#114 = Volume 38, Part 2 = July 2011
NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE
“For-a-While”: Remembering Joanna Russ (20 February 1937–30 April 2011). Just as this issue was going to press, we heard the sad news of the death of Joanna Russ. Holding impeccable academic credentials (an English BA from Cornell and an MFA from the Yale Drama School), she was a free spirit whose sf and critical writings channeled aspects of feminism that are today more or less matters of consensus but that during the 1970s were considered alarmingly radical by some. She held her ground, battling prevailing views and championing the borderlands. “Only on the margins,” she wrote in How to Suppress Women’s Writing (Austin: U of Texas P, 1983), “does growth occur” (129).
Her first story, “Nor Custom Stale,” was published in 1959 in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. During the 1960s, she published a series of tales featuring the time-traveling Alyx, a female warrior in the mold of C.L. Moore’s Jirel of Joiry though with even more of an aggressive gender-bending aura. Russ’s later novels grew increasingly ambitious, from And Chaos Died (1970), with its psychedelic depiction of psionic powers, to We Who Are About to… (1977), an uncompromising parable of individual autonomy, to The Two of Them (1978), which explores issues of patriarchy and oppression on a planet governed by sharia law. A series of health problems—she suffered from arthritis and chronic fatigue syndrome—curtailed her output in the 1980s.
Her best-known novel, The Female Man (1975), was first printed as a paperback original (“a Frederik Pohl selection,” says the cover) and turned a tidy profit for Bantam despite a deep recession. As we wrote in the headnote for “When It Changed” (1972) in the Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2010), The Female Man “is ideologically rigorous and experimentally rich, examining the linked lives of four women from disparate time-frames, each engaged in a grueling battle of the sexes, whether figurative or literal. An intricate fusion of sf, postmodern metafiction, and the consciousness-raising novel, it brilliantly illustrates ... feminist gender politics” (507). The novel received a Nebula Award nomination but mixed notices: Lester del Rey, writing in hard-sf-oriented Analog, decried Russ’s “vendetta against all the male half of mankind” (June 1975:168). Dale Mullen, however, praised Russ in SFS for her adroit sf handling of four alternate time-frames and worlds. In this “superior” work of genre fiction, he wrote, “the time-travel, time-track concept is worked out better ... than in any other SF novel I know, and the characters and setting are very vividly realized” (SFS 5.2 [July 1978]: 196). Samuel R. Delany devoted a chapter to the fiction of Russ in his classic critical study The Jewel-Hinged Jaw (1977). In 2006, opening his phone interview with Russ during Wiscon 30, Delany rightly introduced her as “one of the most important writers ... in the United States in the last fifty years.”
She is also one of the most important author-critics in the genre’s history, as proven by the agenda-setting essays gathered in To Write Like a Woman: Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction (1995). Russ received the SFRA’s Pilgrim Award in 1988 for her sf criticism. Her critical contributions to SFS, mainly published between 1975-80, were eccentric, incisive, and witty: “Idiocy debars people from entering academia,” she mused in these pages. “Lunacy is a qualification” (SFS 5.3 [Nov. 1978]: 255). Russ’s reaction to a “technophilic book” that she did not identify by title—it foresaw an end to the war between the sexes when “men [could] be given female sex organs” and “women male organs”—is by turns forceful and humorous:
It is certainly clear to me (and any other feminist) that men’s and women’s misunderstandings of each other, far from being due to the differences in their sexual organs or their experiences in sexual intercourse per se, are carefully cultivated in the service of sex-caste positions in a very nasty hierarchy, and ... one cannot dissolve the hierarchy by giving people double and triple sexual equipment, even if we could get over the anatomical problem of where to place the extra goodies. (SFS 5.3 [Nov. 1978]: 258)
She loved science fiction but held it to a high standard. Although not dismissing the popular (she enjoyed slash fiction and Buffy The Vampire Slayer), she expected the genre to keep sight of its visionary potential. She admired the early mystical sf of Arthur C. Clarke. In that Wiscon phone interview, when Delany asked Russ what “authors you return to,” the first one mentioned is Robert A. Heinlein: “always doing something different, and the sf didn’t disappear after the beginning of the book, it was being carried through all the way. Like the young girl saying ‘I did divorce my parents.’” Following this tribute to irrepressible Betty Sorenson in Heinlein’s The Star Beast (1954), she goes on with characteristic eclecticism to her next favorite text for rereading, Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Pardoner’s Tale.”
“Take my life but don’t take away the meaning of my life” (WASF 515): that haunting line near the end of “When It Changed” expresses a fate that will not befall Joanna Russ. The stories of Janet and Katy (“When It Changed”) or Joanna, Janine, Jeanette, and Jael (The Female Man), along with the stories of so many others including her early warrior-woman, Alyx, are as meaningful today as when they first delighted readers and shocked the sf establishment. —Carol McGuirk, SFS
Suburbia and the Dual City in The Iron Heel. Jack London, adventure novelist and political radical, was a writer with a distinctly modern vision of the future American city. In The Iron Heel, he describes something that looks much like the sprawling, socially segregated American city of the twenty-first century—perhaps even the American city California style, appropriate for the imagination of a native Californian.
