When we talked to Samuel R. Delany for our mega-feature about writers we wished would return to science fiction last week, he was gracious enough to stay on the phone and answer some more questions. And since we promised almost a year ago to ask him some of your questions — back when we had a failed game of phone tag with him — we decided to ask as many as we could. Along the way, he told us a lot more about his new novel.

mistermac2000 asks: "During the seventies, Samuel Delany had a brief involvement in a few comics/graphic novel publications. With the rise in popularity of these forms, has he considered any more projects of this type?"

As I think I've written at one point or another, they are a large investment, especially for the artist. I think a 23 page ordinary comic is an investment for the artist, but if you're doing something 60 to 104 pages, that's a really big investment for an artist. So unless you've got someone who wants to pay you while you're doing it or up front, it's kind hard to get someone to do that with you, unless you're the artist yourself. When I did Empire with Howard Chaykin, which was 1980 or 1982, Byron Preiss was the packager, and that was a strangely ill-fated project. After we did it, I was very happy with what we did, and Byron was very unhappy with the ending, and just took it upon himself to completely rewrite it, and cut up the art, so that there's no way to put it back in its original shape. It just doesn't exist any more, and he's dead now of course. So nobody will ever see the way it was originally supposed to end. I've written about it in at least one interview. I think it's my book Silent Interviews. I'm very happy with Bread And Wine, which is the one I did with Mia Wolff more recently. It basically explains how Denis and I, my partner of the past, getting on for 20 years [got together]. But you basically need to find someone who is really interested in doing sixty to 100 full-sized fairly complicated and rich drawings — or paintings in the case of Empire, every page was actually painted in Empire — that's hard to find. So I could see doing more, but you've got to find somebody who wants to do it.

DocNoodle asks: After being involved in science fiction for 40 years, are you seeing any trends that are tend to repeat themselves or go in cycles, or do you have any predictions for the future of the genre?

Not really. No. I think that's the easiest way to answer that. Some of the Cyberpunk stuff — some of the most recent incarnations of the Cyberpunk stuff seem to me to be kind of dull. It seems to become a [collection] of endless mannerist fights, with everyone firing various and sundry power guns at each other from around corners, and I don't see what the point of it all is. I suspect probably I'm not giving it my full attention when I read it, rarely do I finish it. It ill behooves me to make a judgment, but rarely are they able to catch me up in the first 20 pages or so. It's as if they think these blood-and-thunder beginnings of "Agent Joe C. Seven leaned from behind and fired into the explosion, etc. etc.," and this goes on for twenty five pages, and this is supposed to make you interested in the character or the situation. ANd it doesn't. It sounds like a bad movie that I wouldn't be interested in either. I will not name names, but I do see a lot of that stuff, by writers who you can tell have a certain verbal facility. They actually do describe these things moderately well. For me, I've read the situation described so frequently, that there's no amount of verbal invention that's going to reawaken it for me. I want to read about a character doing something fairly quiet where I can picture who the character is, and what their attitude towards the world is — which I'm a lot more interested in than what they do under the pressure of a gunfight. Most people under the pressure of a gunfight, assuming they know how to shoot guns, do pretty much the same thing: try very hard to stay alive and kill the other guy. Not terribly exciting.

Djehuty asks: "Will he ever finish and publish The Splendor and Misery of Bodies, of Cities?"

Probably not, I can't say for sure. Again, I haven't written it off entirely. I did write about 150 pages of it at some point. But a number of things had come up to undercut it. I've explained it many, many times, and don't mind explaining it again. I was in a major relationship at that time, that kind of fueled the first volume, Stars In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand. And that relationship broke up, and that was the beginning of the Eighties, at the same time the AIDS situation came in. A lot of it, as the diptych was originally planned out, was a celebration of lot of the stuff I saw at the time in the gay world. Sort of in allegorical form, a lot of that was being celebrated. There was a lot of the gay situation that made me rethink some of that, not in any kind of simplistic way, but in a fairly complicated way. So between the personal breakup, which was an eight-year relationship that came to ane nd, and the changes in the world situation, there were other things that sort of grabbed my interest more. That made the second one a little hard to go on. I still think there are some valid things to be said about it, in that second volume. And it's quite... I've got two or three more books, that I really would like to write, and at this point, my books take me three to five years. So that's 15 years, and I'm practically 70 years old. So I'll be in my 80s when those books are done, and I don't know whether I'm going to be writing anything, or even if I'm going to be here. But I do have thse other projgects I want to write first. Three of them, one of which is the book I'm finishing up now, Through The Valley Of The Nest Of Spiders.

Can you tell us more about that?

