The Atheist in the Attic Read online

  With five days to go in my twenty-fourth year, on March 25, 1967, my sixth science fiction novel, Babel-17, won a Nebula Award (a tie, actually) from the Science Fiction Writers of America. That same day the first copies of my eighth, The Einstein Intersection, became available at my publishers’ office. (Because of publishing schedules, my seventh, Empire Star, had preceded the sixth into print the previous spring.) At home on my desk at the back of an apartment I shared on St. Mark’s Place, my ninth, Nova, was a little more than three months from completion.

  On February 10, a month and a half before the March awards, in its partially completed state Nova had been purchased by Doubleday & Co. Three months after the awards banquet, in June, when it was done, with that first Nebula under my belt, I submitted Nova for serialization to the famous SF editor of Analog magazine, John W. Campbell Jr. He rejected it, with a note and phone call to my agent explaining that he didn’t feel his readership would be able to relate to a black main character. That was one of my first direct encounters, as a professional writer, with the slippery and always commercialized form of liberal American prejudice: Campbell had nothing against my being black, you understand. (There reputedly exists a letter from him to horror writer Dean Koontz, from only a year or two later, in which Campbell argues in all seriousness that a technologically advanced black civilization is a social and a biological impossibility.) No, perish the thought! Surely there was not a prejudiced bone in his body! It’s just that I had, by pure happenstance, chosen to write about someone whose mother was from Senegal (and whose father was from Norway), and it was the poor benighted readers, out there in America’s heartland, who, in 1967, would be too upset …

  It was all handled as though I’d just happened to have dressed my main character in a purple brocade dinner jacket. (In the phone call Campbell made it fairly clear that this was his only reason for rejecting the book. Otherwise he rather liked it.) Purple brocade just wasn’t big with the buyers that season. Sorry …

  Today if something like that happened, I would probably give the information to those people who feel it their job to make such things as widely known as possible. At the time, however, I swallowed it—a mark of how the times, and I, have changed. I told myself I was too busy writing. The most profitable trajectory for a successful science fiction novel in those days was for an SF book to start life as a magazine serial, move on to hardcover publication, and finally be reprinted as a mass market paperback. If you were writing a novel a year (or, say, three novels every two years, which was then almost what I was averaging), that was the only way to push your annual income up, at the time, from four to five figures—and the low five figures at that. That was the point I began to realize I probably was not going to be able to make the kind of living (modest enough!) that, only a few months before, at the awards banquet, I’d let myself envision. The things I saw myself writing in the future, I already knew, were going to be more rather than less controversial. The percentage of purple brocade was only going to go up.

  The second installment of my story here concerns the first time the word “Negro” was said to me, as a direct reference to my racial origins, by someone in the science fiction community. Understand that, since the late ’30s, that community, that world had been largely Jewish, highly liberal, and with notable exceptions leaned well to the left. Even its right-wing mavens, Robert Heinlein or Poul Anderson (or, indeed, Campbell), would have far preferred to go to a leftist party and have a friendly argument with some smart socialists than actually to hang out with the right-wing and libertarian organizations which they may well have supported on principle and, in Heinlein’s case, with donations. April 14, 1968, a year and—perhaps—three weeks later, was the evening of the next Nebula Awards Banquet. A fortnight before, I had turned twenty-six. That year my eighth novel, The Einstein Intersection (which had materialized as an object on the day of the previous year’s), and my short story, “Aye, and Gomorrah …” were both nominated.

  In those days the Nebula banquet was a black-tie affair with upward of a hundred guests at a midtown hotel-restaurant. Quite incidentally, it was a time of upheaval and uncertainty in my personal life (which, I suspect, is tantamount to saying I was a twenty-six-year-old writer). But that evening my mother and sister and a friend, as well as my wife, were at my table. My novel won—and the presentation of the glittering Lucite trophy was followed by a discomforting speech from an eminent member of SFWA.

