Dad read the signs of what had gone on between them, like spoor in the room. “You want this?” he asked Mom.
“Yes.”
“Brother mine,” said Dad, “give me my child.” His two eyes made four with Uncle’s. In that moment, Dad’s eyes in his bark-brown face were green, the bright green of new spring leaves. Gently, Uncle handed Abby over. Gently, Dad took her. His first time holding his baby. That was the moment that Uncle violated the border between this side and the next, for once he had taken a soul to himself, he wasn’t ever supposed to hand it over until he had delivered it to its destination.
If Uncle is a ferryman between the worlds, Dad is a gardener. His talents are growing, grafting, and pruning. “Lewwe go then, nuh?” said Dad to his brother.
“What?” said Mom. “Where’re you taking her?”
Dad replied, his voice full of loss, “Can’t fix her up here. We have to go to the next side. You stay and see to Makeda.” He tried on a smile. “We going to bring her sister back to you before you could say Jack Mandora.”
Uncle embraced Dad. Their circled arms protected Abby. Mom had to look away from the brothers then. Their aspects were already changing, preparing to cross over to the other side. Mortals cannot look upon that celestial shift for long. It’s like looking directly into the sun. Between the glory that was the brothers, dying Abby was a fleeting scrap of dull flesh. Then the three were gone. Mom clambered back into her bed, closed her eyes, and prayed for both her children. No point imploring the Big Boss. He has more important things to look after. As so many claypickens do, Mom prayed to the celestials more directly involved in the affairs of this plane: in this case, to her lover and to his brother.
Baby Abby came back to us from the other side a living being who could grow and thrive on her own. Of course the Family knew immediately what the brothers had done. Abby shouldn’t have been alive. Those were some big-ass laws they broke. There were to be consequences. Since Dad had been willing to do all that for a human, they made him into one. They stripped his godsoul away from him, leaving him purely claypicken. (You do realize that Dad and his family had been among the first humans of the world? When the Big Boss decided he wanted some managerial staff, they volunteered for the job.) Dad would have to spend a whole human lifetime with only the tricksy pinch of mojo that claypickens can sometimes muster if they chance upon exactly the right charms, potions, and prayers in exactly the right configuration at exactly the right time. His godsoul would return to him when the flesh body died.
After all, we would need someone to look after us until we were grown; someone who wasn’t too busy looking after every other living thing. Because Grandma Ocean had seen to Mom. Grandma’s province is the waters of the world, salt and sweet both. She tossed Mom over her shoulder into one of them, and didn’t even look back to see which one she’d landed in. She didn’t deprive my mother of life, but of the beautiful form with which, Grandma convinced herself, Mom had bewitched her sons. Loch Ness has Nessie, its monster of fame and fable. Okanagan Lake has Naitaka, aka Ogopogo, a snake demon. As with them, no one has ever found proof that the monster that people began sighting in Lake Ontario just under thirty years ago really exists. She does have a name, though, and it’s Cora. I call her Mom, or I would, if I ever met her.
And Uncle Jack? Or John, or whichever of his monikers he chose to use at any given time? Well, his family couldn’t do anything incapacitating to him, as they had to Dad. If they did, it would bung up the claypicken wheel of life and death. No one would be able to get on or off, and pretty soon the Big Boss would come looking for the cause of the constipation, and though he (or she, or they, or it) might or might not be green, they say he’s a big fella, bigger than all Creation, and you sure as hell wouldn’t like him when he was angry.
So for his transgressions against the tabus of death and life, the Family punished my Uncle in the worst way they could think of; they left him unharmed. His curse was to carry the knowledge of the fate he had helped bring down on his dear brother and on my mother.
That’s how the story went that Uncle used to tell me and Abby when we were kids and he was babysitting and had run out of other ways to keep us occupied. He made it sound almost jolly. At least romantic. Because Uncle likes to keep things lighthearted. It’s important to him to always have a smile on his face. It keeps his spirits up, and sometimes it prevents people from being too scared when it’s their time and he shows up to ferry them over to the other side. Though sometimes his death’s-head grin just makes them shit their pants with terror. But, as Uncle says, you win some, you lose some.
