Description

Of Solids and Surds by Samuel R. Delany

Hardcover – Yale University Press – Sep 2021 – 157 pages

In the fourth volume in the Why I Write series, the iconic Samuel Delany remembers fifty years of writing and shaping the world of speculative fiction.

Language is the way humans deal with past, present, and future possibilities, as well as the subset called the probable. This is where Samuel Delany finds his justification for the writing life.

Since the 1960s, occurrences such as Sputnik, school desegregation, and the advent of AIDS have given Delany, as a gay man, as a black man, access to certain truths and facts he could write about, and the language–sometimes fiction, sometimes nonfiction–in which to present them. “We write,” Delany believes, “at the intersection of your experience and mine in a way, I hope, that allows recognition.”