Over the course of almost a year, I met with Delany eight times. We never returned to the diner; as we finished that first interview, the waitress informed us they would be closing forever that afternoon. We conducted one of our longest interviews in a café-bar in Philadelphia called Woody’s, where the walls are painted bordello red. Young men milled about in leather vests, and someone kindly picked up our bill. I had been reading Octavia Butler’s essay “Positive Obsession,” in which she mentions that when she started out as a writer of science fiction, Samuel Delany was perhaps the only black author writing in the genre. “What good is science fiction to black people?” Butler asks. “What good is its tendency to warn or to consider alternative ways of thinking and doing?”
I pose these questions to Delany, and he responds excitedly: “Science fiction isn’t just thinking about the world out there. It’s also thinking about how that world might be—a particularly important exercise for those who are oppressed, because if they’re going to change the world we live in, they—and all of us—have to be able to think about a world that works differently.”
—Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah