Science fiction saw itself as a field that was different from all the other pulp fields. Even during the gosh-wow early years of super science, many writers and editors - led by Hugo Gernsback - really thought they were leading the world into a glowing future of space travel, robots, world cities, and all the other tropes of sf. The early fangroups were filled with teenage boys with towering intelligences, oversized egos, and almost total lack of worldly experience who nevertheless became popular writers. As Little Nemo once correctly said, Asimov wrote his entire future as if it was 1940 Manhattan.
Fans have always continued to idolize these writers. Outsiders (and many writers) didn’t. They noticed how provincial their writing was and how that glorious future didn’t have much place inside it for those who weren’t white, middle-class, science-obsessed city dwellers. This became much more acute in the 1960s when class and race issues dominated the news and mainstream writing started addressing it seriously while sf barely changed at all. Delany’s work was noticeably different. He wrote with a different perspective (and obvious excellence) that was a sensation.
The sf world already understood this through the experience of female writers. The urban legend that women hid their identities under male pseudonyms has been thoroughly debunked. Male editors did occasionally force them to use them or initials, but mostly women wrote as women. All the editors knew they were women and so did all of the other writers. And they also brought noticeably different perspectives to the field. Think of the stories of post-war and 50s writers like Judith Merrill (“That Only a Mother”) or the People stories of Zenna Henderson in F&SF, which made a deliberate effort to develop women writers, including Mildred Clingerman and Doris Pitkin Buck. For whatever reason they mostly did only short stories, and when the magazine market died in the late 1950s they faded away. A whole new group of female writers had to be built up from scratch.
That “editors don’t care who sends them good stories” is true but a half-truth. They care very much whether the totality of the stories they print meets the needs of the reading public. Most of the editors wanted to build up the puny percentages of women readers, who would be attracted to women writers who wrote stories that featured issues they could identify with. In addition, editors would have loved to expand the percentage of minority readers by offering stories that spoke to their experience. They had small success at the one and total failure at the other.
Black writers have stated in no uncertain terms that they were not welcomed into the tiny, clubby world of science fiction writers. They continue to say that today, so we can only imagine what it was like 50 years ago. Delany was a unique figure, and came from an unusually well-to-do black family. He mixed into the white world early: he attended the Dalton School and the Bronx High School of Science. Unique figures tend to stay unique rather than lead others. He makes somewhat of a fetish of this, to be sure. His pronouncement that as a gay black Marxist science fiction writer he is the ultimate minority in America is amusing and telling and a total accusation about American culture and its treatment of outsiders.
SF has proclaimed itself the literature of the Future for almost a century. The vast majority of that time, maybe all of it, it instead has been insular, clubby, bigoted, narrow-minded, and short-sighted. That’s a disgrace and many people in the field have labeled it a disgrace. I’ve been active in the field since 1969. It’s gotten much better. But given the awfulness of the start, better is only relative. It ain’t good.