The Iron Heel is a novel about the rise of American fascism and class warfare. Published in 1908, it takes the form of a memoir/history written by eye-witness Avis Everhard, composed after the political disasters of the early twentieth century, rediscovered hundreds of years into the future, and annotated by a future historian. London’s dystopian story of his near future recounts how corporate capitalism seizes control of the state and presses its “Iron Heel” on the working class. Much of the book is set-piece dialogues in which labor leader Ernest Everhard (Avis’s husband) lectures the powerful and argues for socialist revolution, although the story does end with a fast-paced description of the bloody suppression of the Chicago Commune after workers rise prematurely against the Oligarchy and are ground to dust.
What does London think that Chicago and other American cities will look like under corporate capitalism? The answer is abject poverty in the core and happily isolated suburbanites on the fringe. The people of the abyss (the term is borrowed from H.G. Wells’s 1902 depiction of London poverty) are confined to miserable lives in the “great ghetto” of old neighborhoods that comprise the worst of lower Manhattan, East London, and immigrant Chicago (544).The workers live “like beasts in great squalid labour-ghettos, festering in misery and degradation” (520). Writing a decade before African-Americans began to migrate in large numbers to northern cities, London was anticipating a white ghetto rather than a black ghetto, but the impacts of spatial confinement are the same.
If the surplus-labor army is confined to big-city ghettos, corporate prosperity satisfies and buys off the more skilled workers. London’s book describes their new suburban communities in language that anticipates the great labor-management bargain of post-World War II America, which created what historian Lizabeth Cohen calls the Consumers’ Republic (title of her 2003 book) and which made possible the housing revolution that turned Ozzie and Harriet Nelson from traveling musicians to suburban householders. Here is Jack London’s version, as channeled through Avis Everhard: “The members of the great labour castes were contented and worked on merrily. For the first time in their life they knew industrial peace.... They lived in more comfortable homes and in delightful cities of their own—delightful compared to the slums and ghettos in which they had formerly dwelt. They had better food to eat, less hours of labour, more holidays” (517).
London was well aware of the suburban trend and its positive reception by urban experts such as Adna F. Weber. Author of the magisterial study The Growth of Cities in the Nineteenth Century (1899), Weber took comfort in the ability of suburbanization to ameliorate the ills of crowded cities. Writing in the North American Review in 1898, he argued that “the ‘rise of the suburbs’ is by far the most cheering movement of modern times.... [T]he suburb unites the advantages of city and country both” to allow “the Anglo-Saxon race” to escape the “hot, dusty, smoky, germ-producing city tenements and streets” (617). In the world of The Iron Heel, the worker slaves left behind were presumably not Anglo-Saxons.
There are suburban new towns as well as free-standing, self-contained communities of the sort proposed by British critic Ebenezer Howard in Garden Cities of Tomorrow (1902). Unlike Howard’s cooperative communities, however, London’s versions are the specialized homes of the Mercenaries. These are the enforcers when force is needed (a cross between a Praetorian guard and company goons). They live in “cities of their own which were practically self-governed, and they were granted many privileges” (517-18). Although there is luckily nothing quite like these towns today, one senses an echo of our era’s survivalist enclaves and politically independent suburbs that turn their cold shoulder to big city problems.
The elite has also suburbanized—but to gated and protected communities. In the paroxysm of the Chicago Commune, the rebels can attack downtown office towers but never once did they succeed in reaching the city of the oligarchs on the westside. The oligarchs had protected themselves well. No matter what destruction was wreaked in the heart of the city, they, and their womenkind and children, were to escape, unhurt. I am told [writes Avis Everhard] that their children played in the parks during those terrible days, and that their favorite game was an imitation of their elders stamping upon the proletariat. (541-42)
Here London took the model of early upscale suburbs such as the communities of Philadelphia’s Main Line or Chicago’s North Shore to a logical extreme. In 1908, such suburbs protected their status with purely symbolic entrance gates, restrictive real-estate covenants, and the simple power of wealth. A century later, much of new residential development on the edges of American cities is built behind very real gates and walls. Urban planners have described the result as “Privatopia” and “Fortress America,” to cite titles by Edward Blakeley and Evan Mackenzie. For a fictional example, see T.C. Boyle’s The Tortilla Curtain (1995), in which the homeowners of an expensive Topanga Canyon subdivision turn symbolic gates into real gates and walls to protect their expensive houses from Mexican immigrants.
There will be, finally, two entirely new “wonder cities” built after the failure of proletarian revolution—Ardis, finished twenty years afterward in 1942, and Asgard, completed in 1984. These are throw-ins to the plot, so London does not provide much detail, but with the timing, we might envision Irvine, California for Ardis and Las Vegas for Asgard—both wonder cities in my book.
