They would develop a society in which government was more or less optional and in which identity was fluid: one could be a man one day and a woman the next, gay or straight or blonde or ginger, liberal or conservative or between or beyond. Ever bookish-the subtitle borrows from the French philosopher Michel Foucault, then not well known outside his own country-Delany had it in mind to work out a story in the same vein as Ursula Le Guin’s utopian vision of an anarchosyndicalist society arising from the ashes of an authoritarian one.īut he took it a step further: in the far future, he imagined, humans would calve off from Earth and settle on the Jovian moon of Jupiter. Delany faced that challenge four decades ago, when he began to sketch out the world he depicted in the novel Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia, published in 1976 and since reissued under the more manageable title Triton. But what if you are a young, gay African-American man of leftist tendencies writing in a time when almost no black writers-or gay writers-had stormed the castle of science fiction?
If you are a white man of academic bent writing in the late 1930s, then the world you build will look different from the one the same sort of person would build 80 years later. The easy part is done: now what remains is to flesh out the story and to create the spaces in which those beings live, what science-fiction writers call “worldbuilding.” “I shall write,” he thinks, “of now-extinct races of beings who join with humans to battle evil, led by a king who struggles with the evil lord to possess a magical ring.” Check. Hours and piles of scratched-up notepads later, he shapes the outline of a narrative. A writer sits at his desk and gnaws at an idea.
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