time back) is about the future , that it is, fundamentally, predictive. Thus 1984 is read as Orwell's attempt to predict the world of 1984, as Heinlein's Revolt in 2zoo is seen as an attempted prediction of life in 2100. But those who point to the rise of any version of Big Brother, or the many current incarnations of the Anti-Sex League, or the mushrooming power of Christian fundamentalism as evidence that Heinlein or Orwell was engaged in forecasting Things To Come are missing the point. The second misconception, a kind of second-stage misconception , easy to make once one has traveled past the "SF is about predicting the future" conceit, is this: SFis about the vanished present. Specifically SF is solely about the time when it waswritten. Thus, Alfred Bester's Demolished Man and Tiger! Tiger! (better known in the United States as The Stars My Destination) are about the 19508,just as William Gibson's Neuromancer is about the 1984 we lived through in reality. Now this is true, as far as it goes, but is no more true for SF than for any other practice of writing: our tales are always the vn fruit of our times. SF,as with all other art, is the product of its era, reflecting or reacting against or illuminating the prejudices , fears, and assumptions of the period in which it was written. But there is more to SF than this: one does not only read Bester to decode and reconstruct the 19505. What is important in good SF, and what makes SF that lasts, is how it talks to us of our present. What does it tell us now? And, even more important, what will it always tell us? For the point where SF becomes a rich and significant practice of writing is the point where it is about something bigger and more important than Zeitgeist, whether the author intended it to be or not. The Einstein Intersection (a pulp title imposed on this book from without—Delany's original title for it was A Fabulous, Formless Darkness) is a novel that is set in a time after the people like us have left the Earth and others have moved into our world, like squatters into a furnished house, wearing our lives and myths and dreams uncomfortably but conscientiously. As the novel progresses, Delany weaves myth, consciously and un-self-consciously: Lobey, our narrator, is Orpheus, or plays Orpheus, as other members of the cast will find themselves playing Jesus and Judas, Jean Harlow (out of Candy Darling) and Billy the Kid. They inhabit our legends awkwardly : they do not fit them. The late Kathy Acker has discussed Orpheus at length, and Samuel R. Delany'srole as an Orphic prophet, in her introduction to the Wesleyan Press edition of Trouble on Triton. All that she said there is true, and I commend it to the reader. Delanyis an Orphic bard, and TheEinstein Intersection, as will become immediately apparent, is Orphic Fiction. In the oldest versions we have of the story of Orpheus it appears to have been simply a myth of the seasons: Orpheus went into the Underworld to find his Euridice, and he brought her safely out into the light of the sun again. Butwe lost the happy ending a long time ago. Delany'sLobey, however , is not simply Orpheus. The EinsteinIntersection is a brilliant book, self-consciously F O R E W O R D viii suspicious of its own brilliance, framing its chapters with quotes from authors ranging from Sade to Yeats (are these the owners of the house into which the squatters have moved?) and with extracts from the author's own notebooks kept while writing the book and wandering the Greek Islands . It waswritten by a young author in the milieu he has described in The Motion of Light in Water and Heavenly Breakfast , his two autobiographical works, and here he is writing about music and love, growing up, and the value of stories as only a young man can. One can see this book as...