Samuel R. Delany: The Grammar of Narrative

Samuel R. Delany grew up in Harlem in a middle-class black family, and attended the prestigious Bronx High School of Science before going on to City College. He never graduated, though today he's a tenured English professor and Director of the Graduate Creative Writing Program at Temple University.

His first novel The Jewels of Aptor (1962) appeared when he was 20. The Fall of the Towers trilogy -- Captives of the Flame (1963), The Towers of Toron (1964), and City of a Thousand Suns (1965) -- followed before his twenty-second birthday. Other works from the '60s include The Ballad of Beta-2 (1965), Empire Star (1966), Nebula Award winners Babel-17 (1966) and The Einstein Intersection (1967), and Nova (1968). These novels, along with several short stories, resulted in Delany's recognition as one of the brightest talents of SF's New Wave. He also won a Nebula Award for short story "Aye, and Gomorrah..." (1967); "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones" won both a Nebula and a Hugo in 1970. Other notable stories include Nebula finalists "Driftglass" (1967) and "The Tale of Gorgik" (1979), Hugo finalists "The Star Pit" (1967) and "Prismatica" (1977), and Nebula and Hugo finalist "We, in Some Strange Power's Employ, Move on a Rigorous Line" (1968).

In the '70s his output dropped off, though he published Dhalgren (1975) and Triton (1976), and edited with then wife Marilyn Hacker four-volume anthology series Quark (1970–71). SF novel Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand appeared in 1984, but most of the decade was dedicated to his ambitious sword-and-sorcery series Return to Nevèrÿon, a collection of 11 linked stories and novels collected in four volumes: Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979), Nevèrÿona (1983), Flight from Nevèrÿon (1985), and Return to Nevèrÿon (The Bridge of Lost Desire) (1987). His last genre novel was fantasy adventure They Fly at Çiron (1993), though forthcoming novel Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders, due out from Alyson Books in November 2010, contains elements of science fiction as well as gay erotica.

During the '70s and '80s years he turned increasingly to literary criticism and the study of semiotics, producing numerous non-fiction books on those and other subjects, including The Jewel-Hinged Jaw (1977), The American Shore (1978), The Straits of Messina (1989), Starboard Wine (1985), and Longer Views (1996). His memoir on "East Village Sex and Science Fiction Writing", The Motion of Light in Water , won the 1989 Hugo for best non-fiction. Silent Interviews: On Language, Race, Sex, Science Fiction, and Some Comics (1994) was a Hugo finalist, as was About Writing: 7 Essays, 4 Letters and 5 Interviews (2006), which collects some of his writing advice and philosophy.

His short fiction has been gathered in Driftglass (1971), Distant Stars (1981), The Complete Nebula Award-Winning Fiction (1986), Driftglass/Starshards (1993), Atlantis: Three Tales (1995, recently re-released in a corrected third printing by Wesleyan University Press), and Aye, and Gomorrah (2003).

Non-genre works of note includes psychological thriller The Mad Man (1994); pornographic novel Hogg (1995); and Dark Reflections (2007), about an aging gay African-American poet in New York City, which won a Stonewall Book Award for 2008 and was a runner-up for the Lambda Literary Book Award.

Delany won a Pilgrim Award for his scholarship in 1985, was a Worldcon guest of honor in 1995, and was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2002. He has received numerous life achievement awards from organizations honoring gay and lesbian writing, and he was the subject of documentary film The Polymath, or, The Life and Opinions of Samuel R. Delany, Gentleman (2007), which tied for the jury award for best documentary at the International Philadelphia Lesbian and Gay Film Festival.

Delany traveled extensively in the '60s, spending months in Turkey and Greece, and he lived in San Francisco and London before returning to New York. He began teaching in 1975 at the University of Buffalo, and also taught at the University of Wisconsin and Cornell University before spending 11 years as a professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Since 2001 he has been a professor of English and Creative Writing at Temple University in Philadelphia. His marriage to Marilyn Hacker began in 1961, with an amicable divorce in 1980. They have an adult daughter, Iva Hacker-Delany.


