Ellison, “‘Repent, Harlequin!’”; Delany, “Aye, and Gomorrah”

Today

Dangerous Visions · Civil disobedience as spectacle · Bodies and desire

Review: Suvin’s definition

SF is “a literary genre or verbal construct whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition.”¹

The novum is the device that achieves cognitive estrangement:

“All the epistemological, ideological, and narrative implications and correlatives of the novum lead to the conclusion that significant sf is in fact a specifically roundabout way of commenting on an author’s collective context.”

Serious SF is ultimately about ourselves.

Today’s authors

• Harlan Ellison (1934–2018)
• Samuel R. Delany (1942– )

Both stories appeared in Ellison’s Dangerous Visions (1967), the anthology that defined the American New Wave.

Harlan Ellison

Reading notes: “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman”

• Ellison was so committed to making SF modern and relevant that when the publisher of Dangerous Visions temporarily ran out of money, he personally paid many of the contributors.
• This story — one of several hundred across his career — depicts a future dystopia somewhat unusual for the Cold War era. Instead of a straightforward denunciation of communism, it is equally a critique of authoritarian capitalism: a centrally planned industrial mega-state overseen by faceless bureaucrats, led by an enforcer nicknamed the Ticktockman who keeps everyone running on schedule.
• The non-linear narrative and Ellison’s exuberant diction are characteristic of experimental New Wave SF, but the plot is relatively familiar: a lone hero fights an oppressive government. The twist is the method — public mischief, civil disobedience, and spectacular but victimless rebellion.
• The Harlequin is a stock character from the Italian commedia dell’arte. Modern variations include Batman’s arch-nemesis the Joker and Spider-Man’s Green Goblin.
• Ellison was likely also influenced by the avant-garde tactics of the Situationists, who held that only purposeful acts of joyful public disruption could reawaken people’s authentic hopes and desires.

Samuel R. Delany

Delany on the purpose of SF

“Science fiction isn’t just thinking about the world out there. It’s also thinking about how that world might be — a particularly important exercise for those who are oppressed, because if they’re going to change the world we live in, they — and all of us — have to be able to think about a world that works differently.”

Reading notes: “Aye, and Gomorrah”

• Delany completed his first SF novel, The Jewels of Aptor, while still a teenager. This story was first published in Dangerous Visions (1968) and won that year’s Hugo for Best Short Story.
• The “Gomorrah” of the title refers to one of the biblical cities — the other being Sodom — destroyed by God, supposedly as punishment for their inhabitants’ sexual activities, though some scholars dispute this. Delany never makes his reason explicit; it is left for the reader to intuit.
• We learn early that Delany is not interested in writing a traditional space opera — nor, for that matter, in writing in a traditionally grammatical way. The narrative is episodic, the prose rhythmical and poetic.
• The first-person narration pulls the reader in immediately, but it takes a while to work out what is going on, given the style and the absence of typical SF action. Note that the other Spacers’ names are non-binary, and that we never learn the narrator’s name at all. Why does Delany withhold all of them?
• Importantly, nobody’s sexual or ethical choices are condemned here, and no one’s identity or preference is judged right or wrong. There is a palpable excitement around the new possibilities opened up by the Spacers and the frelks — and a clear sense of the unintended consequences of making space travel real.

Two rebellions

For Thursday

• “Vaster Than Empires and More Slow” by Ursula K. Le Guin (BBSF 577)
• “When It Changed” by Joanna Russ (BBSF 602)