I’ve been thinking quite a bit about Chip Delany and his writing recently, as evidenced by this post from a few weeks back, and that resulted in me suddenly remembering an interview I conducted with him more than thirteen years ago in support of the release of his 1974 novel Dhalgren.

The nearly 6,000-word interview originally ran on June 18, 2001 in Science Fiction Weekly #217. The contents of that magazine vanished from anywhere online save the Wayback Machine when Science Fiction Weekly merged with SCI FI Wire—or maybe it was when SCI Wire transformed into Blastr—taking this interview with it, which seems a shame. So here it is once more, rescued from the black hole of the Internet, following my original introduction …

(This photo of us, however, is from May 2014.)

Samuel R. Delany launched his science-fiction career as a 20-year-old publishing prodigy with the novel The Jewels of Aptor in 1962. Other critically-acclaimed novels and short stories quickly followed, as did recognition from both fans and peers. He earned Nebula Awards for his novel Babel-17 (1966), as well as the short stories “Aye, and Gomorrah … ” (1967) and “Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones” (1969), the latter of which also won a Hugo Award. By 1969, the author, editor and critic Algis Budrys was already calling Delany “the best science-fiction writer in the world,” which, based on the evidence at the time, did not seem to be that controversial a call.

The true controversy waited just around the corner. For at the height of his success, Delany sequestered himself to spend half a decade on his next project, Dhalgren, which when eventually published in 1974 was like no science-fiction novel seen before. The 800-page novel used experimental literary techniques to tell an apocalyptic tale containing explicit explorations of sexuality, race and gender. The controversial novel was either loved or hated, proving to be the most hotly debated SF novel of the decade. Vintage Books has just begun a publishing program to reissue all of Delany’s classic novels, beginning with Dhalgren.

Science Fiction Weekly interviewed Delany over lunch at the Hotel George in Washington, D.C., while he toured the country to promote Dhalgren‘s new home. (more…)

There’s an easy way to tell whether you’re my kind of foodie, and that’s if upon taking a look at this photo from Edible Selby‘s gallery of the Copenhagen restaurant Noma …

… you don’t think “I’ll pass” or “that’s weird” or “what the heck is that,” but instead, your first thought is —

I want that in my mouth RIGHT NOW!

Because that was my immediate, visceral reaction.

There are other ways to know whether we’re on the same culinary wavelength … but that’s a good start.

I told you earlier this month how I’d tried—and failed—to get a reservation at Noma to celebrate my milestone birthday later this year. Chef Rene Redzepi’s Copenhagen restaurant is currently considered the best in the world, and has been ranked as such four of the past five years. Noma’s home location is temporarily closed right now, and operating as a pop-up in Japan, where it reportedly has a waiting list of 60,000 people.

But last night, in a stunning surprise that I still can’t quite believe … I got my reservation!

Why is that so stunning?

Consider that a columnist for The Guardian once wrote: “The chances of getting a table at noma these days are about as likely as getting invited to the Queen’s Palace for dinner … ”

And that getting in is so difficult, the story of a woman who had a reservation and was looking for a date went viral.

So, yes. That I could get a table was astounding. How I was able to get that table is even more astounding, considering I let my dream of a milestone birthday dinner there go after my January 12th failure.

So I was stunned Wednesday night when—after I shared a recent review of the Japanese pop-up on Twitter to explain to my followers why I’d so wanted that birthday dinner—

—Chef Redzepi reached out to me personally and asked when my birthday was! (more…)

Not sure why the editors at Charlton felt a need to publish a comic attacking those godless communists on the other side of the Iron Curtain in Love Diary #23 (September 1962), surrounded by the standard romance stories you’d expect to find in such a title, but for some reason, that’s exactly what they did.

“God is Never Out of Style,” drawn by Rocke Mastroserio and written by (your guess is as good as mine), instead of being about a woman’s search for true love, is rather a stern warning not to “scoff at the beliefs of our forefathers” and certainly never “be tempted at times to put your religion second.”

A check of the Grand Comics Database shows that this incongruous one-pager ran eight times, first in Teen-Age Love #27 (August 1962) and last in I Love You #44 (February 1963).

Bottom line—go to the beach instead of church and it’ll be your fault if we lose the Cold War!

I have no idea what teens thought about the story 50+ years ago, but since we won (we did, didn’t we?), I take it they took its message to heart.

Poet Robert Hass, who won the $100,000 Wallace Stevens Awards last year from the Academy of American Poets, was one of 14 people interviewed for the January/February 2015 issue of Esquire about their 2014.

Among the many interesting things Hass had to say was this.

My younger brother once said to my mother, “I don’t know why Bob writes poetry. Nobody reads it.” And my mother said to him, “Yes, but they don’t read it for a long time.”

Here’s hoping we all have readers who don’t read us for a long time. Or something like that.

Mothers always put these things in perspective, don’t they?