The Iron Heel is a political tract steeped in Jack London’s ardent socialism. It is not an exercise in urban theory, and the passages about the urban future are secondary to the plot. That said, London was a product of the San Francisco Bay Area who already thought of Oakland and San Francisco as a single metropolitan community and whose depiction of a horizontally differentiated metropolis is a distinctive homegrown vision.
We can contrast London’s vision with Edward Bellamy’s future Boston in the immensely popular Looking Backward (1888). Bellamy’s city of 2000 is put together very much like the city of 1888, with compact development and differentiated neighborhoods but no mention of sprawl. Future Bostonians live in city apartments and houses, some of which have been rebuilt on the sites of nineteenth-century dwellings. Bellamy, in short, had a vision of social and economic change that would take place within the spatial framework with which he was already familiar.
Even stronger is the contrast between London’s horizontally divided metropolis and the sort of dual city that Fritz Lang (raised in Vienna and working in Berlin) imagined in Metropolis (1927), where social classes are divided by elevation among subterranean barracks and towering penthouses. Contrast as well the vast roster of “future war” and apocalypse stories that have been imagining the destruction of New York for a century and a half. As detailed by Max Page and Nick Yablon, the images are almost inevitably of skyscrapers, concrete canyons, and the Statue of Liberty all gone to ruin.
By and large, crowded city centers such as William Gibson’s Tokyo and San Francisco are more fun to imagine and read about than reputedly boring suburbs, but Jack London’s future metropolis does have echoes in later science fiction. There is, for example, the postwar New Jersey suburb of Belle Rêve that has evolved into the feral slum Belly Rave in Frederick Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth’s Gladiator-At-Law (1955). Closer in geography are Neal Stephenson’s west coast cities in Snow Crash (1992), where Seattle is surrounded by clusters of millionaires tucked into woodsy houses and Los Angeles is a crazy quilt of physically isolated, politically independent, and actively defended burbclaves.
A final point is London’s version of hegemony. Living in comfort, the oligarchy and their middle-class minions accept the rightness of the bifurcated city. The oligarchy, “as a class, believed that they alone maintained civilization.... Without them anarchy would reign.... I cannot lay too great stress upon the high ethical righteousness of the whole oligarch class. This had been the strength of the Iron Heel” (518-19). So too, a critic might say, suburban Americans have internalized the premises that success justifies privilege and that suburban comfort is a natural manifestation of civilized order.—Carl Abbott, Portland State University
WORKS CITED
Cohen, Lizabeth. A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America. New York: Knopf, 2003.
London, Jack. The Iron Heel. 1908. Novels and Social Writings. New York: Library of America, 1982. 315-554.
Page, Max. The City’s End: Two Centuries of Fantasies, Fears, and Premonitions of New York’s Destruction. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2010.
Weber, Adna F. “Suburban Annexations.” North American Review 166 (May 1898): 612-17.
Yablon, Nick. Untimely Ruins: An Archaeology of American Urban Modernity, 1819-1919. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2010.
The Case for Rape: John Wyndham and Octavia Butler. John Wyndham (1903-69) and Octavia Butler (1947-2006) are not the most obvious pairing. One was what might be regarded as the perfect Englishman (except that he was half Welsh), the son of a solicitor (later a barrister) and the daughter of a wealthy Birmingham iron master. The other was African-American, daughter of a shoe-shiner and a maid. Since Brian Aldiss in Billion Year Spree (1973) associated Wyndham with the “cosy catastrophe” subgenre, the epithet “cosy” has unfortunately stuck as a putdown instead of simply describing a middle-class veneer of propriety that serves to disguise reality in Wyndham’s work. No one would ever think of describing Butler’s fiction of coerced interracial and interspecies couplings or mergings as in any way cosy.
Yet the essence of Butler’s Darwinian themes, so insightfully discussed in the special section on Butler in SFS (37.3 [Nov. 2010]) was pioneered by John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris (henceforth “JBH” to initialize the names he used in his daily life). In his “John Beynon” novel Planet Plane (1936), serialized under his own title Stowaway to Mars in Passing Show the same year but not published as a book under that title until 1953, the female stowaway, Joan Shirning, is raped by a Martian “human” named Vaygan, one of the last of his kind.1 We learn in the concluding chapter of the novel of the birth of the resulting son. According to the novel’s last sentence, “the tale of Vaygan’s son belongs to a different story.” That sequel was never written.
JBH does not describe how Joan is raped. Instead, he places that event in the blurred context of what he allows readers to misunderstand as a very accelerated romance. Vaygan’s motivation is, of course, the survival of some aspect of the Martian race on Earth through the hybrid progeny of his son. JBH is implying that the survival of an individual’s kind justifies rape. Butler tells a variety of stories in which the production of superior hybrid progeny is graphically coerced. Butler, like JBH, creates scenarios in which such coercion is necessary for survival. In Kindred (1979), her black female protagonist Dana, who, thanks to time travel, has the opportunity to kill a slave-owner who is her own great-great-grandfather before his rape of the slave who is her great-great- grandmother, does not do so not because her own existence (dependent on the rape’s taking place) is so important. What is central, as Benjamin Robertson makes clear in “‘Some Matching Strangeneess’: Biology, Politics, and the Embrace of History in Octavia Butler’s SF” (SFS 37.3: 362-81), is her representation of the paradoxical miscegenate nature of American identity and the historical survival of that identity.