Excerpts from the interview:


“For the last decade I've been teaching at Temple University, as Professor Delany of English and Creative Writing. I really didn't think it would come to that! But now I've become fat and comfortable with a monthly paycheck. (Capitalism can be really evil. I know from firsthand experience.)

“From where I sit, I see the remnants -- dare I say the dregs -- of High Modernism being protected in a way that I don't know whether it's all that productive or not. With my classes, I try to use the Clarion/Milford model. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. I consider myself genre-friendly, although I'm one of those people who keep saying to the kids that want to write science fiction, once they have proven themselves absolutely incompetent to write it, 'Why don't you try to write something a little simpler first?'

“Most of the time, those failed attempts come from their not knowing their way around English or basic narrative strategies -- what I would call the grammar of narrative. If you write a page-and-a-half about somebody doing something and we don't know where you are or what you are doing yet, usually that's a sign of narrative incompetence of some sort; or the writer simply hasn't thought about how to tell a story.

“Writing good science fiction is more complex and more difficult than writing a relatively straightforward account of someone getting up in the morning, making a cup of coffee, going to the bathroom, and getting out of the house. You have to be able to describe that in a familiar earthbound kitchen before you can describe it on a spaceship in free fall.”

*

“I've finished another novel. Basically I'm very happy with it. The working title is Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders. I have been working on it for the last five years, and a section of it was published a couple of years ago in a journal called Black Clock. Now it's finished, it's over 250,000 words long. In one sense, it's an attempt to write a book that sits -- formally, almost -- on the three-way genre boundary between literary impressionism, pornography, and science fiction. (I think you should use the conservative term, pornography; 'erotica' sounds too much like you're embarrassed about what you're doing, and I'm not.) It's about a working-class gay male couple who meet when they are teenagers (19 and 17), living very much out of the center of things somewhere on the Georgia coast. They meet in 2007, and spend the next 75 or 76 years together, till one of them dies. And not much else happens.”

*

“When I talk to people with MFAs who are now working as editors for literary publishers, they say, 'What we learned in college is a kind of writing that our current bosses do not want to let in the door.' They want nothing to do with 'good writing.' These are places like Random House; Harcourt Brace; Knopf; and Farrar, Straus & Giroux, who are the epitomes of literary publishing in this country, yet they're willing to say, 'I'm sorry. That's not what we're interested in anymore. We have a couple of slots a year for novels like that.'

“This is not a healthy situation for writing in general. It's not healthy for science fiction, not healthy for anyone. I think we have five publishers left in New York, and 25 years ago there were 79! So when we're talking about 'commercial' versus 'art' publishing, we're using a leftover vocabulary. We're still looking at the world through 1955-colored glasses.”

Comments are welcome...

Felix Gilman: : Making the World Stranger

Felix John Gilman was born in London and grew up in the south London suburbs. He attended school in Seven Oaks, Kent, and read in history at Oxford for three years, then got a master's degree in "Elizabethan stuff," graduating in 1996. After working briefly for a small London publisher, he moved to the US to live with his wife Sarah. They resided in Washington DC for a couple of years starting in 2000, where he worked as a writer for a telecommunications business publication. He then attended Harvard Law School. He has worked for the federal courts in New York and in private practice.

First novel Thunderer appeared in 2008, followed by sequel Gears of the City (2009). A History of the Half-Made World, first in a new series, is forthcoming.


Excerpts from the interview:


“I grew up in Bromley, South London. Bromley is the location of large parts of Michael Moorcock's The Dancers at the End of Time, as an archetypal incredibly dull London suburb. H.G. Wells grew up there, and he used it as his archetypal dull London suburb. I always read science fiction and fantasy, but I started writing relatively recently. (Well, in my early twenties I had various abortive efforts, but I never managed to summon up the energy to get much past five pages into anything.) Around 2006, I had a slightly odd situation in which I had six months to fill before I started a new job. I started trying to write legal academic things, a project which I then lost interest in, and I also started a fiction project. I thought, 'I have six months, so I have absolutely no excuse for not sitting down and writing a novel.' So I did.

