The pulp hero, though he may be a renegade, is a guy who doesn't feel. Anything. Ever. And for the adolescent male - pummeled by emotions left and right, whether arising from sexuality or resulting from his necessary encounters with authority - this hero is a blessing, a relief and a release. The world he lives in, where feelings are totally under control, looks to the adolescent boy like heaven! This hero's lack of feeling - like Star Trek's Spock - is what allows him to be a genius, or allows him to shoot the bad guys and/or aliens, without a quiver to his lip.

Samuel R. Delany

Categorized in : Boys Hero Stars

The only important elements in any society are the artistic and the criminal, because they alone, by questioning the society’s values, can force it to change.

Samuel R. Delany

criminals elements important

There is no articulate resonance. The common problem, I suppose, is to have more to say than vocabulary and syntax can bear. That is why I am hunting in these desiccated streets. The smoke hides the sky's variety, stains consciousness, covers the holocaust with something safe and insubstantial. It protects from greater flame. It indicates fire, but obscures the source. This is not a useful city. Very little here approaches any eidolon of the beautiful.

Samuel R. Delany

hunting fire beautiful

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.

Samuel R. Delany

important exercise thinking

The problem isn't to learn to love humanity, but to learn to love those members of it who happen to be at hand.

Samuel R. Delany

problem humanity hands

Endings to be useful must be inconclusive.

Samuel R. Delany

inspirational

The truth is always multiplex.

Samuel R. Delany

truth-is

Science fiction doesn’t try to predict the future, but rather offers a significant distortion of the present…We sit around and look at what we see around us and we say how can the world be different

Samuel R. Delany

different trying looks

It's only ... when we're stripped of purpose that we know who we are.

Samuel R. Delany

who-we-are purpose knows

Apocalypse has come and gone. We're just grubbing in the ashes.

Samuel R. Delany

apocalypse ashes gone

But I realized something. About art. And psychiatry. They're both self-perpetuating systems. Like religion. All three of them promise you a sense of inner worth and meaning, and spend a lot of time telling you about the suffering you have to go through to achieve it.

Samuel R. Delany

self promise art

It’s a very new, not to mention vulgar, idea that the spectator’s experience should be identical to, or even have anything to do with, the artist’s.

Samuel R. Delany

artist should ideas

The artist has some internal experience that produces a poem, a painting, a piece of music. Spectators submit themselves to the work, which generates an inner experience for them. But historically it's a very new, not to mention vulgar, idea that the spectator's experience should be identical to, or even have anything to do with, the artist's. That idea comes from an over-industrialized society which has learned to distrust magic.

Samuel R. Delany

magic ideas art

Dictators during the entire history of this planet have used similar techniques. By not letting the people of their country know what conditions existed outside their boundaries, they could get the people to fight to stay in those conditions. It was the old adage: Convince a slave that he's free , and he will fight to maintain his slavery .

Samuel R. Delany

fighting country people

Babes, I am so bored here that I don't think, since I've come, I've ever been more than three minutes away from some really astonishing act of violence.

Samuel R. Delany

bored three thinking

A sentence has meaning in the sense that a train has a track, not that a train has a passenger.

Samuel R. Delany

passengers sentences track

It is a magic book. Words mean things. When you put them together they speak. Yes, sometimes they flatten out and nothing they say is real, and that is one kind of magic. But sometimes a vision will rip up from them and shriek and clank wings clear as the sweat smudge on the paper under your thumb. And that is another kind.

Samuel R. Delany

rip real book

There are three types of actions : purposeful, habitual, and gratuitous. Characters , to be immediate and apprehensible, must be presented by all three.

Samuel R. Delany

three action character

I want to read about a character doing something fairly quiet where I can picture who the character is, and what their attitude towards the world is - which I'm a lot more interested in than what they do under the pressure of a gunfight.

Samuel R. Delany

attitude character world

Good writing is clear. Talented writing is energetic. Good writing avoids errors. Talented writing makes things happen in the reader's mind - -vividly, forcefully.

Samuel R. Delany

errors mind writing

How we treat our invalids - our mad, our physically or mentally compromised family members - does tell you something about who we are politically, historically, culturally.

Samuel R. Delany

who-we-are mad doe