Butler arrived at her startling subject matter because coerced miscegenation is part of black and white US history. JBH arrived at much the same idea because he and his only sibling, his younger brother Vivian, were childless. Their family line, which their genealogy-obsessed father believed to be more illustrious than it actually was, died out when JBH and his brother died.
Joan Shirning in Stowaway to Mars is a combination (and so a kind of hybrid) of two women: his first cousin Dorothy Joan Parkes (known as “Joan”; 1902-66) and the social historian, author, and screenwriter Mary (Molly) Cathcart Borer (1906-94). JBH thought he should have married one of them (although he was unhappy about the institution of marriage) and had a child or children.
Although JBH did not write the sequel he projected at the end of Stowaway to Mars, thematically The Midwich Cuckoos (1957), his best novel, is the closest thing to such a sequel. The Midwich women “impregnated” by a rapist alien “cuckoo” give birth to offspring who are either hybrid or totally alien. One way or the other (one other way is presented in the preceding year’s Chrysalids), a superior telepathic life-form comes into being that could supplant humanity. Zellaby, in Cuckoos, explains the plan as “‘xenogenesis.’ That is, the production of a form that could be unlike that of the parent—or, should I say ‘host’?—It would not be the true parent” (Penguin [1960], 64). Although the “xenogenesis angle” (65) that Zellaby favors involves “the implantation of fertilized ova” (64), another “form of conception” (65), perhaps involving parthenogenic cloning, is not ruled out. Subsequently, the local physician, Dr. Willers, writes three reports. In the second, aimed at lay readers, he considers the xenogenesis and incubation explanation: “I have been unable to find any record of a case of human xenogenesis, but I know of no reason why it should not be possible” (97).
In the second report, Dr. Willers notes of the Children that “Additional evidence may accrue when the blood-groups can be determined—that is to say, when the blood circulating ceases to be that of the mother’s group, and becomes that of the individual” (97). If this information was in Dr. Willer’s third report (his second specialist one), it is not mentioned when that report is briefly alluded to three pages later. The implication would seem to be that the Children’s blood group or blood-group equivalent is previously unknown. The same uncertainty applies to Vaygan’s son in Stowaway to Mars. Is he truly also Joan Shirning’s son? JBH’s original title for that novel—“Martian Blood”—would appear to relate to that offspring. In spite of the title of Butler’s 1984 novella “Bloodchild,” the symbiotic nature of what results from a human host/alien parasite relationship has, it would seem, nothing to do with any surviving human blood-type component. But there is a blood bond. Butler intends a pun. To give birth, the male host must shed blood.
In her Xenogenesis trilogy (1987-89), published in 2000 as Lilith’s Brood, Butler imagines a superior community consisting of coerced hybrid beings who amount to a human and insectoid amalgam—the insectoid part provided by the alien Oankali. J. Adam Johns understands the Oankali as akin to E.O. Wilson’s “insect” or “ant superorganism” (“Becoming Medusa: Octavia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood and Sociobiology” in SFS 37.3 [Nov. 2010]: 389 and 399n5). JBH’s own human and insectoid amalgam is most memorably dramatized in “Consider Her Ways” (1956), a critical utopia or dystopia about an all-female society modeled on that of ants. The narrator, Jane Waterleigh (note the shared initials with John Wyndham), finds herself transported to a world in which she has been transformed into the monstrous body of Mother Orchis, who has just had four new babies to add to her preceding twelve.
It would be interesting to know how many of JBH’s titles were part of Octavia Butler’s personal library. The Octavia Butler archive, which will be available to researchers at the Huntington Library in one or two years’ time, does not include her personal library. Sue Hodson, Curator of Literary Manuscripts at the Huntington, kindly forwarded my query about possible personal copies of The Midwich Cuckoos, etc., to the executor of Octavia Butler’s estate, but I have not received a reply. Nevertheless, it is reasonable to assume that she would have read at least The Day of the Triffids, The Midwich Cuckoos, and “Consider Her Ways”.—David Ketterer, Honorary Research Fellow, University of Liverpool
NOTE
1. The name “Shirning” probably derives from collapsing “she,” “her,” and “yearning” into one word meaning “yearning for her.” There is a Shirning Farm in The Day of the Triffids (1951) known to narrator Bill Masen’s female interest, the unlikely named JOsellA PlatoN. I have capitalized the letters that (aside from the already capitalized “P”) spell out “Joan,” which might be phonetically spelled as “Jone” or “Joen,” leaving all the remaining letters to be read as “Sally” and “Plato.” In Plan for Chaos (2009), JBH’s novel about Aldous-Huxley-style cloned Nazis written mainly in 1948 during a gap in the writing of Triffids, the librarian Sally is a brief portrait of Molly Borer (see pages 24-25 of the 2010 Penguin edition). JBH did not want any confusion of Molly Borer and fellow Penn Club resident Mollie Raymer. My point is that Joan and “Sally” add up to JBH’s conception of a PLAYTONic ideal woman—someone, by definition, that he never found. Mary Cathcart Borer puts in a further appearance in JBH’s fiction as Mary Gore, the wife of David Gore, narrator of the 1968 Chocky (see pages 10-18 of the 1970 Penguin edition and my “Wyndham’s Chocky: The First Covert Alternate World?” [SFS 35.2 [July 2008]: 352-55]). JBH believed he was insufficiently sexually aggressive (see his story “But a Kind of Ghost,” published only in America in 1957 and reprinted in No Place Like Earth [2003]). Had he raped and impregnated Joan or Molly, as implied in Stowaway to Mars, his and Vivian’s family line might have continued for at least one further generation. Further biographical context and fictional subtext is discussed in my yet-to-be-published “Trouble with Triffids: The Life and Fiction of John Wyndham.”
