Stories for Chip by Nisi Shawl Read Free Book Online Page A

previous replies were sans Delany because I knew at those points, as I know now, that Delany deserves special consideration. In terms of my personal experience reading Delany, the dual nature of his influence as a thinker and as a creative writer requires my full self-awareness.
    â—Š
    Samuel R. Delany at his finest—black, gay, and erudite—remains a creative and critical force in science fiction. This opening statement encapsulates my many encounters with Delany’s writing in my time pondering the significance of race and racism in the science fiction genre, although I first came across the work of Octavia E. Butler and Steven Barnes much earlier. Believe it or not, my first ephemeral encounter with Delany occurred during my initial grad school days at Louisiana State University in the mid-1990s. Science fiction scholar Carl Freedman had something posted about Delany on his office door. 2 It may have been a placard advertising Delany’s essay collection
Longer Views: Extended Essays
(1996), or the Wesleyan University Press edition of
Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia
(1976; 1996); I cannot be sure. Though we are now colleagues at LSU nearly twenty years later, I regret not having taken a class with Carl. However, I did not think of science fiction and fantasy as an academic pursuit at that time, only as a category of pleasurable reading and viewing. Besides, I was courting my wife Heather when not studying various facets of black American literature. My time was occupied.
    I was also enthralled, though to a lesser extent, by the Dakota-verse and its black superheroes, particularly Virgil Hawkins, a.k.a. Static, which seemingly has nothing to do with Delany. I identified with Virgil because he was locked in the “friend zone” with his best friend Frieda Goren and had no luck with dating, much like me in high school. However, his sharp-witted Static alter ego gifted him with self-confidence. Now, I could not channel electricity, but my intelligence worked to my own advantage in college through the bad poetry that I wrote from time to time. Imagine my fury and pain upon learning that an aunt of mine had thrown my cherished Milestone Comics collection (
Static
,
Icon
,
Hardware
,
Blood Syndicate
,
Kobalt
,
Xombi
, and
Shadow Cabinet
) in the trash when she moved to Atlanta! I practically owned every issue of that seminal line. In fact, my first publication was a letter of the month in the
Hardware
fan column
Hard Words
. Milestone even sent me a gold-foiled issue of
Hardware
. I’d love to get my hands on one of those again.
    I could have sworn the letter appeared in issue 15. My chagrin at learning it was not hit me pretty hard. I bought a copy of this issue online and it was not there!
    In hindsight, I should have never stored my comics and baseball card collections at my aunt’s apartment in Baton Rouge.
    Anyway, I had no idea that Delany wrote two issues of
Wonder Woman
and was so heavily invested in comics as a paraliterature. In his own words, Delany has “always liked comic books—which is the understatement of the age” because “of the unique things that comics can do” in providing the “visual realization” of storytelling (
Silent Interviews
85-6). I did not discover this fact about Delany until much later in my doctoral studies at the University of Iowa, when I bought and read some of Delany’s philosophical works at Prairie Lights Books in Iowa City, such as
Silent Interviews: On Language, Race, Sex, Science Fiction, and Some Comics
(1994) and
Shorter Views: Queer Thoughts & The Politics of the Paraliterary
(1999). My scholarly inclinations and ambitions might have turned to the speculative much sooner if I had known this information about Delany sooner. I would not have been so intimidated by the man’s brilliance as a thinker and would have discovered his penchant for beautifully crafted sentences as a fiction writer so much