*The original version of this post was published on Patreon on March 10, 2023.
I have a new hobby, which I can’t share with you. Or rather, I can tell you guys about it, but I want to try to avoid turning this hobby into “content,” because I think it’s important for people These Days to have one area of their lives that isn’t up for public or even semi-private consumption. Even writing about it like this is stretching the bounds of my vow…but I’m not going to post pictures…so maybe this is okay? Idk, it’s my own non-binding personal vow, lay off me.
Anyway the hobby is building miniatures, and it started a few months ago after legally perfect human being Allegra Silcox got me a miniature wooden library kit as a holiday gift. Putting together any kind of complicated thing based on step-by-step instructions has always been something I find soothing (I LOVE assembling IKEA furniture), and miniatures have the added advantages of being 1) tiny, difficult, and fragile, thus requiring extra attention, and 2) customizable. Since finishing Allegra’s library kit, I’ve been busy adding new pieces to it: more books, ivy curling up the walls, flowers in lamps and jars, a reclining cat figurine, and a baby dragon coming out of his shell. It looks great, trust me! And I’m going to keep toying with it, because the process is fun and also because the library's still missing one very important element: a Resident.
I’ve felt very strongly, from the beginning, that this library has needed someone in it. It just won’t feel finished to me until a person “lives” there. (I have not gone completely insane, I promise, only partially and artistically insane. It’s been a difficult snowless winter/dark spring.) Anyway I’ve been poking around hobby shops and the internet looking for the exact right figurine, and I keep failing. As clearly as I understand that the library needs a resident, I also understand that the resident is not human. But it’s hard to find the right nonhuman for this space. There are plenty of treacly, poorly-painted gnomes and fairies meant for garden dioramas; there are metric tons of unpainted D&D figurines, standing on coin-shaped bases (why wouldn’t you stand on your own feet, in the library) brandishing fierce weapons (why would you be armed to the teeth, in the library), absurdly scantily clad (why would you be tits out, in the library?) So I’m still looking. I’m hoping that in some antique store, buried among the creepy Hummel statues and weird racist figurines, I’ll find the person I’m looking for.
Along with going a bit insane over miniatures (only a bit), I’ve been reading Samuel Delany’s essays on science fiction, mostly from his collection Starboard Wine.1 Delany is the fucking best. I should do a full recommendation post on him at some point, but I haven’t read quite enough of his novels to fill it out (Dhalgren is the big one I haven’t tackled yet, it’s often described as a drug-fueled scifi Ulysses, for better or for worse.) Anyway, Delany is just a remarkable person, full stop. He’s often credited as the first Black scifi writer, and he was a child prodigy, having published his first novel at age 20. Since then he’s written about thirty more novels, short stories, and brilliant essays about science fiction and other subjects. Reading his essays is a humbling experience: he’s extraordinarily well-read, moving easily from vivid imagery to abstract discussion of philosophy and semiotics, rendering any subject in a fluid, engaging style. I once read a popular neuroscience article which claimed there are three types of human thinking: visual, aural, and abstract (I don’t know if this is remotely true but it’s at least an interesting way to think about thinking.) I seem to have an overdeveloped visual capacity: I often have to “see” an image before I can put it into words. I think I have a decent aural capacity, but my abstract capacity is wee and vestigial: I struggle a lot with abstract thinking unless I can turn it into images first. But Delany has one of those perfectly balanced intelligences; when you read his essays, it’s clear that he excels at all three forms of thinking, both separately and together. This is how he can write a sentence like “Facts result from the encounter of consciousness with landscape,” and move on while slower readers like me are still trying to recover.
