Starboard Wine. Samuel R. Delany
experiences we may have had, about realities we may have known.
The image was brief. And it was only an image—not at all an explanation of how to accomplish it. But it made me realize that up until then, with all the efforts going on about me to “improve the racial situation,” I really had had no image of what the “improved racial situation” was actually going to look like. Oh yes, equality was a word I knew; but what would it look like, feel like, smell like? How would I know it had actually come?
I have many times revised that image of what such a racially improved world might look like from that first bright flash that Heinlein tricked me—and probably many other young readers, black and white—into experiencing. This was 1960; the rashest of the decade’s political leavening was still to come; and the backlashes of the ’70s were not envisioned.
But one cannot revise an image until one has an image to revise.
The philosopher and aesthetician Susan K. Langer, in the two volumes that have appeared of her three-volume study, Mind, devotes most of her argument to the proposition that this initial experience of the image, a vision of something not yet real, is the impetus for all human progress, scientific, social, or aesthetic. If you don’t see it, you can’t work for it.
Image first. Then explanation.
And if science fiction has any use at all, it is that among all its various and variegated future landscapes it gives us images for our futures … as did the Heinlein novel.
And its secondary use, as in the Asimov stories, is to provide a tool for questioning those images, exploring their distinctions, their articulations, their play of differences.
“Do you believe in that science fiction stuff?” I’m all too frequently asked.
Well, if you mean it in the idiomatic sense—do I think that science fiction is a good thing and that people should read it?—then of course I do. Otherwise I wouldn’t write it.
If, however, you mean, “Do you believe that all the things science fiction has ever talked about—flying saucers, colonies in space, aliens living on other worlds, cures for cancer, and cloned human beings—will really come about?” then I have to stop and explain something to you about your question.
Let’s think of three good, exciting SF stories, all of them set in New York City in the year 2001.
The first is about life in a New York City that has become vastly overpopulated. No more luxury apartments on Park Avenue and Sutton Place. All of them have been broken up with wallboards into tiny cells. (Harlem itself was once New York’s Dutch, Jewish, and German neighborhood.) Five and six to a room is the minimum anywhere in the city; the maximum can’t even be published. Packs of armed marauders roam the streets openly wherever food is rumored to be stored. Supermarkets? They no longer exist: their shelves have been pulled down and the homeless camp out in the buildings. A few large central food supplies—one at Battery Park, one at Bryant Park, one at Morningside Park, and another at St. Nicholas Park—are ringed with guards. The supplies are dropped in by helicopters daily; the lines weave around for miles as people queue up to get their rations, but it’s inefficient and there’s no assurance that you can make it home safely, even if you wait the necessary hours to get your government allotment of the few handfuls of dried seaweed, soybean meal, a container of milk and another of honey that the law says must go to each person every day.
It’s a very grim story, but it could be a very exciting one.
Now let’s think of another, also set in New York in 2001.
Over the years, the city has become almost abandoned. (As indeed much of Harlem is today.) In the rest of the country, through solar energy, miniature circuitry, increased transportation efficiency, and ecological advances, it is possible for everyone to live more happily in rural areas. New towns have sprung up all over the deserts of the South and Northwest, while the big cities of the Eastern Seaboard now lie more or less abandoned. Only a few groups of people have come into the city, or stayed. They seek homes in the empty ruins. Most of them are families of individualists and are well educated, including doctors and engineers. They have taken over some of the remaining public buildings, built their own farms in the city’s parks, installed their own solar heaters, and turned the subways near them into sewers. These few communal groups live, in their own way, a rather magnificent, if eccentric, life, making their own clothes, their own music, stories, games.
But one day the government decides to pull down the remains of the city. “You’ve got to go,” they say.
“We won’t go,” is the reply. “You abandoned all this. Nobody lives here now except us. We made it ours and we intend to keep it!”
“No, we want to pull down the place and turn it into another few small towns….”
National Guards come in; perhaps there are even bombings. But the people who live there have their own methods of retaliation: they have their own planes, and towns across the country begin to be bombed as well. A war of national guardsmen and entrenched guerrillas begins in the deserted streets of New York….
Such an underpopulated New York City could make just as exciting a setting for an SF story as the overpopulated New York City described in the previous scenario.
But let’s imagine a third SF story, again set in New York in 2001.
By 1985 a birth control method has been discovered that could be given to both men and women, once, at puberty—and it remains effective for the rest of one’s life. To have children, both the prospective mother and father merely have to take a pill to counteract the method, and pregnancy can ensue. The nation’s population is stabilized. Slowly the big cities of the country get themselves together, and with the decreased population and economic pressures the cities become the clean and elegant living arrangements they were once envisioned as. By 1995 the school population has been cut in half. Educational overcrowding is a thing of the past. And most education, anyway, is carried on in private study groups which children choose on their own and which they attend on Mondays and Fridays, the public school week now cut down to Tuesdays through Thursdays. But with the increased space, leisure, and good living, a certain languor comes in. Persons with really new ideas are suddenly seen as threatening to this fine way of life. Almost all the changes consist of new freedoms people may now indulge in. Yet every time someone comes up with a really new idea, people say, “Next thing you know they’ll be wanting to cut the birth control methods out.”
In this world, a group of young psychologists, men and women, living in one of the elegant mansions that dot the rolling greenery that has been planted over the former site of the St. Nicholas Houses, decide that they—and just they—should try, as an experiment, living for ten years without the universal birth control methods, merely to record and explore what it was like. With so few people, it should be no threat at all. Most of these young psychologists were born in 1978, 1979. But the older ones remember what the overcrowding was like, remember the tenements and the rats and the garbage on the streets—and a great split starts between the older generation and the younger….
This is just as good a 2001 story as the previous two.
Now there’s no way that all three could happen at the same time in New York City in the year 2001.
Yet all three could make good SF stories, fun to read and conceivably enjoyable to write. And my experiences as a black growing up in the very real New York City of the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s will certainly contour my particular vision of each of my three tales.
Which one do I actually believe?
I think aspects of all of them are possible; other aspects of all of them strike me as impossible.
And if I did sit down to write an SF story right now, set in New York in 2001, it would probably be different from them all.
Science fiction is a tool to help you think; and like anything that really helps you think, by definition it doesn’t do the thinking for you. It’s a tool to help you think about the present—a present that is always changing, a