The Trouble with Samuel R. Delany’s Pornography. Samuel R. Delany is best known for his ground-breaking, experimental sf novels and stories, as well as his criticism of literature, philosophy, and culture. He has also written a number of pornographic novels: Equinox (1973), Hogg (1995), The Mad Man (1995), Phallos (2004), Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders (2011), and a mainstream book with some graphic gay content, Dark Reflections (2007). Most of these volumes have received scant attention by Delany scholars, and no one has noted the curious fact that each of the publishers of these books met bad luck after having released Delaney’s porn.
Delany wrote Equinox (the intended title) in September 1968 with the intention of publishing it with Los Angeles-based Essex House, a short-lived imprint of Milton Luros’s successful Brandon House, which was issuing “literary erotica” by the likes of Charles Bukowski, Philip José Farmer, and Michael Perkins, via the quirky editorial hand of Brian Kirby (later of the Los Angeles Free Press). The books were packaged as smut, and discerning readers did not buy them in numbers that yielded a profit; by the time Delany had his manuscript ready, Luros had discontinued Essex House. Delany did not find a publisher until 1973, with Lancer Books. The editor there imposed the title The Tides of Lust, more fitting for the conventions of the genre: “lust,” “sin,” or “shame” was in almost every title.
Because of Delany’s status as a major sf writer, The Tides of Lust was reviewed by the mainstream media and met with favorable coverage, despite being ground-breaking, even for erotica, in its sexual content, what with rape, S/M, and the sexual slavery of underage characters. Ten years earlier, a book with this content would have landed Delany and the publisher in federal prison; but a number of court cases, backed by the Miller Test, decreed that the publication of such material was protected under the First Amendment.
Lancer went out of business “a week after the book was published, so that only a few thousand were distributed” (87), writes Seth McEvoy in Samuel R. Delany (New York: Unger, 1984).
The law was different overseas. When UK publisher Savoy House published The Tides of Lust, two thousand copies were seized and destroyed by British authorities and the publisher was prosecuted and jailed for dissemination of obscene materials—this included a number of books, not just Delany’s.
Delany wrote his second porn novel, Hogg, right after Equinox and while he worked on Dhalgren for five years; it was completed in 1973. Delany had difficulty finding a publisher willing to take on a novel filled with rape, pedophilia, and erotic murder. Hogg had a bit of an underground cult following: a copy shop employee (Delany had taken the manuscript in to be duplicated) made his own copy and passed it along to friends, who made copies and passed them along to other friends and so on. Black Ice Books, a mass-market imprint of Fiction Collective 2, did not publish Hogg until 1994. Delany had contributed a piece to the Black Ice anthology Avant-Pop: Fiction for a Daydream Nation and had mentioned this porn novel to Larry McCaffery as one that every publisher in the universe had rejected. McCaffery asked to see it for possible publication by Black Ice Books, though this proved to be a difficult project.
At first, the non-profit committee of writers and professors who ran Black Ice were enthusiastic to publish a transgressive novel by a literary icon, until Jesse Helms got a look at Doug Rice’s Black Ice novel, Blood of Mugwump (1996), and went on a tirade because Black Ice Books was funded in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Helms, on CSPAN, called for funding to be denied to any publishing outlet that released books with incest, vampirism, and transgender sex, of which Rice’s text contained plenty. Helms also wanted to cut FC2’s funding and called for an investigation to make sure that certain publishers complied.
Doug Rice’s Mugwump was sandbox play compared to the explicit, over-the-top perversions found in Hogg. The FC2 committee became nervous—what would Helms have to say about Hogg? Would they lose their NEA funding, as well as any other funding from the University of Colorado, Boulder, where Black Ice was located? Publication was almost cancelled. Larry McCaffery fought tooth and nail for the book, trying to dissuade his colleagues from giving in to fear and censorship; he solicited blurbs from name writers, including Norman Mailer, to give Hogg some literary credence under the Miller Test.
