The Einstein Intersection Read online

  Praise for Samuel R. Delany’s Other Books

  “The Neverÿon series is a major and unclassifiable achievement in contemporary American literature.”

  —Fredric R. Jameson

  “Delany’s work exists on a kind of borderline—between theory and literary practice, between canonical and popular culture, between academic and nonacademic culture—a borderline familiar to feminist theory and cultural critique. The Neverÿon series is one of the most sustained meditations we have on the complex intersections of sexuality, race, and subjectivity in contemporary cultures.”

  —Constance Penley

  “[Delany] works real magic in these pages . . . Portions of ‘Atlantis: Model 1924’ linger, even loom, in my memory, and I suspect they will long endure there.”

  —Hungry Mind Review

  “ ‘Atlantis: Model 1924’ is neither SF nor fantasy . . . [but it] has an odd, unsettling power not usually associated with mainstream fiction . . . should be of interest to all Delany fans for its wondrous (and entirely characteristic) ability to introduce us to a living world. It’s a talent very close to time travel—or magic.”

  —Locus

  “One of the most interesting pieces now published, [‘The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals’] is a melding of fiction, commentary and diary, bringing together Delany’s Nevèrÿon characters with people from the equally fantastical setting of modern New York during the early years of the AIDS epidemic . . . redolent of Defoe’s ‘The Plague Years,’ [it] is a moving and powerful statement that strikes home.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “This may be the most successfully experimental work yet from an author for whom language and story are inseparable . . . [‘The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals’ is] a lengthy masterpiece, whose kaleidoscopic fragments cross the border between fact and fiction, extracting one from the other with meticulous precision.”

  —Library Journal

  “A Joycean tour de force of a novel [Dhalgren] seems to me . . . to stake a better claim than anything else in this country in the last quarter-century . . . to a permanent place as one of the enduring monuments of our national literature.”

  —Jeff Riggenbach, Libertarian Review

  “The very best ever to come out of the science fiction field . . . The usefulness of Dhalgren to you and to me is beyond question. Having experienced it, you will stand taller, understand more, and press your horizons back a little further away than you ever knew they would go . . . a literary landmark.”

  —Theodore Sturgeon, Galaxy Bookshelf

  “[Trouble on Triton] is classic Delany that maintains a cutting edge of sheer platinum. Delany sets his interrogation of the myth and politics of a central culture within an infinitely richer galaxy of interwoven margins. The dazzle always illuminates: the novel offers vision-altering thrills on the order of paradigm shifts or sex at its most rapturously cataclysmic.”

  —Earl Jackson, Jr., author of Fantastic Living:

  The Speculative Autobiographies of Samuel R. Delany

  The Einstein Intersection

  Books by the Author

  Fiction

  The Jewels of Aptor (1962)

  The Fall of the Towers:

  Out of the Dead City (formerly Captives of the Flame, 1963)

  The Towers of Toron (1964)

  City of a Thousand Suns (1965)

  The Ballad of Beta-2 (1965)

  Empire Star (1966)

  Babel-17 (1966)

  The Einstein Intersection (1967)

  Nova (1968)

  Driftglass (1969)

  Equinox (formerly The Tides of Lust, 1973)

  Dhalgren (1975)

  Trouble on Triton (formerly Triton, 1976)

  Return to Nevèrÿon:

  Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979)

  Neveryóna (1982)

  Flight from Nevèrÿon (1985)

  Return to Nevèrÿon (formerly The Bridge of Lost Desire, 1987)

  Distant Stars (1981)

  Stars in My Pockets Like Grains of Sand (1984)

  Driftglass/Starshards (collected stories: 1993)

  They Fly at Çiron (1993)

  The Mad Man (1994)

  Hogg (1995)

  Atlantis: Three Tales (1995)

  Graphic Novels

  Empire Star (1982)

  Bread & Wine (1999)

  Nonfiction

  The Jewel-Hinged Jaw (1977)

