Hey.
I started reading STARS IN MY POCKETS LIKE GRAINS OF SAND and wow ok Delany. So good. A long time ago my old homie Baxter left Philly and moved back to Cali and started going to a graduate writing program. He told me about Tiptree and he told me about Delany and linked me to this syllabus index from a sci-fi class with short stories from both (o sike, only Tiptree).
Like, I read his story AYE, AND GOMORRAH and was like bruh, this is some pervert sci-fi like I been craving ayeeeee!!!! When I was still distributing single zines of my ALL THAT'S LEFT stories, people flattered me by saying my writing reminded them of crosses between Delany, Tiptree, and JG Ballard. At those instances I hadn't read any of them yet. Seriously, it's been funny to come out of an upbringing in working class anime/Philly's Black sci-fi nerd environment and into this literary world of sf – just on the principle of being a writer myself – and I still have to emphasize to people that anime is GOOD and great storytelling exists beyond the exclusive literary canon that some upper class snobs made up. I like to rail against high brow snobs who look down on anime as being bizarre or derivative... but honestly, they're not used the the tropes and canon of anime in much the same way I used to not be versed in the tropes and canon of science/literary fiction. Blahhh blahh blah.
So saying that, I had only read that one short story of Delany's by the time I crossed paths with him sitting on his front stoop halfway down the block from the William Way Center. I was on my way to Philly's first feminist zine fest, with my first box of zines under arm, and I was like holy shit are you Samuel Delany? He was like yeah call me Chip. I was like zomg can I give you my zine. He was like "naw" – sike, he was like I'll probably lose it but ok. And in my excitement I shoved my zine into his hands and was like wow you're a legend or something, and said good day and walked off to the fest like ⭐️＿⭐️
When METROPOLARITY formed, we were like yo we should try to interview Delany for our zine or something. We're like, walking down a path he formed or something. Except it never happened. Even though he lives in Philly, Alex was friends with him on Facebook, and all this, I think dude can only afford to expend his energy when monetary transactions are involved. Definitely not for some upstart strangers. My boo and I went to see him read on his birthday at a coffee shop in the Gayborhood. He read this longass Facebook post that was entertaining, that I had read on my own not that long before, but now he was sitting NEXT TO ME reading it. He reads like a nerd. Like anyone who has ever rolled with know-it-all nerds to the anime con or to your DnD session... like that. I love this about him. The reading was full of fans and admirers and colleagues, and a fan of mine introduced me as a great science-fiction writer in his presence. I was like ::aghast but laughing trying to play it off face:: and .... anyway, I'm just here to freestyle.
I think Delany is famous because he's a freak and a nerd and a very apt literary critic. He's written fantasy, sci-fi, critique, autobiography, and regular degular literary fiction. He's black and gay and he has no qualms about writing explicit shit, which...some of it ain't a few people's thing. I'm heard he inspired Gibson to write Neuromancer (someone got a link?), and yeah it's pretty wild to read his scifi and get a heavy dose of NOT STRAIGHT VERY KINKY characters that are into cruising and all kindsa wild shit that you'd otherwise have to go searching taboo 1990s lesbian BDSM books for.
SO THERE'S THAT.
How are you doing?
Happy Witch's New Year!
Scorpio season.
My witches workbook says it's time to enjoy the silence of the post-harvest season and attend to the inner self.
I did a nerdy roundtable discussion with Jeanne Thorton, Trish Salah, Cat Fitzpatrick, and Ayşe Devrim last weekend. It's called Viable Ways For Living: Trans Authors on SFF in Meanwhile, Elsewhere and you can read it here. Here's an excerpt from Trish Salah:
Two things. One is that all those folks I was critiquing a minute ago were politically radical and they were genius writers: anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, anti-racist, queer or very queer-ish. So for me the radical tradition in science fiction is there and the question is: how do we help move the gears beyond a certain use or abuse of trans people within that radical tradition. On the other hand I just want fucking good exciting writing and I think that Meanwhile, Elsewhere is full of good exciting writing that is also politically militant and changing how we think about trans lives and representation.
Somewhere in that discussion I mention how good Jamie Berrout's PORTLAND DIARY is. SO GOOD MY GOD. Here is my review verbatim:
The promotional description of this book is good and apt. Portland Diary is so good and impressive. It’s chic in size. There are seven speculative short stories. Each story brings you intimately in to the waking toll of both the protagonists’ everyday life struggles and extraordinar(ily dystopian) circumstances. These stories are all explicitly from the perspective of a trans woman of color. Many of them detail unnerving and distressing surveillance and police states, the horror of which I bet many institutionally supported contemporary fiction writers wish they could so thoroughly capture.
To me, the stories in Portland Diary communicated the aching oppressiveness of a willfully ignorant white society that shrugs its shoulders at the demands of anti-black global capitalism. They communicated the internal horror and denial one forces upon oneself in order to “function” and “survive” under capitalism and the complicity it coerces out of us. I wish I had some more graceful or flowery way of putting it. To me, who finds gleefully dystopian science fiction completely late and distasteful (a sort of relief tourism for the protected classes that oh, thank god that’s not REAL yet), the stories of Portland Diary communicate what life is actually like IN the edgy cyberpunk dystopia of white imagination, when you’re not white and your body and behavior are completely surveilled and policed by all around you.
A number of the stories dance in vengeance plots that feel incredible to read. Others are experiences in hope, despair, desire, the weight of violent society bearing down on you and you feel yourself wearing away and don’t know what will happen and yet you persist. Some stories carried on in a such a way that I wondered, with only another page left, what it was all developing into. Then the final sentence would hit me and I had to hold the book to my chest and let the feeling fully unfurl.
Every story was amazing.
Switching gears just a touch (of love)...
I came across this review of Blade Runner 2049 by an old head white guy programmer nerd who like wrote Mozilla back in the day. While breaking down this long list of things wrong with the movie, he links to an interview with Sean Young, aka Rachel the Replicant. Like... ok, I'm in this new therapy and was going into today about my abuser's bullshit and talking bout predators and pedophiles, AOL in the 90s, Lolita shit, and how there's all these sweetheart songs glorifying grown men's relationships with pre-teens... Anyway fuck the patriarchy and trans femmephobia. Sean Young is a real bitch (as Cutlass likes to say) and you can tell Hollywood didn't like that. Ridley Scott's a bitch who ain't shit. I enjoyed this article by Clara Mae for Women on Comics about "how Ridley Scott just really wants to make the woman-helmed ALIEN franchise actually about a man 🙃". Water is wet.
I'm gonna have a screening of the new blade runner but instead will just show Armitage III
Ok. Gotta get my grind on.
Take care of yourself.
Till next time.
^_~/
monk