# Samuel Delany named Grand Master **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [December 4, 2013, 8:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/samuel-delany-named-grand-master/675506 "2013-12-04T20:10:19Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 5\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [December 8, 2013, 10:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/samuel-delany-named-grand-master/675506/61 "2013-12-08T22:21:36Z")
No, sadly, that was probably not a whoosh. That is exactly the level of argument the purity of precious bodily fluids of “real” science fiction defenders have been making since the 1950s. I’m always surprised they can find anybody who meets their criteria when they get done throwing even Heinlein overboard. ---
**Author:** ![Amateur\_Barbarian](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/59ef9b/32.png) [@Amateur\_Barbarian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Amateur_Barbarian)\ **Post date:** [December 8, 2013, 10:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/samuel-delany-named-grand-master/675506/62 "2013-12-08T22:57:14Z")
> [@Exapno\_Mapcase](#): > > I’m always surprised they can find anybody who meets their criteria when they get done throwing even Heinlein overboard. I can’t recall an argument in any venue that claimed Heinlein wasn’t sf - at least the greater body of his indisputably hard-sf work. He certainly visited other genres and styles. Including mainstream. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [December 9, 2013, 2:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/samuel-delany-named-grand-master/675506/63 "2013-12-09T02:25:53Z")
> [@](#): > > Quoth **The Other Waldo Pepper** : > > At the risk of being whooshed, I’ll note that Bradbury wrote about robots and time machines and interplanetary colonization, and we don’t call Shakespeare a science fiction writer because he, y’know, didn’t. Shakespeare wrote about mundanely framing someone for adultery to provoke a homicide; Bradbury was anticipating the holodeck when coming up with a fun new way to kill people. The fact that Bradbury wrote about those subjects certainly makes him a science fiction writer, but it doesn’t make him a _great_ science fiction writer. **Exapno** points out that Bradbury produced very high quality writing, which is true, and that many science fiction writers aspired to produce writing of the same quality, which is also true. But that, also, is not enough to make him a great science fiction writer, as evidenced by Shakespeare: Shakespeare also produced very high quality writing, which many science fiction writers aspired to, but nobody would say that Shakespeare was a great science fiction writer. Let me put it another way: Bradbury was a great writer, and he was a science fiction writer, and he influenced science fiction writers. Shakespeare was a great writer, and influenced science fiction writers, but he was not himself a science fiction writer. Neither Bradbury nor Shakespeare was a great science fiction writers. Or yet another way: Other authors have aspired to Bradbury’s writing, but they weren’t aspiring to his writing of science fiction specifically. Nobody says “I’m a big fan of the way Bradbury set his stories on Mars and Venus”, or “I’m a big fan of the way Bradbury included robots in his stories”. ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [December 9, 2013, 2:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/samuel-delany-named-grand-master/675506/64 "2013-12-09T02:59:52Z")
Or you (plural you in all that follows) could take the position that Bradbury was a science fiction writer and that Stranger was a novel of science fiction. Which has been the position of almost everybody inside and outside the field since these works were written. As I mentioned earlier, the contrary position - at least about Bradbury and others who were insufficiently “real” - was made in the 1950s and early 1960s by critics of the stature of Blish and Knight, who articulated it with all the considerable knowledge and insight at their command. Those critiques were dismissed pretty much by the time they made it into book form, certainly by the 1970s, when the dominant position was to bring mainstream into science fiction rather than casting science fiction works out for purity’s sake. No argument ever goes away completely and fashions in arguments do cycle. There is no overall definition of science fiction and what is or should be included in it is not fixed. If you want an analogy, let me suggest race. Race is rejected as a scientific construct but race is almost inescapable as a cultural construct. You might argue that the lack of a strict definition of race should make the common identification of it moot, but society simply doesn’t work that way. Science fiction is and has been since Gernsback a cultural construct. President Obama is culturally black, regardless of his white mother. Bradbury is culturally science fiction, regardless of his lack of formal scientific content. (So is Stranger in this sense.) If you try to argue otherwise you have to do so in the narrowest of senses and understand that you are removing yourself from the conversation that is taking place all around you. My personal take on it is that it’s not worth the effort. There is almost nothing to be gained by defining Bradbury or Stranger out of science fiction and everything to be gained by inclusion, just as its hard to imagine any advantage in taking Obama’s blackness out of the conversation that has swirled around him for five years. If you do so you will be baffled at almost everything everybody says and the context in which they are saying it. And your comments will undoubtedly backfire because they will lead people to assume that you are either talking out of ignorance or saying things you don’t mean. As they are doing here. Blish and Knight were great critics, invaluable to the growth of the genre, who were spectacularly wrong on this one point. You are being spectacularly wrong as well. And for once that’s not me being idiocentric but the overwhelming consensus opinion. ---
**Author:** ![The\_Other\_Waldo\_Pepper](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/the_other_waldo_pepper/32/12370_2.png) [@The\_Other\_Waldo\_Pepper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Other_Waldo_Pepper)\ **Post date:** [December 9, 2013, 3:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/samuel-delany-named-grand-master/675506/65 "2013-12-09T03:03:52Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > Or yet another way: Other authors have aspired to Bradbury’s writing, but they weren’t aspiring to his writing of science fiction specifically. Nobody says “I’m a big fan of the way Bradbury set his stories on Mars and Venus”, or “I’m a big fan of the way Bradbury included robots in his stories”. You don’t think aspiring writers say stuff like _“I hope to write science fiction as well-crafted as FAHRENHEIT 451, because Bradbury sure created a classic there, didn’t he? He made his cautionary tale approachable and plausible by extrapolating the details of a not-too-distant-future, holding a mirror up to society by showing his vision of what could be; I may fall short of that, but how could I aim any higher?”_ [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/samuel-delany-named-grand-master/675506.md?page=3)