  The American Shore (1978)

  Heavenly Breakfast (1979)

  Starboard Wine (1984)

  The Motion of Light in Water (1988)

  Wagner / Artaud (1988)

  The Straits of Messina (1990)

  Silent Interviews (1994)

  Longer Views (1996)

  Shorter Views (1999)

  Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999)

  Samuel R. Delany

  The Einstein Intersection

  FOREWORD BY NEIL GAIMAN

  Published by Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, CT 06459

  Copyright © 1967 by Samuel R. Delany

  All rights reserved

  Printed in the United States of America 5 4

  CIP data appear at the end of the book

  First published by Ace Books in 1967. Subsequently reprinted by Bantam Books.

  Wesleyan University Press paperback 1998.

  This edition originally produced in 1998 by Wesleyan/

  University Press of New England, Hanover, NH 03755

  For Don Wollheim,

  a responsible man in all meanings

  to and for what is within,

  and Jack Gaughan,

  for what is without.

  Foreword

  BY NEIL GAIMAN

  Two misconceptions are widely held about written science fiction.

  The initial misconception is that SF (at the time Delany wrote The Einstein Intersection many editors and writers were arguing that Speculative Fiction might be a better use of the initials, but that battle was lost a long time back) is about the future, that it is, fundamentally, predictive. Thus 1984 is read as Orwell’s attempt to predict the world of 1984, as Heinlein’s Revolt in 2100 is seen as an attempted prediction of life in 2100. But those who point to the rise of any version of Big Brother, or the many current incarnations of the Anti-Sex League, or the mushrooming power of Christian fundamentalism as evidence that Heinlein or Orwell was engaged in forecasting Things To Come are missing the point.

  The second misconception, a kind of second-stage misconception, easy to make once one has traveled past the “SF is about predicting the future” conceit, is this: SF is about the vanished present. Specifically SF is solely about the time when it was written. Thus, Alfred Bester’s Demolished Man and Tiger! Tiger! (better known in the United States as The Stars My Destination) are about the 1950s, just as William Gibson’s Neuromancer is about the 1984 we lived through in reality. Now this is true, as far as it goes, but is no more true for SF than for any other practice of writing: our tales are always the fruit of our times. SF, as with all other art, is the product of its era, reflecting or reacting against or illuminating the prejudices, fears, and assumptions of the period in which it was written. But there is more to SF than this: one does not only read Bester to decode and reconstruct the 1950s.

  What is important in good SF, and what makes SF that lasts, is how it talks to us of our present. What does it tell us now? And, even more important, what will it always tell us? For the point where SF becomes a rich and significant practice of writing is the point where it is about something bigger and more important than Zeitgeist, whether the author intended it to be or not.

  The Einstein Intersection (a pulp title imposed on this book from without—Delany’s or
iginal title for it was A Fabulous, Formless Darkness) is a novel that is set in a time after the people like us have left the Earth and others have moved into our world, like squatters into a furnished house, wearing our lives and myths and dreams uncomfortably but conscientiously. As the novel progresses, Delany weaves myth, consciously and un-self-consciously: Lobey, our narrator, is Orpheus, or plays Orpheus, as other members of the cast will find themselves playing Jesus and Judas, Jean Harlow (out of Candy Darling) and Billy the Kid. They inhabit our legends awkwardly: they do not fit them.

  The late Kathy Acker has discussed Orpheus at length, and Samuel R. Delany’s role as an Orphic prophet, in her introduction to the Wesleyan Press edition of Trouble on Triton. All that she said there is true, and I commend it to the reader. Delany is an Orphic bard, and The Einstein Intersection, as will become immediately apparent, is Orphic Fiction.

  In the oldest versions we have of the story of Orpheus it appears to have been simply a myth of the seasons: Orpheus went into the Underworld to find his Euridice, and he brought her safely out into the light of the sun again. But we lost the happy ending a long time ago. Delany’s Lobey, however, is not simply Orpheus.