I was flipping through the November 1950 issue of Marvel Science Stories this afternoon (as one does on a lazy Saturday), and while the content by the likes of A. E. van Vogt, Gardner F. Fox, and A. Bertram Chandler was intriguing, what interested me most was the back cover ad.

“Most Bald People Could Have Saved Their Hair Had They Acted in Time,” we’re told, with random italicization that doesn’t seem to make any sense. But what’s fascinating is the identity of the celebrity endorser doing the telling—”Rocco, Personal Barber of the late Thomas A. Edison.”

That’s right—the barber to the inventor known as the Wizard of Menlo Park claimed that a formula called Sayve is “the best Science can do to SAVE YOUR HAIR.”

One question, though. (more…)

Over the past couple of months, I’ve run across three romance comics containing stories about overweight women having trouble finding true love. And I’ve been intrigued by the message they were sending, in that two of the protagonists only arrived at happy endings after reaching a societally approved weight.

But body shaming isn’t limited to the stories. It spills over into text pages, too, as in this example, titled “Nobody Loves a Fat Girl,” from Young Romance #8 (April 1951). I have no idea who wrote this piece under the byline Charmaigne, but whoever it was starts off by making sure the teen reader of the comic is insecure about her appearance.

Oh, you may be just a few pounds overweight now, and your boyfriend might even like you that way … but that’s won’t last!

There’s only a few pounds difference between your pleasingly plump status of today and that of a tubby woman tomorrow.

So if you want to keep your man, you’d better not let yourself go, girls!

(more…)

We’ve already learned that the protagonist of the 1950 romance comic book story “Too Fat for Love” was required to slim down before finding true love, even though her man said he’d always loved her whatever her size, while the far more enlightened tale, 1949’s “Was I Too Fat to Be Loved?” didn’t demand its heroine lose a pound in order to embrace happiness.

A few years later, another tale on a similar topic—also titled “Too Fat for Love”—appeared in Great Lover Romances #3 (March 1952) and was later reprinted in Dream of Love #9 (1958). Which gives us a third chance to see how old timey romance comics dealt with society’s insistence that only women who maintain a certain idealized body size are deserving of love. (This time courtesy of artist Myron Fass and an uncredited writer.)

The story begins as “famous comedy star” Dorothy Drake takes a pie in the face on the set of her new movie. She hates being the butt of jokes, but knows that at her size, those are the only roles available. (more…)

So late last night—or early this morning, depending on how you keep track of these things—I attempted to book a table at Noma. With a milestone birthday coming in March, I figured, what better place to celebrate then at the Copenhagen restaurant that’s currently considered the best restaurant in the world? And since you might want to eat there someday, I thought I should share how it all went down.

Reservations for the date in question began at 10:00 a.m. Central European Time, which translates to 4:00 a.m. Eastern Standard Time, so I set an alarm for 3:45 a.m.—two alarms, actually, because I activated a Fitbit silent one to vibrate on my wrist in case the main alarm failed—and slept for a few hours before waking, stumbling downstairs, and being confronted by this pre-booking countdown screen.

I had no idea how many others around the globe were staring at something similar, but found out, once 10:00 a.m. Central European Time rolled around, that there were at least 1,449 of them—because I was number 1,450, with an estimated wait time of more than an hour. And there were equally as many behind me in the queue, because when I decided to try logging in using my iPhone, I was assigned a number greater than 3,000. (more…)

A few weeks ago, I read Joanna Russ’s 1975 review of the movie A Boy and His Dog, which had originally been published in Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies. I hadn’t intended to, and wasn’t deliberately seeking it out. I just came upon it the way one often does online, clicking through from link to link, and eventually ending up somewhere unexpected but necessary.

It’s a wonderful piece, and deserves your attention, as all of her work does, but the passage that intrigued me the most was a paraphrase of something Chip Delany once wrote:

According to Samuel Delany, a literary characterization proceeds by means of three kinds of actions: gratuitous, purposeful, and habitual, and well-written characters perform all three. (This classification certainly applies to realistic fiction, and I suspect it applies to all fiction, however stylized.) Sexist literature produces two kinds of female characters, both imperfect: the Heroine, whose actions are all gratuitious, and the Villainess, whose actions are all purposeful. Neither performs habitual actions.

This stood out for me because, being a writer, I immediately wanted to understand more fully exactly what Delany meant by these three classifications. I could tell the concept would be helpful to my own writing. And as I thought, hmmm, how will I ever track down the source, I suddenly remembered that due to this connected world in which we live, I could simply ask the source directly, since Chip and I are friends on Facebook. So I reached out to query where I could find his full essay explicating this idea.

It turns out the essay “Letter to the Symposium on Women In Science Fiction” originally appeared in an issue of Khatru, and was then reprinted in his non-fiction collection The Jewel-Hinged Jaw. But not, unfortunately, my copy of The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, as it’s a first edition. It can be found in the current expanded edition, though. I decided I’d pick up a copy at this year’s Readercon, where I could get him to autograph it, and then thought nothing more. (more…)