This blog post Bradley is an interesting examination of another section of Delany’s text. Instead of my focus on subjunctivity, Bradley instead talks about how individual words in science fiction develop the ideas of “speculative fiction.”
Question 1- Delany’s “About 5,750 Words” by Bradley Cisternino
At first, I was a little confused by Delany’s terminology, as he uses the term “Speculative Fiction,” however I believe that term is either synonymous with or encompasses science fiction. He outlines Speculative Fiction in a number of ways. The key points are (to me) as follows: Speculative Fiction deals with things that have not happened (with accompanying subcategories.) It is not the style or the content which makes SF, but the information itself and how it is presented as an image to the reader. Content as a concept is misunderstood: the words do not create content necessarily, it is the meaning of words when strung together which create the image and story for the reader. I found the following quote to be incredibly striking: “A sixty-thousand word novel is one picture corrected fifty-nine thousand, nine-hundred and ninety-nine times.” I consider this, together with the earlier point, to be Delany’s definition of Science/Speculative Fiction. He goes on to explain this point by constructing a sentence word-by-word, noting the large difference between the image of the sentence as each word is added. He also notes differences between styles and how they can entirely change the meaning/effect of a sentence when referencing the Gurney/Trench translations. Each is a translation of the same text and each sentence should theoretically be about the same thing. However, in practice, they appear entirely different and one is far more effective than the other.
The advantage of this approach (to me) is that it forces one to look both holistically and engage deeply with a given text simultaneously. While you still get the broad image and concepts of the story effectively, you can trace back individual images and points to specific individual WORDS rather than paragraphs or chapters. I can’t say I’m an avid SF reader, however I have read my fair share of it as well as other fiction types, and I’ve never even thought about or tried doing that. With Delany’s approach, it seems not only possible, but easy. Something I disagree with, though, is the narrowness of a story that Delany creates. Does a sixty-thousand word novel really have to be just one picture continuously updated? I can agree that each word has a significant contribution to a larger image, however I’m not sure it’s all the same image they’re contributing to. Instead, I think it would be better presented as a series of different images (or a collage, if you will) that are interconnected in sequence, each building off of the image before it. I think it may narrow the story down too much if it is constrained to a single individual image, as it may cut out or confuse other concepts or themes that are in the novel. This is especially important because most novels, including Science Fiction, will almost always have multiple themes, settings, and overarching concepts.