Driftglass by Samuel R Delany

I read this over a week ago, when beginning my journey back from my minibreak in Varanasi (yes, I travelled from London to the middle of India for a minibreak, what of it???) so time is not on my side here and (also) the book I read afterwards (see next post, currently unwritten) was big and enveloping and also science fiction but very different so I dunno if the two would have merged in my mind tho I don’t think they did but I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know I don’t-

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This 1971 collection of ten (I think) short stories is a masterful, enervating and almost overwhelming collection of writing, featuring nine (or one less than whatever the accurate total count is) pieces of high concept science fiction set at varying points in various potential human futures, plus one (1) piece of gritty social realism set on a Greek island in the 1960s.

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Delany is not someone I have read before, though he comes highly acclaimed and raved about, not only for his fiction, but also for his academic work on science fiction, and also for his memoirs and essays about queer life in North America in the latter half of the 20th century, with his work exploring intersectionalities of race, gender, sexuality and class.

Delany has won a lot of awards, he’s published a lot of books, and this one – Driftglass – is often cited as one of the most influential, if not necessarily the most transgressive or important. That doesn’t mean it isn’t both, tho.

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The stories here explore various themes and narratives, and are (as befits a short story collection) pieces that range in length from a few pages to novella-(or at least novelette)-length.

A lot of them feature elements that touch on generational change, or shifts in power dynamics, with some (for example, in one an early-retired-due-to-injury semi-merman (made by science that way so as to be able to complete complex deep sea engineering work) watches as a newer, younger semi-merman prepares to re-attempt the same long-postponed and likely impossible work that injured him years before; in another, the newly promoted work crew leader of a team who travel the world connecting the last remaining groups of off-grid people to the grid rumbles with the previous leader about how to deal with a group of 21st century Hell’s Angels (yes, in some ways the book is dated, but not often) who just want to be left alone), and frequently the conversations and concepts Delany rises evoke the dangers of hubristic tech-utopianism, and evidence the inevitability of the grim reality of surveillance-capitalism that we now, half a century after these pieces were written, are fucking rammed deep within.

Technology, in Delany’s stories and perhaps in reality, offers solutions only to problems that were created by technology, or by capitalism.

In these stories, jobs are more scarce due to more mechanisation, but even in these futures, the dirtiest, most dangerous, jobs revert to human – rather than mechanical – labour, due to our bodies being cheaper and more disposable than something that has to be built and designed. Life is cheap; even with hyper inflation, the value of flesh and the value of work never rises as high as the value of fucking commodities…

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Though, aside from the piece set on a Greek island, there is nothing here that has literally (or nearly-literally) happened, the discussions around body-augmentation, around increased isolation and loneliness in the face of mass communication and ease of travel and movement is, sadly, prescient, and Delany’s potential future horrorworlds are bleakly (the bio-technological innovations aside) familiar to a 21st century reader.

We like to optimistically say that we live in late capitalism, but that’s the kind of phrase that could weightily suit the sociocultural background of these stories, and things don’t look any closer to being post-capitalism from here compared to the sixties. (Aside – I typed “post-capitalism” and my phone suggested I correct to “capitalism”, which is almost a poem.)

The things that made life bad in the 1960s persist yet, and they show no signs of abating. There is still war and cruelty and violence, there is still bigotry and prejudice and selfishness, there is such inequality in the world that it should be considered a crime against humanity. One of many crimes systemically perpetuated. Only one of many…

We’re fucked, we’re fucked, we’re fucked, we’re fucked, we’re fucked, we’re fucked, we’re fucked. And reading political fiction from decades ago really emphasises the fucking rut we’re really fucking fucked in…

Driftglass is great. But it does remind one that maybe there we remain distant from a future that works for everyone…