ABOUT THE DAMON KNIGHT MEMORIAL GRAND MASTER AWARD
In addition to giving the Nebula Awards each year, SFWA also may present the Damon Knight Grand Master Award to a living author for a lifetime of achievement in science fiction and/or fantasy. In accordance with SFWA’s bylaws, the president shall have the power, at his or her discretion, to call for the presentation of the Grand Master Award. Nominations for the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award are solicited from the officers, with the advice of participating past presidents, who vote with the officers to determine the recipient.
There have been thirty Grand Masters since the award was founded in 1975. Samuel R. Delany is the most recent.
1975 Robert A. Heinlein (1907–1988)
1976 Jack Williamson (1908–2006)
1977 Clifford D. Simak (1904–1988)
1979 L. Sprague de Camp (1907–2000)
1981 Fritz Leiber (1910–1992)
1984 Andre Norton (1912–2005)
1986 Arthur C. Clarke (1917–2008)
1987 Isaac Asimov (1920–1992)
1988 Alfred Bester (1913–1987)
1989 Ray Bradbury (1920–2012)
1991 Lester del Rey (1915–1993)
1993 Frederik Pohl (1919–2013)
1995 Damon Knight (1922–2002)
1996 A. E. van Vogt (1912–2000)
1997 Jack Vance (1916–2013)
1998 Poul Anderson (1926–2001)
1999 Hal Clement (Harry Stubbs) (1922–2003)
2000 Brian W. Aldiss (1925–)
2001 Philip José Farmer (1918–2009)
2003 Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–)
2004 Robert Silverberg (1935–)
2005 Anne McCaffrey (1926–2011)
2006 Harlan Ellison (1934–)
2007 James Gunn (1923–)
2008 Michael Moorcock (1939–)
2009 Harry Harrison (1925–2012)
2010 Joe Haldeman (1943–)
2011 Connie Willis (1945–)
2012 Gene Wolfe (1931–)
2013 Samuel R. Delany (1942–)
“A LIFE CONSIDERED AS A PRISM OF EVER-PRECIOUS LIGHT: AN APPRECIATION OF SAMUEL R. DELANY”
NALO HOPKINSON
I’m honoured and tickled to be writing an appreciation for Samuel (Chip) R. Delany, SFWA’s 2013 Grand Master. I doubt I would be a published SF/F writer if it weren’t for him. I doubt I’m alone in that. His writing excites me. It fills my brain with thoughts and mirrored neuron responses, and teaches me about writing. I was lucky enough to have him as a teacher when I attended Clarion in 1995, but I held his work in high esteem long before that.
So: what is there to appreciate about Chip and his works? (And by “works” I mean the whole package; writing, teaching, activism, and being:
I appreciate Chip’s frankness and particularity about sex, sensuality, and sexuality, especially gay black male sexuality. Especially that it happens so often in science fictional contexts, still a rare occurrence in the genre. When I, a Caribbean black reader, was in my 20’s—I’m 53 now—my literary world was comprised of science fiction/fantasy, Caribbean literature, erotica/porn, black literature, and everything else. I read bits of all of it, but primarily SF/F and probably porn, which meant that I read a lot of stories about white people having fantastical adventures. And that was fine at first, because I was fortunate enough to have other literatures and other exper
iences of the world around me. For many years, I didn’t notice that the fiction I loved didn’t seem to much love me back. (It’s coming around.) When I read Chip’s genre-busting novel Dhalgren, it was a revelation. It was full of the future, and the future was full of people of colour and jamette1 people living lives and having raunchy sex right alongside the white folks. And the sex was hella queer. I was straight-identified at the time, and I’m middle class. Not that it mattered when it came to Dhalgren. It was as though science fiction and James Baldwin had made a love child, and it was that novel. Dhalgren brought three of my worlds into conjunction, and in doing so, made me more real. It put people like me on the page right smack dab in the centre of my beloved science fiction. It made me realize that truth is not always absolute. It made me consider whose truths get told, and why. It showed me what the novel is capable of, in ways I had vaguely apprehended before from other groundbreaking novels, but had never really lived in until Dhalgren. It made me long for more of that experience.
