SOURCE: “Talking,” in Science-Fiction Studies, Vol. 22, No. 2, July, 1995, pp. 204-11.

In the following review, Samuelson provides an extended analysis of Delany's comments on literary theory, the politics of marginalization, and science fiction in Silent Interviews. Though noting repetition and contradiction in the volume, Samuelson finds Delany's poststructuralist perspective challenging.

Samuel R. Delany both clings to and defies genrefication. Claiming to write “science fiction”—not speculative fiction, or sword and sorcery—because of a defining attitude he brings to it, he notes that spaceships appear first in his fifth sf novel, and argues for science fictional readings of Dhalgren and the four volumes of “Return to Nevèrÿon.” Sf’s “way of reading” he keys to a readerly and writerly focus on a malleable material world, in contrast to the malleable subject (perceiver-protagonist) of fantastic and realistic fiction. Yet his fiction, not all of which demands an sf...