“Because I didn't have any substantial (fiction) writing experience when I started, I had no idea how much space any particular idea would take. I started Thunderer with a handful of ideas which were not fleshed out, and for about four months I shut myself up and worked on that. It was very much a learning-as-I-went-along process. I didn't know what I was doing, but I produced a first draft that I gave to people, and later it went through at least two rounds of major revisions.”

*

“The gigantic city is obviously central to Thunderer. I don't think I made a conscious decision that the book should be city-based. When I started writing a book, I just took for granted that it would be set in a city. I don't know anything about what happens outside of cities.

“But if I had to reconstruct my subconscious motives (since you ask) I'd say the following. The things that interest me in world building are the entertainment or culture of the world, or the academy, or the newspapers: what are they like? Or the politics in the sense of the day-to-day ideas and ideologies and unexamined notions and slogans people carry around in their heads. And to develop these things through contrasts, through things knocking and rubbing against each other. The denser and more knotted the more interesting. Hence: cities. (I am not claiming success in this goal or even that the final product even aims as high as all that. But something like that was the drunk/manic-upswing pitch-to-self.)”

*

“There are different kinds of world building. There's the kind that focuses on making the physical details real, and the texture of the culture the characters inhabit. That's something I want to do, and I think it's really interesting trying to create textured worlds in that sense -- which is very different from the huge architectural level of deciding, 'This goes here and this goes here; this is the continent with the elves, and this is what dragons do.' (As a lawyer, I have written and then thrown away extensive passages on made-up legal systems. A little of that got in. Not much. Turns out there's not much of an audience. Oh well.)”

*

“In September, I have something coming out from Tor which is very different. I didn't want to write another city book, didn't feel like creating another gigantic setting. And I wanted to try my hand at something which had a more straightforward plot. I've been accused of overplotting and underplotting, but this one has a clearer plot. It's called A History of the Half-Made World (first of what will be either two or three books), and up to a point it's like a fantastic western. It's a purely invented world, though the fantastical elements are mostly limited to two weird and inhuman factions which sort of divide the world between them. They're archetypes of something or other, probably. The book has the frontier theme, the theme of the founding and various falls from grace, but I don't want to describe it as purely an American history thing, because that sounds like it's more closely tied to American history than it is. It plays with certain tropes, let's say.”

Comments are welcome...

Charles Coleman Finlay: The Crucible

Charles Coleman Finlay grew up in Marysville Ohio, and has lived in central Ohio for most of his life. His first published story was "Footnotes" in F&SF in 2001.

Finlay's fascination with history informs much of his writing. Novella "The Political Officer" (2002) was a finalist for the Nebula and Hugo awards, as was follow-up "The Political Prisoner" (2008), which was also a finalist for the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. Some of his short fiction was collected in Wild Things (2005).

Finlay's first novel The Prodigal Troll (2005) was both a thought-provoking fantasy and an homage to classic adventure fiction, set in the world of his stories "A Democracy of Trolls" (2002), "Love and the Wayward Troll" (2005), "The Nursemaid's Suitor" (2005), and "Abandon the Ruins" (2006). His Traitor to the Crown trilogy, a secret history of the Revolutionary War with magic, appeared under the byline C.C. Finlay: The Patriot Witch (2009), A Spell for the Revolution (2009), and The Demon Redcoat (2009). In 2003, Finlay was a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer.

Finlay is active as a teacher and mentor in the field, serving as administrator of the Online Writing Workshop from 2000-2007, and teaching at Clarion and the Clarion Young Authors Workshop, the Alpha Writers Workshop, and numerous convention workshops. He also founded the Blue Heaven professional novel writing workshop and served on the juries for the Philip K. Dick Award and the Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy.