In a way, it's a very simple story, just about two working-class gay men, who meet when they're seventeen and nineteen, living on the coast of Georgia. They meet in 2007, and they stay together for the next 80 years, until one of them dies. Now you tell me whether that's science fiction or not. It definitely goes into the future, but on the other hand, they're absolutely out of the center of life, and things progress where they live, very very slowly. And they hear about things that are going on outside. They live on coastal part of Georgia in a little town that does go through cycles of being a semi-popular tourist spot in the summers, and then some years, nobody bothers to come at all. Eventually they move to a little island off the coast, and a little lesbian art colony starts up on the island. And they wonder if they're not being crowded out of their new home. But they're very fond of some of the people who live there, and some of the people who live there are very fond of them.

Gargle asks, Do you consider linguistics a science in real life? And how do linguistics and philosophy inform your work?

Yes, of course. Linguistics is very much a science. It's a human science, one of the human sciences. And it's one of the more interesting human sciences. It's a science in the same way that sociology and psychology is a science. [As for how they inform my work?] At this point, very little. They did when I was 22 and 23, and I am now 67.

Galatea2.2 asks: "One more question for Mr. Delany: Writers are often exhorted to write the novels they are dying to read...what's the unwritten book he would love to write (or just read)?"

All of my books have been ((what I would like to read.)) That's the impetus to write pretty much any book I've ever writen. That's true of the Jewels of Aptor, although maybe in this case, my wife would have liked to have read it, back when I was married. That cretainly was true of Dhalgren, and it's just equally true of Through The Valley Of The Nest Of Spiders... As a gay man in a long-term relationship that's been going along quite happily, for as I said, going on for 20 years, I realized I would like to read a book about a long-term relationship and the type of things that might go into it. It's not an autobiographycal work in any way shape or form, although certainly many many of the lessons and ideas and the kinds of things that you learn as you go on in your life have gone into it. It's a very low-key book about people who do their laundry together and help each other fold up the sheets, and one of them makes the coffee in the morning because he makes an especially good pot of coffee. That kind of thing. It is not a "big plot" novel. It's a very characater driven novel. Although it's fairly long, around 200,000 words.

I was talking to some friends online about the writers we miss the most from science fiction, and these four's names came up again and again. So I was moved to get in touch with them and ask them if they thought it was true that they'd stopped writing science fiction. And if so, why was this the case? Their answers say as much about the genre as a whole as they do about the individual writers.

Mary Doria Russell wrote the breathtaking first-contact novel The Sparrow and its sequel, Children Of God. Since then, she's written two historical novels, A Thread Of Grace and Dreamers Of The Day. She writes:

My husband and I talked this over last night, and it's not clear to us that anything significant changed when I began my third novel. I didn't decide to switch genres. I simply told a third story, and then a fourth, and now a fifth.

SF and historical fiction make similar demands on an author. They both require you to imagine as fully as possible a time and place that are not your own. In all my novels, there is an ironic and distanced narrator who knows a lot more than the characters about their past and future. And there is always an awareness of the contemporary limitations of technology and ideology, and of how those limitations affects lives.

In my personal life, the most unconventional thing about me is how relentlessly conventional I am have remained for nearly six decades. I married my high school sweetheart almost 40 years ago. I was a PTA mom who stayed at home to raise my kid. Don and I still live in a Cleveland suburb and I'm on the City of South Euclid's Planning and Zoning Commission, for crissakes. At the same time, intellectually, I am drawn to borderlands and to the people who inhabit them: marginal natives, newcomers, travelers, people who don't fit and who therefore have an interestingly slanted view of the cultures they inhabit. Remember: I was an anthropologist long before I was a novelist. We are trained to seek out marginal natives; no one can give you a better perspective on aspects of culture that statistically normal people simply accept as, well, normal.

Admittedly: I have turned out to be kind of a genre slut. I will stand on the literary street corner and get into any genre that drives by and offers to take me to a good par-tay. And sometimes I don't go home with the one who brung me to the dance.

THE SPARROW is first contact SF; it is also a courtroom drama a lot like THE CAINE MUTINY. CHILDREN OF GOD is obviously SF, but it's also a three-generation family saga. Both are prolonged meditations on the role of religion in the lives of many people and in human history from the Age of Discovery to the Space Age. A THREAD OF GRACE is a World War II thriller, and a natural history of resistance movements. It also lets readers think about the two questions that every Holocaust novel must address: How could this have happened? What would I have done?

DREAMERS OF THE DAY is about the 1921 Cairo Peace Conference and the invention of the modern Middle East, but it's also sort of a romance, and it ends as magical realism, complete with Egyptian gods and a bitchy little tiff between Napoleon and General George McClellan. And I'm almost finished with EIGHT TO FIVE, AGAINST.

This new book is in some ways a classical Western about Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp, but I see John Henry Holliday as a heartbreaking figure: born in the antebellum South, educated in the North for a professional life in the East, trying not to die on the rawest frontier of the West. Doc might as well have been THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH: frail, lonely and desperately homesick, surrounded by people who are not nearly as sophisticated or educated as he was. At the same time, this story is a murder mystery set in Dodge City in 1878.

