My Love of Chip: Samuel Delany

 

  While "Hard sci-fi" was about reliving the Second World War but with improved Nazis, faster and faster ships, and exploding, could be bigger explosions, technologies, Samuel Delany was writing moving beyond all that. He is talking about multi-generational travel between the stars and wars that killed centuries-old civilizations but lasted for only minutes. His discussion about the changes in language as well as grasping the the transference of how we talk about things from one generation to another, despite some very coherent talk about physics-bound science fiction conventions, was labeled "Soft Wave."
   I, as an avid science fiction reader reading, in my 6.1th Decade of age, have noticed a tendency for Hard Science Fiction to be blurts of the hip techno-babble proselytizing about the most ridiculous advancements in technology and militarism. Those prophesies have turned not only to be outdated by stuff like micro-chips and "social" networks within the span of four years since the works' publication. Meanwhile this author's, Delany, in case you forgot whom I was talking about, speculative fiction doesn't, at least to me, get stale. 
   First book, novella really, is Babel 17 . This is not out of any sort literary dominance. This was the first work that I read by the person. I'm not a literary scholar, I've just read a whole bunch of books. More than a fair share of those were paperbacks. This work introduced me, an already bilingual person, to the effects of language on those subscribing to Literacy Equals Language. I walked out of that dime-store book much wiser about the salesmanship that goes into the cultures around us.
   I went on to read about a billion books. While doing so, there was Delany's shorter works. His novels rocked me. The shorter works inspired me. Through all of those works, I learned about stuff like the speed of light, while more "Hard Core" sci-fi authors scrawled pages about more and better tanks, sex but with time travel, and "good" cultural warfare.
   While sci-fi booksellers will always have classifications, as a science fiction reader, I recommend not taking them at their word. Authors like Samuel Delany are standing proof of the fallacy of that.