And Chip is still bringing it. In 2014, at the Nebula Awards weekend in San Jose, Chip gave a reading from his recent novel, Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders. (I haven’t finished reading my copy yet. The variety of ingested bodily fluids in the first few pages is giving me pause. Shouldn’t have started reading it while I was eating breakfast! But I will persevere.) At Chip’s reading, I was in the back, holding hands with my primary partner, David. One of us is female, the other male, but we’re both black, both writers, both queer-identified. We’re used to living at-risk lives in racialized bodies. That evening, we sat and snuggled in happy tears as Chip read about a community of black men, simultaneously utterly average and utterly unique, daring to live, love, and fuck each other. Surviving the life. One of the best fairy stories ever; the kind that sometimes manages to come true. And yes, the pun is deliberate.
As well as in queer male lives, Chip’s pride in blackness is a healing balm against the myriad cuts of daily existence as a black person in a society that brays that you are stupid, ugly, criminal, a despoiler, a thug, a problem. There are many who do this work of necessary healing. Chip is one of them. I appreciate his insistence in putting blackness and working class sensibilities (not the same thing, yet there are places of overlap) on the page at a time when little of that was happening in SF/F. I have to also praise the editors who have had the stones to publish his work. The genre would be poorer had that not happened.
I appreciate Chip’s sense of humour and playfulness; for instance, the ending of The Madman, when you find out how the two men live their lives together. Rarely has something so stank made me giggle so much. The character of Raven in Tales of Nevèrÿon with her matter-of-fact, norm-flipping monologues on what menstruation is for, how to keep from getting pregnant, and why men have those floppy, delicate “scars of Eif’h” hanging between their thighs. I howled with laughter. Thanks to Raven, I also discovered places where gender norms had sunk their claws into me and began to yank them out.
I appreciate Chip’s joy in life and his willingness to be silly. One Readercon, he spent hours with a bunch of other con-goers in a hot, stuffy room, playing Mafia. (For those who don’t know it, Mafia is kind of like Murder in the Dark meets “Who Goes There?”) I will never forget the sight of Chip, having just won the round by killing everyone, doing the Ex Tempore Evil Elf Dance of Villainy.
I appreciate the sheer, dense beauty of his language. Sometimes the density is in the deep investigation of the physicality of a moment, second by second, as it gets your own senses buzzing. Sometimes it’s in the way he reframes your way of thinking about something so that you’ll never see it quite the same way again. (See Raven and the scars of Eif’h.)
His creative daring. He’s unafraid to insert a lecture on a non-fictional topic into the middle of a fictional narrative. To get intensely personal, as in his memoir The Motion of Light On Water. To write in forms considered déclassé, such as porn and comics. To take on the fictional persona of a female academic —K. Leslie Steiner—to rigorously critique his own work. Who does that?
His generosity. Chip uses complicated sentences in his writing, but in person, speaks in simpler language. He has a knack of assuming everyone is capable of complex analysis while simultaneously taking people as he finds them. Many years ago, I wrote a mostly inept review of his novel The Madman. I knew it was inadequate to the novel but at the time, I couldn’t articulate why, or figure out how to fix it. When I mentioned my review to Chip at Clarion in 1995, replied that he’d read it and liked it because it was positive; a tactful acknowledgement that the value of my review was not its critical analysis but its enthusiasm, because he enjoyed hearing his work praised. The generosity wasn’t just in his tact, but in his using it to tell the truth. I have often seen him tell someone a hard truth. I have never seen him be disrespectful about it. Though I also appreciate that he has stopped telling Clarion students which of them will and won’t be writers. It was something he was still doing at my Clarion in 1995. I don’t remember what he told me, though. I suspect I deliberately blanked on it, because if he said “writer,” I feared I’d be too overawed to try for it. And I’d made up my mind that if he said “non-writer,” I’d just have to do my utmost to prove him wrong.