So I guess what this all adds up to is: who gives a shit about labels? I write about what fascinates me, and I use whatever tools seem best suited to do the job at hand. What happens after that is marketing.

Karen Joy Fowler wrote Sarah Canary, which is widely viewed as a type of first-contact novel. Her story "What I Didn't See" won a Nebula Award, and she co-founded the James Tiptree Jr. Award for speculative fiction stories that consider gender in new and interesting ways. (Full disclosure: I was a Tiptree juror.) Her more recent novels, The Jane Austen Book Club and Wit's End, have fewer overtly fantastical elements. She tells io9:

So this is something I've been thinking hard about ever since I published Wit's End. I've just finished yet another of my maybe-they're-aliens-maybe-they're-not stories, (Gardner Dozois calls this the "is that a dinosaur in the shadows?" stories) and am about to write an incontrovertible ghost story.

Here are some of the things I've been thinking.

1) I don't set out to write in any genre; that's just not my working method. I start with whatever I have, some tiny incoherent image that I hope to make into a story. And then I take what I need to make that story work. Maybe what I need comes from science fiction, but maybe not. I won't know until I write it.

2) I'm really interested in genre and draw a lot of energy from it. So even if the things I write aren't, strictly speaking, genre piece, they all seem to be in conversation with genre in some way. (I like mysteries as much as I like sf, by the way.)

3) What I love most about science fiction is the short fiction. Almost all my short fiction spins around a science fictional idea even if the resulting story isn't quite sf. Charles Brown of Locus told me once that I'm a science fiction writer because I think like a science fiction writer and I was enormously flattered and hope that's true.

4) But even if it is, mystery writing with its emphasis on plot and sf writing with its emphasis on tech don't really play to my strengths.

What I noticed with Wit's End was that my most sympathetic reviews came from inside sf or mystery. The literary reviews were more baffled and less pleased. People have asked me repeatedly if I think my story "What I Didn't See" is sf and I can't say that I do. But what is very clear to me is that I wrote it for sf readers. And what became clear with Wit's End is that I'm always writing for sf readers. Science fiction readers enjoy figuring things out and don't mind being puzzled for long stretches. They read in a very active way. And that's the way I read and those are the readers I'm trying to please.

So — what I'm asking myself now is: if my ideal readers are sf readers, doesn't it seem, well, logical, that I would please them most by writing sf? Which is really what they want to read? And I'm not sure I can be anything but the writer I am. But I'll keep trying.

One final point. In the last couple of weeks I've read about toxoplasma — the parasite that alters our behavior until we're simply pawns in the paws of housepet cats; a woman in India found guilty of murdering her fiance based on her brain scan; a site on the internet where for a monthly fee a computer will pray for you ceaselessly. Stan Robinson says we all live in a science fiction novel now and it's clearly true. So I truly believe that science fiction is realism now and literary realism is a nostalgic literature about a place where we once lived, but no longer do.

Nicola Griffith won the Tiptree Award and the Lambda Literary Award for her first novel, Ammonite, and the Nebula and another Tiptree for her second novel, Slow River. She co-edited two queer speculative fiction anthologies in the Bending The Landscape series. Her last few novels have been crime fiction, and her most recent book is a memoir. She says:

I'm a native of sf. You can't leave that kind of thing behind. Just as everyone I meet in the US knows I'm English, everyone who reads my work knows I'm a skiffy geek. It doesn't matter how long I've been away; my English sf upbringing colours my accent, my attitude, my vocabulary. It's who I am.

But I've been visiting home more often lately.

I've just written my first short story in years and it's sf—it will be in Eclipse Three, out in December. I've been outlining a screenplay—it's sf. I've written chunks of, and have most of an outline for, an alternate history/sword swangin' fantasy novel. My recent favourites in film and TV are all skiffy extravaganzas—Iron Man, Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, True Blood. My last two essays were all about sf (one is even called "Identity and SF"). I just wrote the intro to the new edition of Leigh Brackett's Sword of Rhiannon. The only anthologies I've ever edited were fantasy, sf, and horror. I've just agreed to be a GoH at the Atlanta queer geekvent, OutlantaCon, next year.

Yes, the next novel I plan to publish is a 7th C. historical — but, hey, think of it as basically a big fat fantasy novel with no magic.

So, no, I haven't left. I'm still part of sf, and it's part of me.

Samuel R. Delany became a published science fiction author at the age of twenty, and wrote the Nebula Award-winning novels Babel-17 and The Einstein Intersection. His novel Dhalgren is considered one of the most important works in the genre, and his other novels include Nova, Triton and Stars In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand. Since the mid-1980s, he's focused on writing literary fiction, essays and erotica. He talked to us by phone yesterday, and here's what he said:

I certainly don't feel that I've abandoned science fiction in any way. I still love it. It's true, I don't either read or write it, the way I used to. But I've always basically considered myself, dare I say it, just a writer. In an odd way, I never really made a decision to be a science fiction writer. I was about 19 years old. My then-wife, Marilyn Hacker, got a job as an assistant editor at Ace Books, and she would come home complaining about the stories she would edit. Her major complaints had to do, mainly, with the women characters. This was back in 1961 or 1962. The heroines tended to be unbelievably wimpy and would hang around waiting to be rescued, and the villainesses were so dastardly, you couldn't believe them. And there was nothing in between. The women characters tended not to resemble anything that you could recognize as a human being at all.

