Informant38

With this out of the way, Delany has the audacity to attack two Sturgeon stories (in another book, not this one, as nearly ALL of Delany's essay focuses on. Best not to open the reader to stories included here, lest the reader begin to doubt shaman Delany's outlandish assertions). Both deal with homosexuality, were written in the early '50s, and are both astonishingly courageous stories (remember, this was the height of McCarthyism, and IN science fiction, which feared straight sexuality almost pathologically well into the '70s).
When Delany dismisses both as "well-mannered," and "only a step from rank conservatism," Delany is unmasked. While few writers in SF have so publicly (and self-servingly) exploited their own sexuality (cf. his Breakfast In Heaven, Bantam, 1979), Delany simply doesn't know what he's talking about. When Ted wrote "Affair With A Green Monkey" (also not included here), it was SO dangerous that he slipped in a red herring at the end. For many years, Ted was surprised at how manyof his seemingly intelligent peers DIDN'T GET IT!It was, according to Ted's widow, "a sort of intelligence test," to Ted. If you got it, it said one thing. If not, another. Add to the "did not get it" list, one Nebula-winning, snobbish Samuel R. Delany, who pompously and wrongly claims "today we have to admit that its whole thrust is toward a rather trivial one-liner." (The Emperor's clothes were actually poorly sewn, and the buttons were all but falling off ....)
Now, having exhumed the dread specter of homosexuality, I must lay it to rest: Ted was NOT writing about homoerotic desire; he was writing about love, whether in acceptable or unacceptable form. In the '50s, this was all but impossibly brave. But Theodore Sturgeon was an impossibly brave writer. He is STILLdangerous: he was the finest stylist this bastard field (sci-fi) ever produced, and his influence is felt over the entire breadth of that field. Remember, as well, when Ted began writing -- as Delany notes -- SF was considered all-but-pornography. It was shunned by literary snobs (like Delany), and its authors were forced to exist in a low-rent neighborhood of literary hell. What Theodore Sturgeon did was amazing. His stories are STILL amazing, and he willbe read in the 21st, 22nd, and other centuries.
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A 2-year-old claim by scientists at Harvard University to have discovered a second virus capable of causing AIDS in humans has been dismissed as "not authentic" in a highly unusual paper to be published here Thursday by a rival team of Harvard researchers.
Writing in Nature, the prestigious British scientific journal, scientists affiliated with Harvard's medical school said neither the purported AIDS virus, nor another AIDS-type virus said to have been isolated from the African green monkey, ever really existed.
When they were broken down biologically into their component parts, the article said, it became evident that the two "new" viruses were really contaminants of simian immunodeficiency virus, or SIV, which had been isolated from the rhesus macaque more than a year before.
Because it is unusual for one group of scientists to openly contradict the work of others, and practically unknown for researchers to investigate and disprove the work of colleagues at the same institution, the full implications of the Harvard affair remain to be seen.
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...Thanks for bounties on wolves and coyotes.

Thanks for the American dream, To vulgarize and to falsify until the bare lies shine through.

Thanks for the KKK.

For nigger-killin' lawmen, feelin' their notches.

For decent church-goin' women, with their mean, pinched, bitter, evil faces.

Thanks for "Kill a Queer for Christ" stickers.





Thanks for Prohibition and the war against drugs

Thanks for a country where nobody's allowed to mind their own business.

Thanks for a nation of finks...
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excerpt from William S. Burroughs Thanksgiving Prayer