Stories for Chip

Stories for Chip is a collection of fiction and essays in honor of Samuel Delany. Two ways of approaching this review suggest themselves.

1. Since I have read only two Delany novels and would place neither on my favorite list, I could humbly remove myself from making further comment.
2. I could consider my relative lack of first hand experience of Delany’s work as a plus when it comes to considering the stories anthologized here strictly on their own merits.

Obviously I am going to go with the second option, but I need to say something more about the first.

I read Nova and The Einstein Intersection about four years ago. Nova I didn’t particularly like for reasons I no longer clearly remember. Einstein entertained and intrigued me, although I remember not quite “getting” the end. Looking at other reader reviews, I saw that I was not alone in that response. Looking recently at a range of reader reviews I see that Delany can be a polarizing author. Encomia are balanced out by disparaging comments from those who find the work opaque or over-written. This is especially true when it comes to Delany’s big books, Dahlgren and Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand. In one of his letters, Philip K. Dick, an author I think very highly of, reports throwing his copy of Dahlgren across the room before he was a hundred pages into it. In some cases, readers are put off by Delany's content. These negative, sometimes angry responses, combined with what I’ve read in this new book, have actually renewed my interest in going back to Delany.

I have also read a third Delany novel. When I was in the book business, a small gay publishing house needed to remainder a few hundred copies of Hogg, one of Delany’s forays into pornography. I bought them and sold them for between $10 and $50 as their number decreased. I also read it. I can’t take the time to be shocked, but it is a variety of violent, transgressive pornography that leaves me puzzled about both its purpose and its audience. But a recent edition of the Los Angeles Review of Books ran an article on Hogg, “Uses of Displeasure: Literary Value and Affective Disgust,” by Liz Janssen. Again, the jury is split.

Stories for Chip is not a collection of pastiches. The writers have apparently been chosen because they work under Delany’s influence and address his themes. I have to say “apparently” because the book comes with essentially no editorial content, and it is badly needed. This situation was worsened by the advance ebook I received from Net Galley. The Table of Contents listed a Contributors page, but it was nowhere to be found. And the transcription was the worst I have ever encountered. Words were run together, sometimesuptotheextentofanentire sentence. A couple of stories with particularly dense or playful language were unreadable.

There is a lot of very good stuff here, and even the absence of the Contributors section worked to my advantage. I knew only a fraction of these writers, and several of those only by name. Most of the stories occasioned a trip to Google, where I found information and links I would not have in the couple of sentences the book itself might have contained.

The contributors are an international, multi-ethnic roster whose interest in Delany shows in their attention to race and gender and the pleasure they take in language. The book was funded by an Indiegogo campaign, and the publisher’s website had an open call for submissions. Somehow I doubt that Junot Diaz, Nalo Hopksinson, Kit Reed, Michael Swannick and a few of the others answered an open call. And then there is Thomas Disch, who died in 2008. As I said above, more editorial content is badly needed, but finally that can’t take away from the enjoyment of the 30 stories and four critical essays included.

A few personal favorites, specifically from authors I did not know:

Claude Lalumiere: “Empathy Evolving as a Quantum of Eight-Dimensional Perception.” A misanthropic human time traveler finds himself millions of years in the future. Octopi are the dominant species, and if they don’t eat you they absorb you. This sets off a change of incarnations over the eons, in one of which the cephalopod/human entity may become God.

Anil Menon: “Clarity.” A professor of computer science in India finds himself living inside one of the theoretical models he and his co-workers consider thought experiments.

Geentajali Dighe: “The Last Dying Man.” According to Hinduism, the world destroys and recreates itself in cycles involving millions of years. And yet it has to happen sometime. A man and his daughter in Mumbai find themselves dealing with the day-to-day reality of the transition.

Weslyan Univserity Press keeps in print around 1500 pages of Delany’s critical and theoretical writing, and he prompts a fair amount of critical writing from others. There are several essays here, but Walida Imarisha’s very personal account of her engagement with both the man and his writing best conveys the significance Delany has had on writers of color. “So long seen as the lone Black voice in commercial science fiction Delany held that space for all the fantastical dreamers of color who came after him.” She goes on to propose that she and other writers become “walking science fiction…living, breathing embodiments of the most daring futures our ancestors were able to imagine.”

She is not asking anyone to sign onto her vision, but reading Stories for Chip you see that vision in action.

An uneven, but still fascinating collection of stories and essays in tribute to Grand Master Samuel R. Delany. My NetGalley ebook did not include the acknowledgments page so I'm not sure of the copyright dates on some, but there are several I would recommend for a Hugo next year if new, especially the essays. Full review at http://templetongate.net/storiesforchip.htm

Stories for Chip is mix of 33 pieces, some are fiction and others are nonfiction. Unfortunately there wasn’t an introductory essay explaining the rationale for the pieces chosen nor for the organization of the book. Perhaps this will be added in a later release of the book, I do not know. As I read the book I felt jolted from one story, one experience to the next. However that is what is most outstanding about this book. There is a fabulous diversity of writers and modes of expression – this group is multi-gendered, multiracial, multiethnic, and international. The aggregate of all of those points of view and types of literary expression does truly make the whole greater than the sum of its parts.

