In 1988 Delany published The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village a memoir about his life during the years he wrote his early science fiction. However, we felt his stories conveyed genuine emotional experiences that we could learn from.
Is that possible? We didn’t even know at the time that Delany was African-American and gay. We feel Chip Delany wrote about important life-altering events in the 1960s he experienced in his mid-twenties that we translated and understood in our mid-teens. This was especially true for Empire Star/Babel-17, and “The Star Pit” (found in the collection Aye, and Gomorrah). It’s why I considered Delany the most creative science fiction writer at the time.ĭelany was a decade older than Connell and me, so we used his books as guides to experiences that were out of our league. Delany was probably in the most exciting place on Earth (NYC) in his early twenties, and that was reflected in his 1960s science fiction. Delany was hanging around Greenwich Village when Bob Dylan showed up. Delany was a child prodigy, and his early books reflect his experiences of exploring a larger, more exciting adult world filled with other prodigies, some more dazzling than he.
Is this an illusion? Can fiction be a Rosetta stone for feelings?Ĭonnell and I continually refer to one book we both read fifty years ago, Empire Star by Samuel R. How often have you felt that a novel transmitted a deep emotional insight about life? We often talk about books and movies in terms of emotional responses. have absolutely no overlap with your own? This kind of practical information based on experience is something nonfiction books do very well, but what about the feelings Connell was talking about? Can we read memoirs and novels that will prepare us for what emotions we might actually experience?įor example, can a book describe the frustration at failing to do normal social tasks because we don’t know the language? Or convey the loneliness that comes from being surrounded by people you can’t talk to? Or the cultural shock of being with people whose politics, pop culture, religion, sports, music, etc. He also relates the experiences of many American expats living abroad. His book, in 316 pages, distils Leffel’s experiences into useful knowledge that can be passed on in words.
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I bought her a book, A Better Life for Half the Price by Tim Leffel, a guy who writes about how to live abroad, and who lives in Mexico. Janis has been to Mexico many times and has even lived there for six months. Is knowledge gained from reading totally fiction, or can fiction convey truths about an experience? Fiction has always given us the illusion that we travel in space and time. Understanding this issue will teach us about the limitations of fiction and nonfiction. And, here’s my hypothesis: novels should be able to describe feelings in such a way that we can relate them to our own experiences and feelings. On the other hand, I think it’s obvious that books can convey information we learn from our experiences. I concur with Connell that books can’t recreate the feeling of an experience. My conclusion is experiencing comes in two kinds – what we feel and what we think about those feelings. I probably am but I want to believe books can convey a degree of actual experience. Since I’ve never traveled out of the country but often read books by people that do, I argued that we should be able to gain some sense of traveling from reading. Connell said traveling to another country changes people in ways that are impossible to know without actually going. We were talking about another friend Janis moving to Mexico, and I wondered if I would like living in Mexico. experience came up recently in an argument with my old friend Connell. Can we ever learn about living from reading fictionalized experiences?īook v. But did I?Ĭan reading ever substitute for experience? Is there ever a time when book knowledge beats knowledge gained through living? Because it’s impossible to do everything in life, most of us live vicariously through reading. Is it possible to learn from a science fiction book? I’ve always believed I learned more from these two stories than all the other thousands of science fiction stories I’ve read. Empire Star and “The Star Pit” help me make more sense of the chaos than anything else I read. Those were crazy times to grow up, especially after Timothy Leary. But after The Beatles, Bob Dylan, and the Jefferson Airplane, when the 1960s became The Sixties, Samuel R. When I first discovered science fiction in the early 1960s I was inspired by the 1950s science fiction of Robert A. Delany are my favorite science fiction stories from the 1960s. A variation of this essay first appeared at Book Riot.Įmpire Star and “The Star Pit” by Samuel R.
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