The Jewel-Hinged Jaw

Cover

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Contents

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Prefaces and Acknowledgments to the First, Second, and Revised Editions

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pp. ix-xiii

The following essays circle about, hover over, and occasionally home in on science fiction. Four—and only four—examine individual science fiction writers’ works; the last three of these presuppose recent if not repeated intimacy with the texts. This book is not an introduction to its subject. ...

Ethical Aesthetics: An Introduction to The Jewel-Hinged Jae

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pp. xv-xxx

Since 1977, when The Jewel-Hinged Jaw appeared, it has been impossible for anyone writing seriously about the nature and purpose of science fiction to ignore the ideas of Samuel R. Delany. Disagree with them, yes. Take a different approach, certainly. But the ideas first expressed in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw and then refined and reiterated and re- ...

1. About 5,750 Words

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pp. 1-16

Every generation some critic states the frighteningly obvious in the style/content conflict. Most readers are bewildered by it. Most commercial writers (not to say, editors) first become uncomfortable, then blustery; finally, they put the whole business out of their heads and go back to what they were doing all along. And it remains for someone in an- ...

2. Critical Methods / Speculative Fiction

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pp. 17-28

The historical discussion of the development of some area of art, while often illuminating, does not necessarily exhaust that area. The development of a particular literary technique or theme over several decades through several writers, often in several countries, is not completely solved by a chronological listing of who did what first. ...

3. Quarks

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pp. 29-34

It’s a term first used by Robert Heinlein in 1951 during a World Science Fiction Convention guest-of-honor speech, as a suggested replacement for Science Fiction. It better described, he felt, what he was interested in writing. ...

4. Thickening the Plot

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pp. 35-42

I distrust the term “plot” (not to mention “theme” and “setting”) in discussions of writing: It (and they) refer to an effect a story produces in the reading. But writing is an internal process writers go through (or put themselves through) in front of a blank paper that leaves a detritus of words there. The truth is, practically nothing is known about it. Talking ...

5. Faust and Archimedes

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pp. 43-58

Thomas Disch and Roger Zelazny have fascinated me since I first read them in the early sixties. Their methods are intricate, their results flamboyantly spectacular. Anyone who offers such fireworks to a public as imaginative as the SF audience, whether he appears in person or not, becomes something of a public mythos. Both writers began publishing SF ...

6. Alyx

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pp. 59-77

In Joanna Russ’s recently published novel The Female Man (Bantam Books, New York, 1975) a woman from an alternate future comes to live with a typical American family—father, mother, teenage daughter, in “Anytown, U.S.A.” The encounter is shocking, traumatic; lives are changed; layers of social and psychological defenses are stripped, protesting, away. ...

7. Prisoners’ Sleep: A Reading of the Dream Scene in Camp Concentration*

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pp. 77-84

Let us reread Disch’s science fiction novel Camp Concentration for . . . what? The third time, the sixth, the twelfth? . . . Certainly now we can focus most of our attention on a single scene, even on the frame of that scene, and be sure of keeping the rest in proportion. ...

8. Letter to the Symposium on “Women In Science Fiction” under the Control, for Some Deeply Suspect Reason, of One Jeff Smith

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pp. 85-104

Last night Marilyn turned in rage from the radio and demanded: “Why is it ‘people have abortions,’ but medicine is one of ‘man’s accomplishments’?” What was coming over the BBC was an educational program in which two men, a doctor and a moderator, were discussing abortions and abortion laws. The general run of their conversation was that, ...

9. To Read The Dispossessed

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pp. 105-166

This paradox and the several surrounding it that close the third movement of Eliot’s second quartet, East Coker, give us the theme of Ursula K. Le Guin’s sixth science fiction novel, The Dispossessed. They give it so exactly we are tempted to suspect an influence, an inspiration, or at least working material. But such suspicions are, even when the au- ...

10. A Fictional Architecture That Manages Only with Great Difficulty Not Once to Mention Harlan Ellison

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pp. 167-184

“It’s almost solid here.” John’s hand reverses to a claw. And much white wrist from the cuff of his sweater. “It’s almost ...” He looks up the rocks, across the cactus (the isles of Greece, the isles of Greece? Um-hm), the grass, at the geometric lime-washed buildings. “Chip, it’s almost as if each object were sunk in light!” It’s late December, five in ...

APPENDIXES

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pp. 185-226

Index

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pp. 243-254