Hogg was published with little notice. I wrote the first critique of it in the Delany focus issue of Review of Contemporary Fiction (16.3 [Fall 1996]: 125-28) before it was published. It was kept under the radar so Helms or other politicians might not notice. Few review copies went out and no promotion was given. Two years later, Black Ice Books, despite the imprint’s popularity, was discontinued by FC2, and not long after, facing extinction itself, FC2 left its home at Boulder and went to the University of Alabama Press.
During the Hogg troubles, Delany sat down and wrote a lengthy third porn novel, The Mad Man, which focuses on urine and feces fetishes among the 1980s gay community just before the outbreak of the AIDs epidemic. The publisher, Richard Kasak (a former Grove Press editor), had announced a release date to the media although Delany was behind schedule, but Delany quickly finished the manuscript and it appeared in hardcover with numerous errors. Kasak reprinted it in a mass-market edition via his imprint, RhinocEROS Books, allowing Delany to make changes and fix typos.
Kasak also reprinted Equinox in 1994 through his Masquerade Books imprint, complying with zoning laws in New York City aimed at suppressing pedophile literature yet mocking the legal pressure by adding 100 years to all underage characters: the brother and sister sex slaves in the text are 113 and 115 years old. Not long after, Kasak’s operation went under when its parent company, Crescent Media, was fined millions of dollars for credit-card fraud stemming from the many adult entertainment websites it owned.
Voyant Publishing, a small one-man effort, reprinted The Mad Man in 2003; that edition was expanded. A year later, the publisher was dismayed by how difficult it is for a micro-press to survive in the conglomerate world of book selling and folded the operation. Copies of this third edition are hard to find.
Voyant had planned to release Delany’s novella, Phallos, whose narrator searches obsessively for a vintage porn novel, Phallos (published by Essex House) that he saw as a teenager. Phallos was published in 2008 by a micro-press one-man show, Bamberger Books. Although Bamberger has been around since the 1960s, its books have not garnered much notice. Phallos found an underground following among Delany fans, however, and acquiring a copy can be pricey.
While not exactly a porn novel, Dark Reflections is connected: the narrator, a semi-famous academic poet, is the anonymous author of the fictional smut book Phallos. This mainstream novel was published by Carroll and Graf in 2007 mere months before the parent company, Avalon Publishing Group, filed for bankruptcy and all its imprints (Thunder’s Mouth, Marlowe, and Blue Moon) folded.
Delany’s most recent erotic gay tome, Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders (625 pages) was scheduled for February 2011 release by Alyson Publications, which ceased business operations in October 2010 and has announced “reorganization.” A new publisher, Magnus Books, has announced publication in the Fall of 2011. (Magnus is run by Don Weiss, who was running Alyson and had edited Delany’s Dark Reflections at Carroll and Graf.)
There seems to be a pattern of bad luck for publishers after, or before, publishing a Samuel R. Delany pornographic book. The publishers tend to be small, independent presses that are economically volatile. His erotic literature is not as welcome as his other writing, whether sf or criticism; and it has been this way since 1974, when Delany’s content took a radical shift with Dhalgren, a sexually groundbreaking science-fiction novel.—Michael Hemmingson, San Diego, California
Louis Armstrong: Secret SF Fan? Was Louis Armstrong a science fiction fan? Michael Steinman, jazz expert and blogger (<http://www.jazzlives.wordpress .com>), forwarded to me this query from Chris DeVito regarding Armstrong’s purported interest in sf:
In the 1960s, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction occasionally ran endorsements from “stars of the entertainment world … notables in the news … [and] distinguished authors and editors” on its back cover. One of the stars was Louis Armstrong. Here’s his plug: “I believe The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction appeals to me because in it one finds refuge and release from everyday life. We are all little children at heart and find comfort in a dream world, and these episodes in the magazine encourage our building castles in space.” [from the Sept. 1966 issue].… Do any of the Armstrong experts have any information about this?” (“Louis Armstrong Magazine Endorsement.” Message to <jazzresearch@yahoogroups.com>. 5 Dec. 2010. E-mail.)
When I consulted James Gunn, he remembered the back-cover endorsements
particularly from Basil Davenport and Clifton Fadiman—both Book-of-the-Month Club Executives. I don’t remember Armstrong’s endorsement, though Tony Boucher had a lot of intercultural connections and these endorsements were part of his strategy of linking F&SF, particularly fantasy, to the broad literary culture, to break it out of its genre ghetto—and either Armstrong wrote a fan letter or Boucher met him, or knew him, and they founded a mutual admiration society. By 1963, though, he had been retired from the magazine for five years, and this may have been a surviving element from the earlier years. (James Gunn. Message to the author. 6 Dec. 2010. E-mail.)
Chris DeVito, who made the original query, then asked Gordon Van Gelder, current editor/owner/publisher of F&SF, who said he also believed Boucher was responsible, because “he did a lot of work in radio and met a wide variety of people that way. It’s doubtful that any money was involved” (Message to <jazzresearch@yahoogroups.com> 24 Dec. 2010. E-mail).