So I began to write a science fiction novel for her, and I tried to work specifically on the female characters, and to make a couple of characters who started out looking like they were fulfilling the stereotype, their reputations came through. And then when you actually spent time with them, you discovered they were a little different than that. That was the Jewels of Aptor. To make a long story short, we submitted it. It was sold, and because it was sold, I began to write another one, and then another one and then another one. And by the time I had written a fifth, I suddenly thought, "Oh, I must be a science fiction author." Because I had now written five of them and had had sold four of them, and was on my way to selling a fifth. As I said, it was something that just kind of happened. I never decided I wanted to be a science fiction author, per se.

Before that, I had written nine other novels that were not sold — and that were not science fiction — and probably for good reasons. They weren't terribly good. It's arguable that neither was my first science fiction novel, if the truth be known. I was nineteen, and you can imagine how good they might have been, or not been. But I just kept doing this. And finally around 1975, 1976, or probably a little earlier than that — I guess it was with Dhalgren — I started thinking about things that couldn't be handled in the usual way science fiction handles things. I think of Dhalgren as a science fiction novel, but it's a lot bigger and a lot more ambitious, than some of the things that came before. And then as things went on, I think Triton is a return, pretty much, to the center of science fiction concerns. And then the Tales of Nevèrÿon, which is the next big project that occupied me — that's a sword and sorcery series.

And since 1984, when I finished Stars In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand, I haven't written anything that's immediately recognizable as science fiction. And so the last few things have been non-science fiction: Atlantis: Three Tales, which is pretty much mundane fiction; the Mad Man, which is sort of highly erotically charged mundane fiction; Hogg (although Hogg was actually written when I was 27). So I was always sort of moving back and forth between them. Dark Reflections, which is last published novel, was not science fiction. Gallows is a historical novel and sort of a spoof on erotica. My most recent novel I'm actually finishing, is something called Through The Valley Of The Nest Of Spiders, and it's very much on the three-way border between literary impressionism, science fiction and pornography. It's an attempt to see whether you can do all three in one book. Though the science fiction aspect of it isn't pushed, and you have to get at least a third of the way through it before any of it raises its head. I hope it works. I will either keep away people, the other two genres will alienate the lovers of the one genre, or maybe it'll be inclusive and invite people in from all three. You pays your money, you takes your chances.

So I never saw myself as either giving it up, or exclusively committing myself to it. I was just interested in trying to write well, and to tell stories using whatever generic constraints seemed to highlight what I was trying to do in that particular story. That's how I've always looked at the process.

Are "plot" and "story" just two different ways of saying the same thing? They're both about a sequence of events that starts in one place and ends in another? (Or goes in a circle, in a hopefully meaningful fashion.) And yet, people seem to use them to describe very different things.

When people talk about a "plot-driven" science fiction book or movie, they're usually implying that the characters are as wafer-thin as the exploding mint in Monty Python's Meaning Of Life. The only thing a "plot-driven" work cares about is marching us from one plot point to another. There's a spaceship that's going to crash, and we have to stop it! But if the spaceship doesn't crash, then the hero's mother will never have been born! And so on. It's all about the mechanics of the plot.

(For some examples, see the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Of America glossary of critiquing terms, which says "plot-driven" stories are ones in which the author forces the characters to go in the direction the plot requires, whether it makes sense or not. Also, a commenter at SFSignal says serious science fiction is being replaced by plot-driven spectacle.)

Meanwhile, you hear creators, and fans, talk about "the story" with awe. Joss Whedon, for example, talks regularly about how "the story" is the most important thing in his works, and everything else is secondary. (Says Joss, "The STORY is in charge, the story that keeps on speaking to me, that says there is much more to tell about all these characters.") Usually, there's an implication that "story" involves more of an emotional component, or some kind of magical alchemy, that's not present in mere plot.

Here's Doomsday Book author Connie Willis, talking in 1997 about how her religious beliefs affect (or don't affect) her writing:

I think writers have to tell the truth as they know it. On the other hand, I think every truly religious person is a heretic at heart because you can't be true to an established agenda. You have to be true to what you think. I think Madeleine L'Engle and C.S. Lewis both have times when they become apologists for religion rather than writers. I want always to be a writer, and if my religion is what has to go, so be it. The story is everything.