  The Einstein Intersection is a brilliant book, self-consciously suspicious of its own brilliance, framing its chapters with quotes from authors ranging from Sade to Yeats (are these the owners of the house into which the squatters have moved?) and with extracts from the author’s own notebooks kept while writing the book and wandering the Greek Islands. It was written by a young author in the milieu he has described in The Motion of Light in Water and Heavenly Breakfast, his two autobiographical works, and here he is writing about music and love, growing up, and the value of stories as only a young man can.

  One can see this book as a portrait of a generation that dreamed that new drugs and free sex would bring about a fresh dawn and the rise of homo superior, wandering the world of the generation before them like magical children walking through an abandoned city—through the ruins of Rome, or Athens, or New York: that the book is inhabiting and reinterpreting the myths of the people who came to be known as the hippies. But if that were all the book was, it would be a poor sort of tale, with little resonance for now. Instead, it continues to resonate.

  So, having established what The Einstein Intersection is not, what is it?

  I see it as an examination of myths, and of why we need them, and why we tell them, and what they do to us, whether we understand them, or not. Each generation replaces the one that came before. Each generation newly discovers the tales and truths that came before, threshes them, discovering for itself what is wheat and what is chaff, never knowing or caring or even understanding that the generation who will come after them will discover that some of their new timeless truths were little more than the vagaries of fashion.

  The Einstein Intersection is a young man’s book, in every way: it is the book of a young author, and it is the story of a young man going into the big city, learning a few home truths about love, growing up, and deciding to go home (somewhat in the manner of Fritz Leiber’s protagonist from Gonna Roll the Bones, who takes the long way home, around the world).

  These were the things that I learned from the book the first time I read it, as a child: I learned that writing could, in and of itself, be beautiful. I learned that sometimes what you do not understand, what remains beyond your grasp in a book, is as magical as what you can take from it. I learned that we have the right, or the obligation, to tell old stories in our own ways, because they are our stories, and they must be told.

  These were the things I learned from the book when I read it again, in my late teens: I learned that my favorite SF author was black, and understood now who the various characters were based upon, and, from the extracts from the author’s notebooks, I learned that fiction was mutable—there was something dangerous and exciting about the idea that a black-haired character would gain red hair and pale skin in a second draft (I also learned there could be second drafts). I discovered that the idea of a book and the book itself were two different things. I also enjoyed and appreciated how much the author doesn’t tell you: it’s in the place that readers bring themselves to the book that the magic occurs.

  I had by then begun to see The Einstein Intersection in context as part of Delany’s body of work. It would be followed by Nova and Dhalgren, each book a quantum leap in tone and ambition beyond its predecessor, each an examination of mythic structures and the nature of writing. In The Einstein Intersection we encounter ideas that could break cover as SF in a way they were only beginning to do in the real world, particularly in the portrait of the nature of sex and sexuality that the book draws for us: we are given, very literally, a third, transitional sex, just as we are given a culture ambivalently obsessed with generation.

  Rereading the book recently as an adult I found it still as beautiful, still as strange; I discovered passages—particularly toward the twisty end—that had once been opaque were now quite clear. Truth to tell, I now found Lo Lobey an unconvincing heterosexual: while the book is certainly a love story, I found myself reading it as the story of Lobey’s courtship by Kid Death, and wondering about Lobey’s relationships with various other members of the cast. He is an honest narrator, reliable to a point, but he has been to the city after all, and it has left its mark on the narrative. And I found myself grateful, once again, for the brilliance of Delany and the narrative urge that drove him to write. It is good SF, and even if, as some have maintained (including, particularly, Samuel R. Delany), literary values and SF values are not necessarily the same, and the criteria—the entire critical apparatus—we use to judge them are different, this is still fine literature, for it is the skilled writing of dreams, and of stories, and of myths. That it is good SF, whatever that is, is beyond question. That it is a beautiful book, uncannily written, prefiguring much fiction that followed, and too long neglected, will be apparent to the readers who are coming to it freshly with this new edition.