  Perhaps you’ve heard such disgruntled talks. They begin, as did this one, “What I have to say tonight, many of you are not going to like …” and went on to castigate the organization for letting itself be taken in by (the phrase was, or was something very like) “pretentious literary nonsense,” unto granting it awards, and abandoning the old values of good, solid, craftsman-like storytelling. My name was not mentioned, but it was evident that I was (along with Roger Zelazny, not present) the prime target of this fusillade. It’s an odd experience, I must tell you, to accept an award from a hall full of people in tuxedos and evening gowns and then, from the same podium at which you accepted it, hear a half-hour jeremiad from an éminence grise declaring that award to be worthless and the people who voted it to you duped fools. It’s not paranoia. By count I caught more than a dozen sets of eyes sweeping between me and the speaker going on about the triviality of work such as mine and the foolishness of the hundred-plus writers who had voted for it.

  As you might imagine, the applause was slight, uncomfortable, and scattered. There was more coughing and chair scraping than clapping. By the end of the speech, I was drenched with the tricklings of mortification and wondering what I’d done to deserve them. The master of ceremonies, Robert Silverberg, took the podium and said, “Well, I guess we’ve all been put in our place.” There was a bitter chuckle. And the next award was announced.

  It again went to me—for my short story “Aye, and Gomorrah …” I had, by that time, forgotten it was in the running. For the second time that evening I got up and went to the podium to accept my trophy (it sits on a shelf above my desk about two feet away from me as I write), but, in dazzled embarrassment, it occurred to me as I was walking to the front of the hall that I must say something in my defense, though mistily I perceived it had best be as indirect as the attack. With my sweat-soaked undershirt beneath my formal turtleneck peeling and unpeeling from my back at each step, I took the podium and my second trophy of the evening. Into the microphone I said, as calmly as I could manage: “I write the novels and stories that I do and work on them as hard as I can to make them the best I can. That you’ve chosen to honor them—and twice in one night—is warming. Thank you.”

  I received a standing ovation—though I was aware it was as much in reaction to the upbraiding of the naysayer as it was in support of anything I had done. I walked back down toward my seat, but as I passed one of the tables, a woman agent (not my own) who had several times written me and been supportive of my work, took my arm as I went by and pulled me down to say, “That was elegant, Chip … !” while the applause continued. At the same time, I felt a hand on my other sleeve—on the arm that held the Lucite block of the Nebula itself—and I turned to Isaac Asimov (whom I’d met for the first time at the banquet the year before), sitting on the other side and now pulling me toward him. With a large smile, wholly saturated with evident self-irony, he leaned toward me to say: “You know, Chip, we only voted you those awards because you’re Negro … !” (This was 1968; the term “black” was not yet common parlance.) I smiled back (there was no possibility he had intended the remark in any way seriously—as anything other than an attempt to cut through the evening’s many tensions … Still, part of me rolled my eyes silently to heaven and said: Do I really need to hear this right at this moment?) and returned to my table.

  The way I read his statement then, and the way I read it today; indeed, anything else would be a historical misreading, is that Ike was trying to use a self-evidently tasteless absurdity (he was famous for them) to defuse some of
the considerable anxiety in the hall that night; it is a standard male trope, needless to say. I think he was trying to say that race probably took little or no part in his or any of the other writers’ minds who had voted for me.

  But such ironies cut in several directions. I don’t know whether Asimov realized he was saying this as well, but as an old historical materialist, if only as an afterthought, he must have realized that he was saying too: No one here will ever look at you, read a word your write, or consider you in any situation, no matter whether the roof is falling in or the money is pouring in, without saying to him- or herself (whether in an attempt to count it or to discount it), “Negro …” The racial situation, permeable as it might sometimes seem (and it is, yes, highly permeable), is nevertheless your total surround. Don’t you ever forget it … ! And I never have.