Samuel Delany talks, obliquely, about the relationship between plot and story in his book, About Writing, which I reviewed a while ago. First, he quotes E.M. Forster, from his 1927 book Aspects Of The Novel:

The more we look at the story (the story that is a story, mind), the more we disentangle it from the finer growth it supports, the less we shall find to admire. It runs like a backbone - or may I say a tapeworm, for its beginning and end are arbitrary... it is a sequence of events arranged in their time sequence - dinner coming after breakfast, Tuesday after Monday, decay after death and so on. Qua story, it can only have merit: that of making the audience wonder what happens next. And conversely it can only have one fault: that of making the audence not want to know what happens next. These are the only two criticisms that can be made on the story that is a story... When we isolate the story like this and hold it out on the forceps - wriggling and interminable, the naked worm of time - it presents an aspect both unlovely and dull. But we have much to learn from it.

Delany adds:

With some extraordinary exceptions throughout the history of all these fields, most comic books, TV series and action movies don't have good stories. Neither do most published novels, and for the same reason: the logic that must hold them together and produce the readerly curiosity about what will happen is replaced by "interesting situations" (or an "interesting character"), which don't relate logically or developmentally to what comes before or after. That is to say, they are wildly illogical. We cannot follow their development, even - or especially - if we try. If we look at them closely, they don't make much sense. The general population, day in and day out, is not used to getting good stories.

You'll notice that both Forster and Delany use the term "story" instead of "plot," to describe the backbone of the narrative. Delany also says that he and Forster share a healthy respect for the ancient power of the story, so it seems like in these quotes, both writers are using "story" to mean both "story" and "plot."

And yet, I feel like I keep coming across the same dichotomy, especially as people talk about science fiction. Stories are nobel and revered, plots are ugly and spine-like, best concealed by layers of muscle and fat. So what is it that makes "plot" mechanistic and "story" magical? Here's one theory that I've come up with: plot is about the future, story is about the past.

Think about it this way: when you focus on the plot of a book or movie, it's always about "What happens next?" You're constantly watching to see how the hero's predicament will turn out, and how the clues you've picked up on will be resolved.

Meanwhile, we tell stories to answer the question, "How did we get here?" Like, for example, I want to know why the U.S. army is fighting in Iraq. I can tell a story about how there was this evil dictator who invaded Kuwait, and we had to stop him, but then he kept flouting the terms of the peace agreement. Or I can tell a story about how our president had an agenda that involved toppling the government of Iraq, and after a terrorist attack, he decided to use that as a pretext to invade. Which story I tell depends on my viewpoint - Does the story begin in 1991, or 2001? And which elements do I include? But either way, I'm telling a story about how things got to this point.

So maybe a good plot is something that takes you from A to B to C without wrecking your suspension of disbelief, and keeps you guessing about what's going to happen next. And maybe a good story is something that delivers you at a destination, and in the end you understand how the journey all led up to this point. The best works, of course, do both. And the worst works do neither. But I guess I tend to think of it as more of a continuum, with most works falling somewhere in the middle. What do you think?

Says the Guardian, in its intro:

It is sometimes assumed that science fiction, fantasy and horror must mean spaceships, elves and vampires - and indeed, you'll find Iain M Banks, Tolkien and Bram Stoker on our list of mind-expanding reads. Yet these three genres have a tradition as venerable as the novel itself. Fiction works through metamorphosis: in every era authors explore the concerns of their times by mapping them on to invented worlds, whether they be political dystopias, fabulous kingdoms or supernatural dimensions.

It's definitely an interesting list — probably different from what most American newspapers or critics would have chosen. There's a lot of literary stuff, some of which everyone recognizes as science fiction (like Margaret Atwood and Michael Chabon) and some of which nobody does (Henry James, Herman Hesse). Oddly, both Iain M. Banks and his literary twin, Iain Banks, make the list. It's probably weighted a bit too much towards earlier works, but it contains a surprising number of ninteenth century titles, enough to be provocative. There's some stuff in there which is more properly fantasy, like Harry Potter and The Sword In The Stone.

Oh, and they misspelled Samuel Delany's name. Oops.

Mostly, though, it's a pretty great list — it does what a list of must-read books should do, which is make you rethink the shape of the genre. Not just by debating which books they left out and which they shouldn't have included, but also by making you think about how far back the genre stretches, and how much it's changed in recent years. The recent authors on the list include rising stars like Alastair Reynolds and China Mieville, as well as some literary stars like Nicola Barker. You can sort of see an arc, from 19th century fabulism through 20th century pulpiness, back to a kind of fabulism in the 21st century. Or maybe I'm just projecting a bit.