3 1/2 stars

So, a confession. I haven't finished any Delany. Yet. I've been meaning to, and I will, but I just haven't gotten to it yet. But when I saw this collection and some of the authors that contributed, I was very interested. It's a really interesting collection, and I really liked most of the stories. However, I didn't care as much for the creative nonfiction that was interspersed among them. Overall, this was a very good collection - I especially appreciated the wide variety of authors.

Publishing since the age of twenty, Samuel R. Delany is a highly respected novelist and literary critic alike. Familiarly known as “Chip”, Delany has written science fiction and fantasy (SFF) known for pushing boundaries, for challenging the notions of speculative genres, and experimenting with approaches to literature in general. Delany’s writing both subverts conventions and transcends fiction to explore social realities, most notably the existence of the Other. Indeed, as a man who could be described with terms such as academic, homosexual, polymath, African-American, and intelligent, Delany writes from the point of view of the Other, a spectrum of under-represented perspectives within SFF.

Both Delany’s fiction and nonfiction have been hugely influential, inspiring, and appreciated, partly due to this unique vision. However, his works have also resonated so strongly because Delany’s vision is not just unique, but uniquely brilliant, honest, and perceptive. With all of its challenges and transgressions against comfortable familiarity, Delany’s work strikes universal human chords, conveying both beauty and progressive encouragement.

Delany’s 1975 novel of apocalyptic literature, Dhalgren, remains the best-known representation of the themes to his fiction, and so far happens to be the only piece of fiction I’ve read by the author. (It is hard to read past works when it’s so much to just keep up with the new wonders!) Thus, reading a recent collection of works written in appreciation of Delany reminded me a lot of my experience reading an issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in tribute of Gene Wolfe soon after starting to really read extensively. At the time utterly unfamiliar with the author, much significance was surely lost to me. Nevertheless, how I did enjoy it despite its challenges and personal obscurity.

Stories For Chip: A Tribute to Samuel R. Delany, published by Rosarium Press and edited by Nisi Shawl and Bill Campbell, is a remarkable collection of both fiction and essays that very correctly does not aim to emulate Delany’s style, or even to copy the precise themes of his highly personal works. Yet, elements that echo Delany are certainly present in the fiction here, from eroticism to explorations of identity and perception.

At times surreal, the stories here are often as subversive and challenging as Delany’s own writing, making the collection no light reading. But as with Nisi Shawl’s own collection Filter House, this anthology will be meaningful to the right readers, and bears repeated readings. Of the thirty-three pieces that make up the collection, nine are reprints and the remainder original. Of the reprints, Junot Díaz’s “Nilda”, first published in The New Yorker, is likely the only one that probably reached a particularly large audience.

The nonfiction essays of the collection are mostly focused reflections on Delany’s works and influence, in a broad (Imarisha’s essay), individual (Swanwik’s), or combined (Lavender’s) context. This avoids including critical essays that try to tackle Delany’s own academic interest and experience directly, and it also provides readers who may be more new to Delany some context for appreciating some details of the story a bit more. Without any editorial comments from Shawl and Campbell (which honestly would have been still nice), these essays become near essential for some readers. I’ve previously enjoyed a collection of essays edited by Lavender, so reading more in this vein was welcome.

Like the contributors to the collection, the writing itself covers a significant diversity. A few instances of fiction, particularly the opening story by Eileen Gunn, are even closer to exercises in creative nonfiction. My personal two favorite stories among the fiction offerings were those by Claude Lalumière and the collaboration between Nalo Hopkinson and editor Shawl. Lalumière’s “Empathy Evolving as a Quantum of Eight-Dimensional Perception” falls into one my favorite categories: the weird alien encounter. In this case octopuses that dominate a far future Earth discover a human time traveler and attempt to absorb understanding of this strange creature. “Jamaica Ginger” by Hopkinson and Shawl is a far more “conventional” steam-punk tale that provides the most pure enjoyment from the collection.

Though I was going to limit myself to two, I just can’t help also mentioning Chesya Burke’s “For Sale: Fantasy Coffins (Ababuo Need Not Apply)” and Sheree Renée Thomas’ “River Clap Your Hands”, a pair of fantasies each with intense emotional resonance and powerful characterization.

Stories For Chip is a collection that both makes you want to go and (re)discover what was so special about Delany while also look for more by some authors that are likely unknown to most readers. No work is really “for everyone”, but people who are looking for depth and diversity and challenges compared to what they may normally encounter in the SFF genres should find much to appreciate in this tribute anthology.