Introduction

At the centre of this Episode is the life and work of Samuel R. Delany. Almost always known as Chip, he is a grand master of science fiction and fantasy, sex-radical memoirist, revolutionary pornographer, social commentator, literary critic, architect of one of the queerest and most uncompromisingly experimental literary careers ever undertaken.

Science fiction doesn’t try to predict the future, but rather offers a significant distortion of the present…We sit around and look at what we see around us and we say how can the world be different? – Samuel R. Delany from Starboard Wine: More Notes on the Language of Science Fiction, 1984.

The fact that the forces of patriarchal and heteronormative, abelist and racist society crawl over our skin, colonise our thoughts and move through our veins, can sometimes feel like a kind of science fiction. But in the midst of this ubiquitous, seemingly unceasing violence, Chip’s writing helps us recognise that we always inhabit multiple worlds—and that other ways of existing already dwell among us.

While recognising the harm they cause, he helps reject the stories that power tries to make us believe about ourselves, and creates allegories that amplify his and our lived experiences in ways that are meaningful to us all. He explores worlds that, even whilst under attack, live out of sync with this so-called present.

The only important elements in any society are the artistic and the criminal, because they alone, by questioning the society’s values, can force it to change. – Samuel R. Delany from Empire Star

Delany’s books inhabit alternate forms of humanity, not as some fantastical future possibility, but as elaborations on already present ways of socialising—recalled as fact, and distorted and amplified through the lens of his fiction.

A beautiful example of this can be found in The Motion of Light in Water, where he reflects on his first encounters of seemingly numberless group sex between parked trucks at the docks or in the St Marks bathhouse. There, you never had to break contact with flesh for more than a few seconds. Delany talks about how men in that space took care of one another not only by offering flesh but by performing a care for the self that encompassed a vast care for others—a delicate and loving being for others. ¹

I want to have sex with what I want to become. – Bhanu Kapil ²

So, following Chip’s lead – this Episode is about the movements, feelings and entanglements of already possible worlds that bear the weight of our desires, and how they help us deal with an often unbearable or impossible present.

It’s about understanding ourselves as tuned to a slightly different spot on the spatio-temporal dial, where—off to the side and in flight—perhaps we can recognise what it is about our cultures that could potentially overwhelm brutality.

If we can influence the future and do a positive visualization of what we wanna see: write it down. Visualize it. Walk in it. Redefine your power—what can you do with no weapons and no money. – Moor Mother

Episode 9 was previewed in The Skinny which included an interview with Samuel R Delany by Adam Benmakhlouf. The Episode was reviewed in Exeunt by Andrew Edwards; in The List by Claire Sawers and in Glasgow Review of Books by Mark West.