Easily as interesting as the main list are some of the side articles, like Michael Moorcock's list of the best dystopias (which contains few surprises but is still an interesting bit of analysis.) And Roz Kaveny's list of radical novels. Susanna Clarke names her favorite world-building series. And there's the best of J.G. Ballard, an author who belongs on any must-read list. [Guardian]

The book in question, About Writing, isn't quite what I'd expected from someone who's been teaching creative writing for the past thirty years. It's definitely not a style guide or a tutorial on fiction writing. (The book's subtitle, "7 essays, 4 letters & 5 interviews," could be a bit of a clue.) Instead, it's Delany's ruminations, gathered over the years, about both the craft of fiction writing and the writer's life in general.

There are fantastic insights in there, as well as advice that might make you rethink everything about your approach to fiction writing - even if you end up disagreeing with some of it.

You have to have a bit of patience, though. Delany says, in the book's intro, that he doesn't think you can talk about how to write fiction, without also discussing why people write fiction, and the world in which we write it:

[This book] deals with three other topics and the relations between them. One - which it shares with most books on writing - is, yes, the art of writing fiction. The other two are far less often discussed in classes and rarely figure in such "how-to" books. First, how is the world structured - specifically the socio-aesthetic world - in which the writer works?... Second (and finally), this book discusses the way literary reputations grow - and how, today, they don't grow.

He goes on to prove his point in the intro, mixing a nuts-and-bolts discussion of scene-setting with a long passage on the nature of begeisterung (roughly translated as "inspiration," but it's actually one of those German words that needs a 500-word explanation in English.)

There are some good nuts-and-bolts essays - in particular, the essays on "Thickening The Plot" and "Characters" are pretty helpful. Even here, though, Delany throws some curveballs, albeit welcome ones. Take the essay on plot, for example. Delany goes off on some tangents, and also seems to be discussing scene-setting instead of plotting. But it all comes together, when he explains that the key to a good plot is actually visualizing the events of the story as if they really happened. And if you're forced - by a cranky critique group, or your own conscience - to change the story's events around, then you must revisualize the story all over again. See it in your mind, through the lens of key details, until you can convince yourself that "on some level the story actually did happen (as opposed to 'should have happened') in the new way." It's actually pretty amazing advice.

A lot of the other nuts-and-bolts advice winds up in the back of the book, in an appendix called "Nips, Nits, Tucks And Tips." Including info like when to use the first person, how to punctuate dialogue, and the dramatic structure of fiction.

The rest of the book includes speeches, essays and letters, where Delany tells funny anecdotes and reminisces about his early friendships with storytellers and his encounters with other science fiction writers. (I didn't actually know he taught Vonda McIntyre at Clarion, but apparently he did.) He explains why Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye is a bad book, discusses how to achieve literary acclaim (including a discussion of Doris Lessing's refusal to cooperate with a would-be biographer) and a lengthy discussion of the state of writing and editing today.

The book is full of insights and startling arguments, but it's probably not a book you'll read in one go. I've found myself picking it up, reading one essay, and putting it down again for a day or two. It might actually be that rarest of creatures - academic bathroom reading. This isn't, by any means, a criticism. It's a very dense, ruminative book full of ideas that will pop into your head a few days after you read them. But it also feels a bit, at times, like Delany is sitting in an overstuffed armchair lecturing the reader, which goes over better in smaller doses. Luckily, the book comes packaged with the dosages already divided up.

As an influence:

Nichelle Nichols decided to quit playing Lt. Uhura at the end of the first season of Star Trek, because she felt the role wasn't stretching her as an actor, and she wanted to return to the theater. But then she met a Star Trek fan at an NAACP event: Dr. King, who asked her to reconsider because of her character's tremendous visibility. Here she is talking about it:

Ammonite author Nichola Griffith says that MLK's marches and speeches coincided with a new wave of science fiction that asked readers to identify with "the Other." For example, John Wyndham's The Crysalids is told from the point of view of a mutant.

Author Harlan Ellison marched with Dr. King from Montgomery to Selma. So did Sulu actor George Takei.

Robert J. Sawyer quotes MLK in several of his books. He has one fictional president quote the "I Have A Dream" speech, and has his characters discuss "the content of his character" in another story. One of his novels begins with a quote from MLK: "Though the arc of the universe is long, it bends toward justice."

George Romero finished his zombie epic Night Of The Living Dead, which has an African American hero, just as MLK was assassinated. And that shaped how people viewed his film, Romero explains:

We cast an African-American actor because he was the best actor from among our friends. And when we finished the film, literally as we were driving it to New York in the trunk of a car, that was the night Martin Luther King was assassinated. So the movie became a reflection of the times. There's a certain anger in the movie already, but a lot of why that film gets applause is because Wayne is a black guy. In the script, his race is never mentioned. In my mind, when I wrote that initial scene, he was a white guy. And he would've been shot by the police even if he was a white guy. But because he happened to be an African-American, that made it much stronger, particularly after the assassination. We shouldn't take all the credit for that. A lot of it was an accident.

