Starboard Wine-More Notes on the Language of Science Fiction # Revised edition by Samuel R. Delany

A revised and expanded edition of a classic work of criticism exploring how science fiction is not about the future but about the potential of the present. In Starboard Wine, Samuel R. Delany explores the implications of his now-famous assertion that science fiction is not about the future. Rather, it uses the future as a means of talking about the present and its potentiality. By recognizing a text's specific "difference, " we begin to see the quality of its particulars. Through riveting analyses of works by Joanna Russ, Robert Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon, and Thomas M. Disch, Delany reveals critical strategies for reading that move beyond overwrought theorizing and formulaic thinking. Throughout, the author performs the kinds of careful inquiry and urgent speculation that he calls others to engage in. "Samuel Delany is without doubt a fine writer and intellectual critic without equal." —S. Raeschild, Choice "After all the years since it was first published, Starboard Wine remains one of the three or four most important critical statements ever made about science fiction. No one with a serious interest in the field should be ignorant of it." —Carl Freedman, author of Critical Theory and Science Fiction "As a fiction writer, reviewer, critic, analyst, and theorist, Delany has done more than anyone to expand how people read, as well as write, science fiction and fantasy. His essays are a seminal achievement by one of the field's most innovative thinkers." —David N. Samuelson, professor emeritus, California State University, Long Beach "In Starboard Wine, Samuel R. Delany explores the implications of his now-famous assertion that science fiction is not about the future. Rather, it uses the future as a means of talking about the present and its potentiality. By recognizing a text's specific "difference," we begin to see the quality of its particulars. Through riveting analyses of works by Joanna Russ, Robert Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon, and Thomas M. Disch, Delany reveals critical strategies for reading that move beyond overwrought theorizing and formulaic thinking. Throughout, the author performs the kinds of careful inquiry and urgent speculation that he calls others to engage in."--Project Muse "Samuel R. Delany's The Jewel-Hinged Jaw first appeared in 1977, and has long been out of print and hard to find. Its demonstration that science fiction is a special language, rather than gadgets and green-skinned aliens, had an impact that reverberates today in science fiction criticism. This edition includes two new essays, one written at the time and one written about those times, as well as an introduction by writer and teacher Matthew Cheney, placing Delany's work in historical context. Close textual analyses of Thomas M. Disch, Ursula K. Le Guin, Roger Zelazny, and Joanna Russ read as brilliantly today as when they first appeared." --Book Jacket Ethical Aesthetics, An Introduction / By Matthew Cheney -- About 5,750 Words -- Critical Methods/speculative Fiction -- Quarks -- Thickening The Plot -- Faust And Archimedes -- Alyx -- Prisoners' Sleep -- Letter To The Symposium On Women In Science Fiction -- To Read The Dispossessed -- A Fictional Architecture That Manages Only With Great Difficulty Not Once To Mention Harlan Ellison. Samuel R. Delany. Includes Bibliographical References And Index. The long-awaited reissue of a classic work of criticism -- revised and expanded