  The fact that this particular “joke” emerged just then, at that most anxiety-torn moment, when the only-three-year-old, volatile organization of feisty science fiction writers saw itself under a virulent battering from internal conflicts over shifting aesthetic values, meant that, though the word had not yet been said to me or written about me till then, it had clearly inhered in every step and stage of my then just-six years as a professional writer. And from then on, it was, interestingly, written regularly, though I did not in any way change my own self-presentation. Judy Merril had already referred to me in print as “a handsome Negro.” James Blish would soon write of me as “a merry Negro.” (I mean, can you imagine anyone at the same time writing of “a merry Jew”?)

  Here the story takes a sanguine turn.

  The man who’d made the speech had apparently not yet actually read my nominated novel when he wrote his talk. He had merely had it described to him by a friend, a notoriously eccentric reader, who had fulminated that the work was clearly and obviously beneath consideration as a serious science fiction novel: Each chapter began with a set of quotes from literary texts that had nothing to do with science at all! Our naysayer had gone along with this evaluation, at least as far as putting together his rebarbative speech.

  When, a week or two later, he decided to read the book for himself (in case he was challenged on specifics), he found, to his surprise, he liked it—and, from what embarrassment I can only guess, became one of my staunchest and most articulate supporters, as an editor and a critic. (A lesson about reading here: Do your share, and you can save yourself and others a lot of embarrassment.) And Nova, after its Doubleday appearance in ’68 and some pretty stunning reviews, garnered what was then a record advance for an SF novel paid to date by Bantam Books (a record broken shortly thereafter), ushering in the twenty years when I could actually support myself (almost) by writing alone.

  (Algis J. Budrys, who also had been there that evening, wrote in his January ’69 review in Galaxy, “Samuel R. Delany, right now, as of this book, Nova, not as of some future book or some accumulated body of work, is the best science fiction writer in the world, at a time when competition for that status is intense. I don’t see how a science fiction writer can do more than wring your heart while telling you how it works. No writer can.” Even then I knew enough not to take such hyperbole seriously. I mention it to suggest the pressures around against which one had to keep one’s head straight—and, yes, to brag just a little. But it’s that desire to have it both ways—to realize it’s meaningless, but to take some straited pleasure nevertheless from the fact that, at least, somebody was inspired to say it—that defines the field in which the dangerous slippages in your reality picture start, slippages that lead to that monstrous and insufferable egotism so ugly in so many much-praised artists.)

  But what Asimov’s quip also tells us is that, for any black artist (and you’ll forgive me if I stick to the nomenclature of my young manhood, that my friends and contemporaries, appropriating it from Dr. Du Bois, fought to set in place, breaking into libraries through the summer of ’68 and taking down the signs saying Negro Literature and replacing them with signs saying “black literature”—the small “b” on “black” is a very significant letter, an attempt to ironize and de-transcendentalize the whole concept of race, to render it provisional and contingent, a significance that many young people today, white and black, who lackadaisically capitalize it, have lost track of ), the concept of race informed everything about me, so that it could surface—and did surface—precisely at those moments of highest anxiety, a manifesting brought about precisely by the white gaze, if you will, whenever it turned, discommoded for whatever reason, in my direction. Some have asked if I perceived my entrance into science fiction as a transgression.

  Certainly not at the entrance point, in any way. But it’s clear from my story, I hope (and I have told many others about that fraught evening), transgression inheres, however unarticulated, in every aspect of the black writer’s career in America. That it emerged in such a charged moment is, if anything, only to be expected in such a society as ours. How could it be otherwise?

  A question that I am asked nowhere near as frequently—and the recounting of tales such as the above tends to obviate and, as it were, put to sleep—is the question: If that was the first time you were aware of direct racism, when was the last time?

