The American Century: Literature since 1945 739lyrical rhetoric and the characterization is consistently freakish and bizarre. In the
early 1970s, however, Delany moved altogether away from conventional narrative
logic. Dhalgren, published in 1975, marks the change. “A book about many things,”
as Delany has described it, it presents a city that has suffered a disaster so catastrophic
that the space-time continuum has been distorted. In a powerful image of society in
chaos, buildings burn endlessly without being consumed; and the only possibility of
redemption seems to shine in youth and art. Time, logic, and narrative viewpoints
are all cut loose from their traditional literary moorings, in this and the later Atlantis:
Model 1924 (1995). They function relativistically. An additional, disconcerting
factor in Dhalgren is that Kid, the narrator, is dyslexic and epileptic. These later
books, and others such as the Return to Neveryon series (Tales of Neveryon (1979),
Neveryona (1983), Flight from Neveryon (1985), The Bridge of Lost Desire (1987)
revised as Return to Neveryon (1994)), take science fiction and fantasy into the
postmodern; as they do so, they carry the habit of these genres to speculate and
subvert to a new extreme.
Both the earlier and later science fiction of Delany is also notable for extending
the frontiers of the genre as far as the treatment of race and sex are concerned. His
novels are notable for their black and mixed-blood characters and their uninhibited
approach to sexuality. One novel, Triton (1976), presents the reader with more
than forty different sexes. Those frontiers have been further stretched by Octavia
Butler, who was also African-American. Her Patternist series, for instance, which
includes Patternmaster (1976), Wild Seed (1984), and Clay’s Ark (1984), has as its
central character a four-thousand-year-old immortal, Dune, who is able to move
at will from body to body. The movement is regardless of race and gender,
although Dune prefers to inhabit the bodies of black males. A powerful Nubian
patriarch, who sustains his power with the help of his psychic abilities and physical
strength, Dune has fathered enough descendants to establish a dynasty known as
the Pattern. Complementing Dune, among many others, is one of his daughters,
Mary, a gifted telepath, and the woman who adopts her, Emma, a strong and
elegant woman. In many ways, the two of them are prototypical feminist science
fiction characters; and it comes as little surprise to learn that Butler herself
included Ursula Le Guin among the foremost of her influences, as her literary
foremother. Just how writers like Butler have stretched science fiction, generically,
imaginatively, and thematically, is suggested by her best-known book, Kindred
(1988). This was originally meant to be a Patternist novel, but Butler found it too
realistic to fit into the futurist frame of the series. Here, a young black woman call
Dana is transported back in time, from the 1970s Los Angeles suburb where she
lives with her white husband, to a Maryland plantation before the Civil War. She
then finds herself the property of a family whose eldest son Rufus has summoned
her to save him. During the course of her journey back into the racial past, Dana
loses an arm – a mark of how slavery inscribed itself on the bodies, as well as the
minds and memories, of African-Americans. Incorporating elements of social
and historical realism, and naturalist critique, into its framework of fantasy,
Kindred shows how porous and adaptable the genre of science fiction can be – andGGray_c05.indd 739ray_c 05 .indd 739 8 8/1/2011 7:31:42 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 42 PM