  I remember, as a teen, encountering Brian Aldiss’s remark on the fiction of Samuel R. Delany in his original critical history of SF, Billion Year Spree: quoting C. S. Lewis, Aldiss commented that Delany’s telling of how odd things affected odd people was an oddity too much. And that puzzled me, then and now, because I found, and still find, nothing odd or strange about Delany’s characters. They are fundamentally human; or, more to the point, they are, fundamentally, us.

  And that is what fiction is for.

  October 1997

  The Einstein Intersection

  It darkles, (tinct, tint) all this our funanimal world.

  James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

  I do not say, however, that every delusion or wandering of the mind should be called madness.

  Erasmus of Rotterdam, The Praise of Folly

  There is a hollow, holey cylinder running from hilt to point in my machete. When I blow across the mouthpiece in the handle, I make music with my blade. When all the holes are covered, the sound is sad—as rough as rough can be and be called smooth. When all the holes are open, the sound pipes about, bringing to the eye flakes of sun on water, crushed metal. There are twenty holes. And since I’ve been playing music I’ve been called all different kinds of fool—more times than Lobey, which is my name.

  What I look like?

  Ugly and grinning most of the time. That’s a whole lot of big nose and gray eyes and wide mouth crammed on a small brown face proper for a fox. That, all scratched around with spun brass for hair. I hack most of it off every two months or so with my machete. Grows back fast. Which is odd, because I’m twenty-three and no beard yet. I have a figure like a bowling pin, thighs, calves, and feet of a man (gorilla?) twice my size (which is about five-nine) and hips to match. There was a rash of hermaphrodites the year I was born, which doctors thought I might be. Somehow I doubt it.

  Like I say, ugly. My feet have toes almost as long as my fingers, and the big ones are semi-opposable. But don’t knock it: once I saved Little Jon’s
life.

  We were climbing the Beryl Face, slipping around on all that glassy rock, when Little Jon lost his footing and was dangling by one hand. I was hanging by my hands, but I stuck my foot down, grabbed him up by the wrist, and pulled him back where he could step on something.

  At this point Lo Hawk folds his arms over his leather shirt, nods sagely so that his beard bobs on his ropy neck, says: “And just what were you two young Lo men doing on Beryl Face in the first place? It’s dangerous, and we avoid danger, you know. The birthrate is going down, down all the time. We can’t afford to lose our productive youth in foolishness.” Of course it isn’t going down. That’s just Lo Hawk. What he means is that the number of total norms is going down. But there’s plenty of births. Lo Hawk is from the generation where the number of non-functionals, idiots, mongoloids, and cretins was well over fifty percent. (We hadn’t adjusted to your images yet. Ah, well.) But now there are noticeably more functionals than non-functionals; so no great concern.

  Anyway, not only do I bite my fingernails disgracefully, I also bite my toenails.

  And at this point I recall sitting at the entrance of the source-cave where the stream comes from the darkness and makes a sickle of light into the trees, and a blood spider big as my fist suns himself on the rock beside me, belly pulsing out from the sides of him, leaves flicking each other above. Then La Carol walks by with a sling of fruit over her shoulder and the kid under her arm (we had an argument once whether it was mine or not. One day it had my eyes, my nose, my ears. The next, “Can’t you see it’s Lo Easy’s boy? Look how strong he is!” Then we both fell in love with other people and now we’re friends again) and she makes a face and says, “Lo Lobey, what are you doing?”

  “Biting my toenails. What does it look like?”

  “Oh, really!” and she shakes her head and goes into the woods towards the village.

  But right now I prefer to sit on the flat rock, sleep, think, gnaw, or sharpen my machete. It’s my privilege, so La Dire tells me.