📕 Samuel Delany, The Jewel Hinged Jaw
The development of a particular literary technique or theme over several decades through several writers, often in several countries, is not completely solved by a chronological listing of who did what first.
Being a book of essays, this collection has its highs and lows; there were long tracts on Robert Zelazny and Thomas M. Disch that i could not follow, for i am unfamiliar with their work, far too much praise for Robert Heinlein, and the earnest belief that James Tiptree Jr. is a man, in a Letter to the Symposium on Women in Science Fiction no less. Though i have both hindsight and history on my side, i could not help but admire the efficacy of Tiptree's literary transsexuality.
To Read the Dispossessed was the essay i'd found most engaging, partly because i read The Dispossessed just last year, and for the very interesting points the essay made on the pitfalls of constructing a literary utopia, how much writing reveals of a writer's politics, and for the questions it raised for me as i read it. Delany's detailing of science fiction's references to literary canons established in the imperialist university grounds the book as a concerted effort to legitimise science fiction as a literary genre as opposed to one that is merely popular.
Delany's efforts were, of course, ultimately successful, but i'd argue that the science fiction works that served as clarion calls for support of the U.S. empire (Heinlein's, for example) had a greater effect than writers like Delany did. I'd go so far as to argue that Delany had a hand in the writing some of the clarion calls as well; consider Babel-17 in terms of its place as a Cold War novel.