Fictionalized representations:

The fictional character most frequently compared to MLK is, of course, Charles Xavier, the leader of the X-Men, a mutant organization that includes a school for gifted and talented mutants. Xavier wants mutants to live in peace among the normal humans, and assimilate as much as possible— in contrast to the mutant villain Magneto, who's usually compared with Malcolm X. The first X-movie makes this comparison more explicit, by having Magneto utter the words "by any means necessary."

But Professor X isn't the only MLK surrogate out there. Paul Fenster, the African American civil rights leader in Samuel Delany's Dhalgren, is frequently described as representing the recently assassinated MLK. He's described as a "colored man up from the South, some civil rights, militant-type person." And the chaos that envelops the midwestern town of Bellona, cut off from the rest of the world, is reminiscent of the riots that struck after King's assassination.

John Barnes' novel Earth Made Of Glass takes place on a planet torn by racial hatred. The only hope is a prophet named Ix, who's portrayed as a Martin Luther King archetype.

DC Comics' black superhero Amazing Man didn't manage to save MLK from an assassin's bullet, but he was a responsible for apprehending shooter James Earl Ray afterwards, in the DC version of events.

In the story "The Space Traders" by Derrick Bell (which later became an episode of the HBO miniseries Cosmic Slop) aliens arrive on Earth on Jan. 1, 2000. They make a simple offer to the United States: we'll give you untold wealth, clean energy, and substances that will clean up your environment. All we want in return is your African American population. After much debate, the U.S. accepts, and hands over all of its African Americans — in chains — on MLK day:

The last Martin Luther King holiday the nation would ever observe dawned on an extraordinary sight. In the night, the Space Traders had drawn their strange ships right up to the beaches and discharged their cargoes of gold, minerals, and machinery, leaving vast empty holds. Crowded on the beaches were inductees, some twenty million silent black men, women, and children, including babes in arms. As the sun rose, the Space Traders directed them, first, to strip off all but a single undergarment; then, to line up; and finally, to enter those holds which yawned in the morning light like Milton's "darkness visible."

The Star Trek anthology Strange New Worlds IV includes a story about the psychiatrist who treated Benny Russell, Captain Benjamin Sisko's 1950s science fiction writer alter ego. (Sisko had a hallucination/vision that he was a 1950s SF writer. Sort of.) In the story, the doctor hears of the assassination of Dr. King, and thinks about his former patient and his stories of a post-racism future Starfleet for the first time in years.

In Roger Corman's batty 1970 film Gas, Or It became Necessary To Destroy The World In Order To Save It, aka GAS-S-S, an experimental nerve gas kills everyone in the world over the age of 25. At the end, all the characters are running around, and people wearing masks of JFK, MLK, Che Guevara and Alfred E. Neuman show up.

Aliens and time travelers:

In Christopher Pike's young-adult Remember Me book series, a woman named Shari Ann Cooper dies, but her spirit winds up in another dimension. She visits demonic aliens on Mars and then goes inside a black hole and nearly gets atomized. But she finds out she's supposed to return to Earth in the body of a living person, as a Wanderer. And it turns out Martin Luther King and Malcolm X were both alien-possessed Wanderers as well.

In the children's TV series A.J.'s Time Travelers, A.J. Malloy travels through time in a ship called the KYROS. In one episode, he decides to celebrate Martin Luther King day by traveling back to witness the famous "I Have A Dream" speech first-hand. But in a (no doubt hilarious) mishap, he sets the coordinates wrong and arrives too early. Instead, A.J. meets King as a teenager, and uses his "time telescope" to share with him a vision of the future, inspiring him to fight to end segregation in America.

Around the same time, a children's book came out called Time Trap: Martin Luther King. Two school rivals are forced to work together on a report about the 1960s, but then they become trapped in that time period together. (And, I'm just guessing here, Martin Luther King explains to them why they should work together.)

In alternate history:

Commenter Grey_Area points out that Harry Turtledove features MLK in many of his alternate histories. In particular, The Two Georges — cowritten with Richard Dreyfuss of all people — features an alternate America where the Revolutionary War never happened. Sir Martin Luther King is governor general of the North American Union, and Richard Nixon is a used car dealer.

Writer Brent Adrian maintains a list of ideas that you can use to start a science fiction story, if you're in need of inspiration. One of his suggestions: an alternate history tale that takes place in a world where the first MLK assassination attempt succeeded. In 1958, a woman stabbed Dr. King in the neck, and he nearly choked on his own blood. If she'd succeeded, who would have replaced MLK in the civil rights movement? Would anyone have been able to?

What if MLK had attended the 1956 Dartmouth workshop on artificial intelligence? That's the question this research paper by Will Fitzgerald at Kalamazoo College asks. Would A.I. research be more humanistic, and possibly more self-aware? He quotes MLK, right before his death, talking about the "technological revolution" of "automation and cybernation," and lamenting its failure to advance human rights.