I could really freak out over most of Delany’s ideas, but for today I want to focus on a point he made in the essay “Dichtung und Science Fiction,” in which he discusses the differences between science fiction and standard forms of literature (he sometimes refers to the latter as “bourgeois fiction” or “mundane fiction” which I think is just magnificent):
Despite the meaningful differences in the way of reading that constitute the specifically literary modes, they are all characterized—now, today—by a priority of the subject, that is, of the self, of human consciousness. To a greater or lesser extent, the subject can be read as the organizational center of all the literary categories’ many, many differing expectations…Answering its own expectations as a paraliterary mode, science fiction is far more concerned with the organization (and reorganization) of the object, that is, the world, or the institutions through which we perceive it. It is concerned with the subject, certainly, but concerned with those aspects of it that are closer to the object: How is the object excited, impinged on, contoured, and constituted by the object? How might beings with a different social organization, environment, brain structure, and body perceive things? How might humans perceive things after becoming acclimated to an alien environment?
Delany is in fact so interested in the primacy of the object, and the way it alters previously expected forms of literary storytelling, that he places the origin of science fiction not with Mary Shelley and Frankenstein, or even with H.G. Wells and Jules Verne, but with the pulp magazines of the 1930s. Frankenstein, he points out, is written in the same style as any other epistolary literary novel of its time; Wells and Verne are likewise writing in the literary style of their contemporaries. One of my favorite H.G. Wells novels, The Sea Lady (1902)—a fantasy novel about a mermaid who washes ashore on an English beach only to be picked up by the Buntings, the parody/paradigmatic version of the stolid bourgeois English family—relies on an especially fun and lightly mocking late Victorian/Edwardian style:
“But really, you know,” said my cousin Melville, protesting in the name of reason and the nineteenth century—“a tail!”
“I patted it,” said Mrs. Bunting.
But the pulps, for the most part, are written in a totally different style than the literary novels of their own era; they are invested in the objects and structures of the worlds in which they are set. (“The monopole magnet-mining operations in the outer asteroid belt of Delta Cygni” is the sample scifi phrase Delany uses to emphasize this point.) I don’t disagree with Delany’s basic definition of science fiction’s orientation toward the object rather than the subject, but I would personally draw the lines a little differently. For me, the significant difference between realism, science fiction, and fantasy has to do with world-expectations: the set of possibilities that can occur without breaking the logic of the story’s universe. Frankenstein introduces technology that didn’t (and still doesn’t) exist; it’s just primarily—and almost solely—interested in the effect of that technology on the subjects of the narrative, both doctor and monster, and how that technology changes fundamental human relationships regarding begetting, birth, and death. Fantasy (and magical realism) allow for the possibility of magic, and how that too would change social structures and human relationships; these stories are often even less focused on the “object,” the world-difference and the description of it, than science fiction would be. (Some stories allow for both magic and science, and can be safely classed as both. Star Wars counts as both, since the Force is magic, but this is exactly why midichlorians don’t work—magic must always trump science, or magic ceases to exist. N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth series does a much more complete job of combining both magic and science into a single story: orogeny, the earth-churning ability, is initially presented as something like a heritable superpower, but in later books Jemisin explores the deeper magical and mysterious workings of orogeny underneath the official, scientifically-oriented explanation of how it functions.)
Anyway, I think Delany’s definition is very helpful when considering the difference between “hard” and “soft” science fiction—hard science fiction is much more interested in the object, and “soft” science fiction much less so. A lot of “soft” science fiction and crossover literary-science fiction is heavily weighted toward the subject—and therefore bourgeois, I guess. Maybe it is. I’ve enjoyed some hard scifi novels (Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama is excellent) but my preference is generally for the softer stuff. The miniature needs a resident; it’s incomplete without a resident. It isn’t really alive until I put a person in it, the person who is affected by the world of the library but is more fundamentally the reason that the library and everything in it exists, the reason the library is interesting in the first place. (I reiterate that I am not crazy, or not very crazy.) I just think it’s meaningful to consider, when writing science fiction or building miniatures: does the character exist to explore the world, or does the world exist to explore the character? It's probably bourgeois and mundane of me, but I almost always prefer the latter.
Starboard Wine is out of print and hard to locate! My library happened to have a copy. Other collections of Delany’s essays may be easier to find.