Chip does love his students. At the end of Fred Barney Taylor’s documentary The Polymath, or The Life and Opinions of Samuel R. Delany, Gentleman, Chip tells a story about urging a group of his students to raise their hands in class even if to say they don’t know the answer. Because every time they remain silent, he told them, they learn something. They learn not to speak for themselves, not to ask for a raise. They learn to keep quiet and “take it.” Then he says to the interviewer, “Because you need to teach people . . .” and bursts into tears as he continues, “that they are important enough to say what they have to say.”
I appreciate Chip’s activism on a number of fronts. His essay on racism in science fiction community is a teaching tool for those who don’t understand systemic racism, who think that racism is a white guy spewing hateful epithets, who believe that because they don’t hate people of colour, they are incapable of perpetuating racism. With his skills of analysis and his frankness about his personal life, he was uniquely placed to write the non-fiction book Times Square Red Times Square Blue. In it, he decries New York City’s closing down of the porn theatres in Times Square with the frank perspective of someone who’s frequented them for sex. He describes the theatres as sexual spaces, precious because they facilitated a dissolving of class, race, sexuality, and gender barriers. I appreciate Chip’s insistence that all aspects of life can be spoken and are deserving of contemplation.
And oh, my God, his writing. His beautiful, thick, raunchy, rambling, misbehaved, surprising, delightful, funky, thoughtful books, essays, and stories. They are the reason so many in the audience at the Nebula Awards hollered with joy at seeing Samuel R. Delany accept the SFWA Grand Master Award from Connie Willis.
To Chip,
With love,
your student.
1. Trinidad creole: “underclass.” From the French “le diamètre,” meaning beneath the diametre of respectability.
DAMON KNIGHT MEMORIAL
GRAND MASTER: SAMUEL R. DELANY
“TIME CONSIDERED AS A HELIX OF SEMI-PRECIOUS STONES”
Lay ordinate and abscissa on the century. Now cut me a quadrant. Third quadrant if you please. I was born in ’fifty. Here it’s ’seventy-five.
At sixteen they let me leave the orphanage. Dragging the name they’d hung me with (Harold Clancy Everet, and me a mere lad—how many monickers have I had since; but don’t worry, you’ll recognize my smoke) over the hills of East Vermont, I came to a decision:
Me and Pa Michaels, who had belligerently given me a job at the request of The Official looking Document with which the orphanage sends you packing, were running Pa Michaels’ dairy farm, i.e., thirteen thousand three hundred sixty-two piebald Guernseys all asleep in their stainless coffins, nourished
and drugged by pink liquid flowing in clear plastic veins (stuff is sticky and messes up your hands), exercised with electric pulsers that make their muscles quiver, them not half-awake, and the milk just a-pouring down into stainless cisterns. Anyway. The Decision (as I stood there in the fields one afternoon like the Man with the Hoe, exhausted with three hard hours of physical labor, contemplating the machinery of the universe through the fog of fatigue): With all of Earth, and Mars, and the Outer Satellites filled up with people and what-all, there had to be something more than this. I decided to get some.
So I stole a couple of Pa’s credit cards, one of his helicopters, and a bottle of white lightning the geezer made himself, and took off. Ever try to land a stolen helicopter on the roof of the Pan Am building, drunk? Jail, schmail, and some hard knocks later I had attained to wisdom. But remember this o best beloved: I have done three honest hours on a dairy farm less than ten years back. And nobody but nobody has ever called me Harold Clancy Everet again.
Hank Culafroy Eckles (redheaded, a bit vague, six-foot-two) strolled out of the baggage room at the spaceport, carrying a lot of things that weren’t his in a small briefcase.
Beside him the Business Man was saying, “You young fellows today upset me. Go back to Bellona, I say. Just because you got into trouble with that little blonde you were telling me about is no reason to leap worlds, come on all glum. Even quit your job!”
Hank stops and grins weakly: “Well . . .”
“Now I admit, you have your real needs, which maybe we older folks don’t understand, but you have to show some responsibility toward . . .” He notices Hank has stopped in front of a door marked MEN. “Oh. Well. Eh.” He grins strongly. “I’ve enjoyed meeting you, Hank. It’s always nice when you meet somebody worth talking to on these damned crossings. So long.”