Excerpts from the interview:


“If there's one thing you need to know about me, it's my background. I'm trailer trash. I grew up in a trailer park next to the city dump and the sewage treatment plant. No man in my family had ever gone higher in school than the eighth grade, and no one had ever gone to college. But there were readers in my family. My mom had been a reader, although when I was young she was working two jobs most of the time. That's because my father was an abusive alcoholic, so she packed up me and my sister and moved from New York back to Ohio to start over again. The trailers we lived in always had stacks of books and she always made sure that I had things to read. Reading was my escape -- from the trailer park, from all the fights I had with other kids, from the smell of trash and sewage.

“But more than that, the characters in books became my role models. So there I was, stuck in this trailer in Ohio reading Tarzan -- that's not like being in the arms of a gorilla in Africa, I'm not saying that. But it put things in perspective. That was my attraction to the literature of the fantastic from a very early age, the scale and scope of it. I'd think, if Frodo can carry the Ring to Mount Doom, then I can get through my problems. In fantasy and science fiction, I saw characters who were faced with horrible, unfair situations and somehow they always managed to rise above them. That was very appealing to me.”

*

“I got lucky. Gordon Van Gelder at F&SF bought seven stories from me in about a year. They were all over the place -- something experimental, comic science fiction, space opera, Leiberesque sword-and-sorcery, high fantasy, alternate history. As I wanted to develop my career and move into novels, that posed challenges because I didn't have an identity as a writer. When Bill Schafer at Subterranean came to me with the idea of collecting all my sword and sorcery stories, I didn't have enough of them and I wasn't in a space where I could write 60,000 words more, so I said, 'Can we do a collection of all my different stories instead?'

“That's how Wild Things came about. That was a collection that had something for everyone to hate. I got a lot of reader reviews from people who were looking for just one kind of kick -- fantasy, hard SF, horror -- so they would love one story and then hate all the others. If I ever have another chance to do a collection, it will just be sword and sorcery, just science fiction, just horror. I won't jump all over the place, because that didn't work.”

*
“These days, I think the impulse toward short stories, and the short story market in speculative fiction, is profoundly anticommercial. It's reaching for an audience that's interested in other things. So that transition between what makes for a satisfying short story and what makes for a commercial novel is a hard one to bridge. There are writers who are doing it -- people like Tim and Tobias, Jay Lake, Elizabeth Bear -- but it's hard.

“The Traitor to the Crown trilogy -- The Patriot Witch, A Spell for the Revolution, and The Demon Redcoat -- is a secret history of the American Revolution in which witches and magic play the central role. The Revolutionary era is a great period of history, one where there are so many larger-than-life figures to work with and really interesting things happening. The belief in the supernatural is already present, and some people -- like the Count and Countess Cagliostro -- were actually trying to influence events through the use of the supernatural. And there are so many events that are unexplained that it's the perfect setting to explore in fiction.”

Comments are welcome...

John Crowley: End of An Age

John Crowley was born in Presque Isle, Maine, where his father, a doctor and captain in the Army Air Corps, was stationed. The family settled in Indiana and Crowley attended Indiana University, earning a degree in English.

Crowley writes SF, fantasy, and mainstream literary work, often blurring genre distinctions. His first three novels were (mostly) SF: The Deep (1975), Beasts (1976), and Engine Summer (1979). He turned to literary fantasy with Little, Big (1981), winner of a World Fantasy Award and perhaps his best known work, called "a neglected masterpiece" by critic Harold Bloom.

He embarked on his hugely ambitious Ægypt series with Ægypt (1987), followed by Love & Sleep (1994), Daemonomania (2000), and Endless Things (2007).

Other novels include mainstream work The Translator (2002) and ambitious historical Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land (2005), which includes a fictional novel by the poet. His latest novel, Four Freedoms (2008), is also historical, set in an American aircraft factory during World War II.

Crowley's short fiction is also celebrated, including "Novelty" (1983), "Snow" (1985), World Fantasy Award winner "Great Work of Time" (1989), and Locus Award winner "Gone" (1996). His short work has been collected in the World Fantasy Award-winner Novelty (1989), plus Antiquities (1993) and Novelties & Souvenirs (2004). Some of his non-fiction was gathered as In Other Words (2007). His work was the subject of critical study Snake's-Hands: The Fiction of John Crowley, edited by Alice K. Turner & Michael Andre-Driussi (2003).

