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Science Fiction and Criticism: The Diacritics Interview This text began as an interview conducted and recorded by Takayuki Tatsumi at Novacon III, in York, Pennsylvania,on November 2, 1985.* Over the next year I rewrote the transcription . It waspublished in the Fall 1986 issue o/Diacritics. Takayuki Tatsumi: Let me begin by expressing my congratulations on your receiving this year's Pilgrim Award at the last SFRA (Science Fiction Research Association) conference. In 1984, you seem to have been quite prolific. You finished a novel, Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, and a critical book, Starboard Wine. Although Walter Meyers, in presenting the award, did not mention the latter title, clearly SFRA appreciates your consistent critical activities. In the introduction to Starboard Wine, you try to identify science fiction criticism as a counterpart of science fiction, based on an analogy between the port side and the starboard side of a boat. Could you give me a deeper sense of the relation between science fiction and science fiction criticism in terms of this most recent book? Samuel R. Delany: First, thank you very much for your congratulations. The image of prolificacy my 1984 publications leave is, alas, an illusion of publishing schedules. Starboard Wine contains essays written before 1980. And I'm ashamed to sayhow many years I pecked and picked over Stars in My Pocket, once it was, for all practical purposes, finished. Though now and again I have my energetic bursts, I'm really a veryslow writer. But to your question about science fiction criticism. * The interviewer would like to thank Richard Ryan for help with a long and difficult transcription. 6. Science Fiction and Criticism i8y The analogy in the Starboard Wine introductory essay doesn't situate science fiction criticism against science fiction itself (though that's an intriguing reading). Rather it tries to situate, however ambiguously, that old opposition, parole against langue—or, if you will, utterance against grammar, the imaginary against the symbolic. "Port wine," in my analogy , along with "left," "the heart," "red," and "the portside ship's beacon," form a web of signifiers whose nodes all have immediate referents,while the webbing itself is only associational—that is, it merely serves to guide us among the references. The associationsare merely meanings: signs,if you will, of the most immaterial order—unuttered mnemonics whose only reading is, "This wayto a reference." "Starboard wine,"on the other hand, while it certainly has meaning, has no referent: nevertheless that a-referential node can help orient us in the greater web of meanings and references when we lose our way.The narrator of my introductory critical fable learns this when he's out on the nearly featureless Atlantic Ocean. At least one purpose of criticism is to give utterance to (or fix names to, or even to create anew) the a-referential patterns that order references . The relation between orders of reference, orders of meaning, orders of fiction, which is the relation we deal with when we talk about the relation between "science fiction" and "science fiction criticism,"has always been slippery. One writer writes a text about an imagined experience . Another comes along and writes a text about an experience he or she imagined—what else is insight and understanding?—about reading the first text. The second writer is called a critic. One problem with science fiction criticism is that those formal critics who've been recently writing texts about reading science fiction are not used to telling stories about science fiction texts. Often these formal critics have been trained only to tell stories about texts in other genres entirely—about texts clearly situated within the literary precincts. Frequently you find them telling the same old literary stories. This is a little sad. In the '408 and '505, in the informal criticism of SF that appeared in fanzines—amateur mimeographed periodicals put out by enthusiastic readers—and among the book review columns of the professional SF magazines, there was a call for increased sociological density in the SF then being written. The best SFwriters responded to that call withworks such as The Space Merchants by Pohl and Kornbluth and The Stars My Destination by Bester. Judith Merril moved from the stark but simple images of "Only a Mother" to rich, social tales like "Dead Center." (She, of course, was also one of the critics who was most articulately voicing the demand.) And Theodore Sturgeon wasable to respond with a fictiv [3.143.23.176] Project...

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