Perhaps most famously, an episode of Aaron McGruder's cartoon version of The Boondocks took place in an alternate history where the assassin's bullet didn't kill Dr. King. Instead, he merely went into a coma, and woke up 40 years later. He's ill-prepared for this new world of shock jocks, hip hop and Fox News, and especially taken aback by what's happened to African American culture in his absence. It culminates in this scene, which caused angry protests and which you should probably not watch at work with the speakers turned up:

When did you live in the Village? And was it really such a hotbed of science fiction?

I was in the East Village from about 61, i suppose, until 1973. Thomas Disch I believe was in the area. Other people passed through. James Sallis, when he was in New York he tended to stay in the Village or the East Village. I believe Robert Sheckley from time to time lived in the village. My sense is that the Village of the 50s, before i got there, was even more a sort of science fiction center, even for New York. Judith Merrill and a lot of the people who lived in Milford, Pennsylvania, would stay in the Village when they came to New York.

Milford, PA? What was going on there?

Milford was the center of science fiction from the 30s to the 50s, and much of the 60s. The Millford science fiction writers conference was held there every September, usually the week after Worldcon, or the week before Worldcon. It was a pretty lively place. At various times Theodore Sturgeon lied there, Harry Harrison, Lester Del Rey, they lived there upwards of a year or two. it was rather like Eugene or Portland, OR, where so many science fiction people lived a few years ago.

You wrote a lot of your early SF when you lived in the Village, right? Did you ever set any stories there?

Most of my sscience fiction was written while I lived there, starting from Jewels of Aptor up through Dhalgren. My first two novels were probably written in the East Village area. We couldn't afford living in the Village Village, it had sort of priced itself out of what I was capable of paying.

Did the Village provide any good material for SF stories? Was it an inspiring place for SF writers because it was so weird?

It inspired anybody who was interested in writing or the arts or music. I think anybody who liked those things or was involved in those things got a certain charge out of the neighborhood.

Did you ever write any science fiction that took place there?

I don't remember ever setting any stories in the Village. At one point, I wrote a couple of issues of Wonder Woman, one of which had [then-depowered] Diana Prince living in the East Village.

Greenwich Village in the 50s and 60s was a place where anything seemed possible. Not only did writers like Samuel Delany and Kurt Vonnegut live in the Village back in the day, but some of the weirdest science fiction stories take place there. Just consider:

The Butterfly Kid by Chester Anderson. This is the first novel in the "Greenwich Village Trilogy." But the other two novels, written by other authors, aren't nearly as well known. Anderson's semi-autobiographical novel has a main character named after himself, and a supporting character named after his roommate at the time. Aliens are supplying a new kind of drug, known as "Reality Pills," which cause your LSD hallucinations to become physically real. One character takes the Reality Pills and is able to make butterflies appear spontaneously, all colors and sizes. Chester faces the vicious Blue Lobster aliens, who hook him up to a machine that forces him to experience horrifying visions that he would have paid to see otherwise. He writes: "I was the rabbit in the moon. I was as corny as Kansas in orbit. I wasn't thinking very well at all!" The book's Amazon reviews are full of raves about how true to the 1960s Village scene it is.

Hark! Was That The Scream Of An Angry Thoat? by Avram Davidson. A surreal description of the Village of the 1950s, populated by weird caricatures of science fiction writers including Robert Silverberg and Randall Garrett. John Carter, Warlord of Mars stalks through the city looking for Edgar Rice Burroughs. Later, "a Thark astride a thoat rides through the streets." There are loving descriptions of the Open Air Market off Bleecker St., interspersed with a four-armed green monster rampaging down the street.

Green Lantern. Fighter-pilot Hal Jordan went nuts and lost the right to be Green Lantern, and his replacement was artist Kyle Raynor. We could tell he was a more bohemian artist type, because he lived in an artisty studio above a coffee shop in the Village. And because he wore a sandwich press on his face.

The Youth Information Party Line. Not fiction, but a very scifi piece of retro-futurism. An early cyberpunk experiment, the YIPL set up shop in the Yippie headquarters on Bleecker St. in 1971. A phone phreak who called himself Al Bell worked with Abbie Hoffman to "liberate" the communications infrastructure. But the venture broke up in 1973 because Bell wanted it to stick to technical assistance and Hoffman wanted it to be political.

"Walking The Floor Over You" by Walter Simons, from the Wild Cards: Deuces Down anthology. Bob runs a comedy club in the Village called the Village Idiot, and his star comedian, Carlotta has the telepathic power to induce laughter in her audiences. When mysterious bad guys start coming after Carlotta, Bob has to use his power to turn into a puddle to save her.

Conan The Barbarian. When Conan travels in space and time, guess where he ends up? At least the hairstyle fits right in.

Sleeper. Okay, it doesn't actually take place in the Village, but Woody Allen's macrobiotic health-food store owner lives there, before he's frozen for 200 years. And his flakey Village person sensibility makes him the perfect wide-eyed stranger in a future that's both more laid-back and more repressive than the 1970s.