  To live in the United States as a black man or woman, the fact is the answer to that question is rarely other than: A few hours ago, a few days, a few weeks … So, my hypothetical interlocutor persists, when is the last time you were aware of racism in the science fiction field per se. Well, I would have to say, last weekend I just spent attending Readercon 10, a fine and rich convention of concerned and alert people, a wonderful and stimulating convocation of high-level panels and quality programming, with, this year, almost a hundred professionals, some dozen of whom were editors and the rest of whom were writers.

  In the dealers’ room was an Autograph Table where, throughout the convention, pairs of writers were assigned an hour each to make themselves available for book signing. The hours the writers would be at the table were part of the program. At 12:30 on Saturday I came to sit down just as Nalo Hopkinson came to join me.

  Understand, on a personal level, I could not be more delighted to sign with Nalo. My student years ago, she is charming and talented, and today I think of her as a friend. We both enjoyed our hour together. That is not in question. After our hour was up, however, and we went and had some lunch together with her friend David, we both found ourselves more amused than not that the two black American SF writers at Readercon, out of nearly eighty professionals, had ended up at the autograph table in the same hour. Let me repeat: I don’t think you can have racism as a positive system until you have that socioeconomic support suggested by that (rather arbitrary) 20 percent/80 percent proportion. But what racism as a system does is isolate and segregate the people of one race, or group, or ethnos from another. As a system it can be fueled by chance as much as by hostility or by the best of intentions. (“I thought they would be more comfortable together. I thought they would want to be with each other …”) And certainly one of its strongest manifestations is as a socio-visual system in which people become used to always seeing blacks with other blacks and so—because people are used to it—being uncomfortable whenever they see blacks mixed in, at whatever proportion, with whites.

  My friend of a decade’s standing, Eric Van, had charge at this year’s Readercon of the programming the coffee klatches, readings, and autograph sessions. One of the goals—facilitated by computer—was not only to assign the visiting writers to the panels they wanted to be on, but to try, when possible, not to schedule those panels when other panels the same writers wanted to hear were also scheduled. This made some tight windows. I called Eric after the con, who kindly pulled up grids and schedule sheets on his computer. “Well,” he said, “lots of writers, of course, asked to sign together. But certainly neither you nor Nalo did that. As I recall, Nalo had a particularly tight schedule. She wasn’t arriving until late Friday night. Saturday at 12:30 was pretty much the only time she could sign—so, of
the two of you, she was scheduled first. When I consulted the grid, the first two names that came up who were free at the same time were you and Jonathan Lethem. You came first in the alphabet, so I put you down. I remember looking at the two of you, you and Nalo, and saying, ‘Well, certainly there’s nothing wrong with that pairing.’ But the point is, I wasn’t thinking along racial lines. I probably should have been more sensitive to the possible racial implications—”

  Let me reiterate: Racism is a system. As such, it is fueled as much by chance as by hostile intentions and equally the best intentions as well. It is whatever systematically acclimates people, of all colors, to become comfortable with the isolation and segregation of the races, on a visual, social, or economic level—which in turn supports and is supported by socioeconomic discrimination. Because it is a system, however, I believe personal guilt is almost never the proper response in such a situation. Certainly, personal guilt will never replace a bit of well-founded systems analysis. And one does not have to be a particularly inventive science fiction writer to see a time, when we are much closer to that 20 percent division, where we black writers all hang out together, sign our books together, have our separate tracks of programming, if we don’t have our own segregated conventions, till we just never bother to show up at yours because we make you uncomfortable and you don’t really want us; and you make us feel the same way …

  One fact that adds its own shadowing to the discussion is the attention that has devolved on Octavia Butler since her most-deserved 1995 receipt of a MacArthur “genius” award. But the interest has largely been articulated in terms of interest in “African-American Science Fiction,” whether it be among the halls of MIT, where Butler and I appeared last, or the University of Chicago, where we are scheduled to appear together in a few months. Now Butler is a gracious, intelligent, and wonderfully impressive writer. But if she were a jot less great-hearted than she is, she may very well wonder, “Why, when you invite me, do you always invite that guy, Delany?”