He also writes scripts for educational films and documentaries, and co-founded Straight Ahead Pictures with his wife in 1989 to produce film, video, radio, and online media.

Crowley's numerous awards include an American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award in Literature (1992) and a World Fantasy Life Achievement Award (2006).


Excerpts from the interview:


“It's very hard living at the end of the Age of Print. It poses problems for all of us. It gets more and more discouraging, in some ways. Are we going to be saved by the ten thousand people all over the world who want and need our particular kind of book? Or do we have to forget about all that, write it on stones, and leave it lying around on the beach? Try to sell a book: it's not easy today. It seems like the cost of printing books has gone down, so this should be a golden age of storytelling and a golden age of book production, yet I feel like I'm not going to be able to make a living doing this.

“As one gets older, fewer things change for us -- or things change more slowly, if we're lucky. When we last talked in 2001 I had finished the fourth volume of the Ægypt books (though it took a long time to get to press). I thought that was the last, but now I hope some foundation or somebody will help me to write the fifth volume, which will consist of a learned commentary on the entire four-volume series. I want to do it myself, because no fan, no critic is going to get it right. Though it's sort of like explaining a joke, I would like to explain all the cool little things that are hard for readers to get or notice.

“I've never really had an editor. I've never had somebody say, 'John, you've just gone too far. This is stupid! Take this part out, write another page explaining this, and that will allow you to cut the next 30 pages.' Nobody has ever done that with any of my books. I wish they would. Very few editors do that anymore. In my experience, editors acquire books but they don't actually alter them. Though in the case of Lord Byron's Novel, I did use suggestions from both my editor Jennifer Brehl and my agent Ralph Vicinanza, for ways of giving background on Byron and having Ada find the manuscript -- neither of those are my original conception, and I was very happy with those. So I guess that counts as an editorial contribution. I'm always open to suggestions. I'm not like Nabokov, where every editorial suggestion would be marked by an angry 'STET!' in the margin.”

*

“I attempted to give Four Freedoms a documentary feel, but a lot of it's made up -- more than it might seem. All historical novels insert a guy who's made up into interaction with people who really did exist. The real Ludwig Wittgenstein studied engineering, flew kites, and designed a patented propeller, all that’s true -- but he didn't sell his patent to my entrepreneur character Henry Van Damme, because my character’s made up! (But the many suicides in the early history of flight recounted in the book are true.)

“All that stuff about early flight doesn't have to be in the book, but I just loved it. I had decided that the airplane pioneers in my book would be brothers, and then I discovered how many real pairs of brothers were involved in the early history of flight: the Wright Brothers, the Montgolfier Brothers, all these pairs of brothers! What is that about? What it seems to be is one brother has an idea and the courage to actually fly these crazy, suicidal machines, and you need the other one to do the calculations and the math and say, 'No, no, no, not yet!'

“At the end, a way of understanding the novel is presented to the smart reader, the careful reader, that I hope will resonate back through the whole book and cause it to be seen as a real American fantasy. The only places in my America that are named are Ponca City, Oklahoma, and San Francisco. You may have felt Chicago, or San Diego, but Chicago and San Diego aren't named. And yes, I did that on purpose. I guess I was trying to make it all-American, without being tied down to any single part of America.”

*
“To actually articulate a way of being in a literary world without boundaries between reality and fantasy – it can’t just be a bunch of craziness and surreal carrying on, like some writers in the '70s were doing. What is done in the writing has to be understood by the standard structures of what counts as a moving and live piece of fiction. It has to do the work of fiction no matter what may be going on, and not, 'Well, we're going to throw away the rules.' Every 25 or 30 years, people attempt to do that, throw away the rules, and it keeps on not working. Gertrude Stein did it, Finnegans Wake does it, and they keep on having no progeny. Fantasy fiction at bottom, or at its best, is about making true fictions by the rules, in worlds you make up out of whole cloth, or out of your heart.”

Comments are welcome...