SF relies on différance, it cannot be stuck in a static structure such as a comprehensive definition. That does not mean, though, that the play of differences that create SF cannot be described. A mature criticism will seek to do just that, and will not bother with the futile pursuit of definitions.
Also futile is the pursuit of an origin, though not entirely for the same reasons (although if SF is, as Delany posits, a “field phenomenon” then locating any single origin is impossible). In the fourth “Exotext” of The American Shore, Delany offers a quick survey of many of the 17th- and 18th-century works various critics have claimed to be science fiction, and he rejects them as SF because they do not possess enough difference from the discourses of their day: “In brief, what we have throughout this whole period is a comparatively undifferentiated tradition of Prose Commentary, in which science and fiction are both struggling to separate themselves out, to establish themselves as separate modes, with separate criteria for judgment.” The nineteenth century’s voyages imaginaires and utopian novels “are works that simply try to resort to an undifferentiated discourse for instructive purposes, an endeavor which still locates itself in commentary rather than in fiction.”6 In Starboard Wine, Delany expands on these ideas, saying in “Dichtung und Science Fiction,” “For an originary assertion to mean something for a contemporary text, one must establish a chain of reading and preferably a chain of discussion as well.” In the “Letter from Rome” to Science Fiction Studies, he writes that “before any historical inquiry occurs a fundamental process takes place, a process so fundamental we are apt to lose sight of it.”
He describes this process through an extended metaphor of automobiles and transportation that is marvelous and resonant, but may not immediately make the point clear. The fundamental process is to determine what unites “the dullest Analog putt-putt tale” with such SF masterpieces as Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination, and what differentiates those two items from other (non-SF) texts. This is not only a process of identifying aspects within the texts themselves (“the engine” in Delany’s metaphor), but it is also a process of identifying the forces and systems (“the assembly-line development, the oil refineries, and the highway systems”) outside the texts that help constitute and support them in ways different from the forces and systems constituting and supporting other texts.
We know that for Delany it is SF’s language—how it is conceived and received—that differentiates SF from other types of writing, and in the essays about specific writers and, particularly, “Reflections on Historical Models” he locates at least some of the extratextual differences at play: the relationships between writers, editors, and fans; the discourse of fanzines and best-of-the-year anthologies; the exigencies of publishing during particular eras in particular cultural and economic environments. In an interview in Science Fiction Studies in 1987, he said, “There’s no reason to run SF too much back before 1926, when Hugo Gernsback coined the ugly and ponderous term ‘scientifiction’ which, in the letter columns written by the readers of his magazines, became over the next year or so ‘science fiction’ and finally ‘SF’.”7 To Delany, 1926 (or so) is a reasonable starting point for SF because that is the point at which it becomes a differentiated discourse, with texts that require their own ways of reading, and with systems of production and consumption for those texts that are not the same as for others. “To say that a phenomenon does have a significant history is to say that its history is different from the history of something else: that’s what makes it significant” (“Science Fiction and ‘Literature’”).
We need to consider Delany’s ideas about science fiction together as a group because they rely on each other. If we accept that SF is not a static system, but is instead an overdetermined phenomenon, then there is no point in searching for an originary text for SF, because overdetermined phenomena can have no single origin. If we accept that SF is an overdetermined phenomenon, then we know that it cannot be defined; however, it can be described. To describe something, we must be able to differentiate it from other things, and any history of the phenomenon must first be a history of difference. This is where the idea of reading protocols (ways of reading, codic strategies) is most useful, because it offers a theory that allows us to describe SF’s differences at a level where we can include works of widely varying qualities. But the concept of reading protocols is only a starting point for analysis, and a critic who considers it an end in and of itself risks creating an analysis that is flat, obvious, or irrelevant.
The path Delany maps is not the only one possible or valuable (he would, I expect, be uncomfortable claiming any One True Way for SF criticism), but it deserves more attention. We can begin to see the value in such attention by looking more closely at how some of the essays in Starboard Wine work together.
The writers Delany repeatedly discusses in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw and Starboard Wine are ones he considers among the best in science fiction: Robert Heinlein (1907–1988), Theodore Sturgeon (1918–1985), Joanna Russ (1937–2011), and Thomas Disch (1940–2008). They come from two different writing generations, two different histories: Heinlein and Sturgeon first built their reputations in the 1940s and by the 1950s were recognized (within the SF field, at least) as masters; Disch and Russ are of Delany’s own generation and first came to prominence in the 1960s. Taken as a group, they have explored the possibilities of science fiction as—if not more—fully than any other set of writers, and so they provide Delany with rich material to test his ideas.
The first writer discussed in depth here is Robert A. Heinlein, and it is a fitting beginning, because Heinlein contributed as much, if not more, to the distinctive language of science fiction as any other writer, both because of the era and environment in which he was writing and because of his own particular talents. Indeed, Delany claims, “In many respects Heinlein’s limits are the horizons of science fiction.” The discussion of Heinlein, though, is less one of limits (except regarding badfaith arguments) than of possibilities. One of Heinlein’s first novels, Beyond This Horizon, provided Delany with a sentence that he has used many times (e.g. in “Science Fiction and ‘Literature’”) to demonstrate a difference between science fiction and other texts: “The door dilated.”8 It is a sentence that metonymically suggests an entire technology if a reader is attuned to such a way of reading, and Delany has repeatedly celebrated similar prose techniques that Heinlein created or honed. But it is not just technique that Delany considers. The occasion of “Heinlein” is an introduction to his relatively neglected novel Glory Road, and it is the history of the neglect that provides the most powerful and far-ranging insights in the essay, because that history requires a discussion of Heinlein’s rhetorical methods, his work in general, and his place within the science fiction community. Heinlein’s texts possess difference because they are science fiction, but some of them have also created the differences that make them most science-fictional.
If “Heinlein’s limits are the horizons of science fiction,” then Theodore Sturgeon, and Delany’s essay exploring his work, provides an extension of those limits:
The corpus of science fiction produced by Theodore Sturgeon is the single most important body of science fiction by an American to date.
Robert Heinlein may be responsible for more technical innovations, more rhetorical figures that have been absorbed into the particular practice of SF writing; his influence is certainly greater. But if this is so, it is at an extremely high cost, both ethically and aesthetically.
Sturgeon’s body of work is, for Delany, “magnanimous and expansive,” characterized by wit, stylistic grace, and “accurate vision.” The accuracy of vision, the magnanimity and expansiveness, are what allow a movement—the movement of a compassionately visionary intelligence—beyond Heinlein’s horizons, and this accomplishment is ineluctably, inextricably aesthetic and ethical. As he argues this, Delany also situates Sturgeon within the circumstances of his era and environment, showing how attitudes toward productivity and rewriting were inscribed in the culture of SF, and the effect of those attitudes on Sturgeon’s stories and their reception.9
As insightful as his discussions of Heinlein and Sturgeon are, and as useful for demonstrating the value of his approach to analysis, Delany brings a larger array of critical tools to bear on Russ