Ricky Riccardi, author of Wonderful World (Pantheon, 2011) and Project Archivist for the Louis Armstrong Archives at Queens College, has a differing opinion: “I just finished cataloging 482 books owned by Louis and/or Lucille Armstrong at the Louis Armstrong House Museum and I don’t think there’s a single science fiction volume in the batch. Looks like Glaser [Armstrong’s agent] found a quick way to make a few bucks off Louis’s name (not the first time).” Perhaps the key words in Riccardi’s statement are “don’t think there’s a single science fiction volume,” as not every sf book is discernible by its title. Steinman’s final appraisal of this conundrum is that Armstrong watched a lot of television and “could very well have seen and delighted in fifties sf” without saving any books in his permanent library. He also traveled extensively and might have disposed of his magazines en route rather than bringing them home to his fastidious wife Lucille. There being no living relatives to ask, Steinman adds that “regardless of whether Armstrong was a reader or a pawn in his greedy manager’s hands, the endorsement is a way of saying that both Fantasy and Science Fiction and Louis had become cultural icons … and the idea of their interconnection is amusing even if it didn’t have a basis in reality.”
Another interesting result of Armstrong’s endorsement was its use by Paul DiFilippo as his inspiration for an alternate-world story, “Plumage from Pegasus,” published in the 50th anniversary issue of F&SF in 1999. In the story Armstrong is not only a major jazz musician but also the editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Jazztopian Fiction. In his band, Ed Ferman is relegated to playing drums; Chip Delany, bass; Roger Zelazny, sax; Barry Malzberg, clarinet. (Chick Corea works the keyboards, Gary Burton the vibes.) The story ends with “the old favorite—“Hello, Hugo!” Gernsback would have been amused.—Barbara Bengels, Hofstra University
Call for Contributions: Special Issue of SFS on Chinese Science Fiction. Contributors are invited to consider the history and development of sf in China, which has been influenced by, for instance, the rich tradition of Chinese fantasy literature, the blended influence of French/Japanese/Russian/Anglo-American sf, and the unique development of scientific culture in China. Given the rise of China’s global profile and the distinctive imaginative productions of Chinese culture, we hope to contribute to a greater understanding both of China and of science fiction. This special issue on Chinese sf aims to encourage researchers to explore the history of Chinese sf, important Chinese sf authors and works, new critical perspectives concerning Chinese sf, and the genre’s intersections with non-Chinese sf traditions. Please send 500-word proposals or completed essays by 1 November 2011 to Yan Wu, College of Curriculum and Instruction, Beijing Normal University, at <wuyan98@hotmail.com>—Yan Wu, Beijing Normal University
Surrealism, Science Fiction and Comics. This one-day conference was held at The Courtauld Institute of Art in London on 22 January 2011; it was organized by Dr. Gavin Parkinson of The Courtauld to explore the affinities shared (or not) among Surrealism, science fiction, and comics—especially their use of tropes of metamorphic transformations. Parkinson’s excellent introduction mapped out connections, pointing out that definitions of Surrealism and science fiction that arose at approximately the same time in the 1920s were anticipated by the proto-Surrealist comics of George Herriman and Winsor McCay.
The premise is appealing, but the result was an uneven selection of papers that struggled to make a triple articulation among these categories. This meant that while Surrealism was a constant feature, connections tended to be made to either sf or comics but rarely both. The only paper to really succeed at making this articulation was Dan Smith’s, which gave a sophisticated reading of the 2000AD strip, Nemesis (1980-1999), written by Pat Mills and illustrated by, among others, Kevin O’Neill and Bryan Talbot. The medieval future presented in Nemesis showed humans as genocidal bigots and aliens as sympathetic grotesques, a vision estranging, non-synchronic, and unmistakeably surreal. Refreshingly, Paweł Frelik’s paper questioned the overuse of “surreal” as a general adjective to describe strangeness. Frelik’s references to cyberpunk and slipstream made his paper the most up to date.
Unsurprisingly, New Worlds featured as a critical reference point throughout. David Brittain emphasized the importance of image-text relations by comparing J.G. Ballard’s condensed prose with Eduardo Paolozzi’s techno-collages, a conjunction that produced a visual sf whose ruptural properties were accentuated by the editorial process of “fold-ins.” No stranger to Ballard herself, Jeanette Baxter reassessed the largely forgotten novels of Alan Burns, a figure on the fringes of the New Wave. These challenging apocalyptic collage-texts that drew on Surrealist works and practices were read as significant and overlooked critiques of postwar culture.
Bryan Talbot presented an archive of anthropomorphic images, while Paul Gravett unearthed a genuine curio in the largely forgotten Herbie (a short, fat, and pubescent superhero, the “Fat Fury”). There was no sustained engagement with Francophone or East Asian comics and animation, surely more fruitful ground for both sf and Surrealism (think of Möebius and Mamoru Oshii as two obvious examples). More effort also could have been made to connect Surrealist diffusions to contemporary sf, such as the pseudo-Dadaist prose of Steve Aylett or the generic monstrosities of China Miéville (both have worked in comics).
This was very much a curate’s egg of a conference, fascinating and frustrating, whose omissions one hopes will be covered in a subsequent publication project.—Tony Venezia, Birkbeck College, University of London
2011 SFS Symposium/Eaton Conference. The double bill of the third SFS Symposium and the 2011 Eaton Conference inspires, first and foremost, academic thoughts, but I would like to begin by noting that moving both events to February was an idea that deserves applause. While I am sure that the participants all came for intellectual nourishment and social networking, the opportunity to bask in the California sun before, after, and during the breaks in the program—at a time when many places from which they came were winter-ridden—enhanced the general atmosphere in no small measure. The same can be said about the venue. With the exception of the Friday afternoon plenary session held at UCR’s Culver Center for the Arts, all events took place in the Mission Inn Hotel and Spa in Riverside, a historic building famous in Riverside and Southern California but, viewed from a fantastic perspective, also a place whose structure, layout, and decor bring to mind the images of Gibson’s “Gothic folly” and Gaudi-esque architectural surreality.
As in 2009, the SFS Symposium served as a prelude, an initiatory but no less intellectually stimulating event. Entitled “The Singularity in SF Literature and Theory” and announced by a very impressively-designed flyer/poster, the symposium was held on Thursday, February 10, and featured three speakers. In his “Singularities,” Neil Easterbrook suggested that among the three S’s that have dominated science fiction for some time—slipstream, steampunk, and singularity—the last one seems to be the most precise and yet, as he ventured to demonstrate, the most ambiguous. Consequently, his presentation sketched out various understandings of the term: technological, cultural, psychological, and textual. Brooks Landon’s “The Light at the End of the Tunnel: The Plurality of Singularity” also stressed plural conceptions of the term but explored the territories closer to the field of sf studies: Kurzweil’s concept of accelerating change, Vinge’s metaphor of the opaque wall around the future, and nanotechnology, which was mentioned repeatedly. In “From Outer Space to Inner Space: New Wave Science Fiction and the Singularity,” Rob Latham took the discussion towards the discourses of literary history, suggesting that the New Wave could be considered a genre singularity but also concluding that the intra-sf revolution of the 1960s failed to reboot science fiction as a field.
The Eaton Science Fiction Conference kicked off on Friday morning, February 11, and for the next two days the participants could choose among thirty-six sessions and close to a hundred papers by presenters from the US, Canada, Great Britain, Australia, Russia, Germany, Italy, France, Finland, Korea, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Poland. This diversity was appropriate given the theme of the conference: “Global Science Fiction.” Apart from the explorations of various aspects of trans-, cross-, and multi-nationalism as well as colonialism, neocolonialism, and postcolonialism in Anglophone science fictions, papers and sessions examined such topics as Orientalism, African-American sf, Chinese sf, Euro-American encounters, Mexican and South American sf, and Polish sf.
Listing the most interesting presentations would take up more space than assigned for this report, but one conclusion is inescapable: the days of conceptualizing sf as an Anglo-American (plus Verne) literary project are long gone. Even though there is so much sf that we have yet to hear about, the conference’s program showed the genre to be a truly global phenomenon, crossing territorial, linguistic, and ideological boundaries and engaging a dazzling array of imagined futures. The international scope of the conference was also strongly embodied in the roster of guest writers, whose identities and work in numerous ways exemplify sf’s globality: Nalo Hopkinson, China Miéville, and Karen Tei Yamashita. Predictably, all three had an opportunity to listen to papers devoted to their own work. No disagreements or fights between the writers and their interpreters were recorded.
The paper sessions were supplemented by other events such as the Science Fiction Poetry Association’s poetry reading and open mike and the screening of Dreams with Sharp Teeth, a documentary devoted to Harlan Ellison. Friday afternoon highlights were the keynote address by UC Riverside’s Mike Davis, a critic and writer much loved in sf circles for his studies of the contemporary world, who gave a moving tribute to his late friend, sf author Ward Moore; the panel discussion on global sf, moderated by Rob Latham and involving Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., and the three guest writers Nalo Hopkinson, China Miéville, and Karen Tei Yamashita; and the J. Lloyd Eaton Lifetime Award presentations. This year, two awards were given—to Samuel R. Delany for 2010, and to Harlan Ellison for 2011. For health reasons, neither recipient was able to attend, but both sent letters to be read by their appointed proxies.
To say that the SFS Symposium and the Eaton Conference were a success is an understatement. The conference directors, Melissa Conway and Rob Latham, did such a splendid job of putting together a conference of that size and scope that it is hard to imagine an event that will trump it. More importantly, it is events like this, however rare they may be, that demonstrate science-fiction studies to be not only an intensely international and polyvocal field but also one that is truly welcoming and collegial.—Paweł Frelik, MCSU, Lublin, Poland.
Correction. In the critical bibliography attached to my introduction to the slipstream special issue (March 2011), I mistakenly attributed the SFS review of Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology to Paweł Frelik; it was actually written by Doug Davis. The error has been corrected on our website, but I wanted to make sure it was noted here as well. My apologies to Paweł and Doug.— Rob Latham, SFS
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