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the language of Babel-17 is a flawed weaponized language. The novel ends with the Alliance turning the tables on the Invaders with the corrected language. Delany conveys that racial antagonisms can be overcome through communication—either that or violence.
    #1
Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (1984): While many fans and scholars consider
Dhalgren
as Delany’s masterpiece, I deem
Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand
his magnum opus. I very much like the neo-slave narrative vibe of its opening sentence “‘Of course’…‘you will be a slave’” (3). The Radical Anxiety Termination technology that strips Korga of his identity to rid him of antisocial behavior and sexual deviance in conjunction with corporate slavery plain scares me. Rat Korga is the lone survivor of a cultural fugue event, a holocaust caused by socioeconomic collapse and competing political systems, that destroys his home world Rhyonon.Of course, the far-future setting, intergalactic empire, and love affair help me choose this novel as my favorite of favorites. Delany turns gendered language on its head with one simple change: every human being becomes “she” regardless of biology unless a person is the object of sexual desire and then becomes “he,” again irrespective of sex. Thus, he creates something profoundly alien about gender by defamiliarizing language. The love affair between Marq Dyeth, ambassador to alien worlds and industrial diplomat, and Rat Korga threatens to bring about a second planet-wide destruction on Dyeth’s own home planet Velm. The novel involves identity politics in every conceivable way—race, gender, sex, class, and family—and strips from us all forms of intolerance. Now that’s powerful artistry.
    *I hope my continuing self-reflection on why I study race in science fiction demonstrates my commitment. As the only black Grand Master of science fiction, Delany’s work inescapably infuses my own. Indeed, Delany’s worlds are fully occupied by all kinds of minorities, especially people of color, and I quite simply love that.
    End Notes
    1 See my introduction to
Black and Brown Planets: The Politics of Race in Science Fiction
entitled “Coloring Science Fiction” (2014) and my essay “Black Grit: or, Why I Study Race and Racism in Science Fiction” (2014)
.
    2 See Carl Freedman’s
Critical Theory and Science Fiction
(2000) as well as
Conversations with Samuel R. Delany
(2009).
    3 See Chapter VIII of Richard Wright’s memoir
Black Boy
(1945), where he drops out of junior high after being named the valedictorian of his ninth grade class and refusing to read the speech provided for him by the school’s principal.
    4 See my review of
Dark Matter
, “A Century of Black SF,” in
Science Fiction Studies
28.2 (2001): 140-3.
    5 See Bould’s essay “The Ships Landed Long Ago: Afrofuturism and Black SF” (2007) and Yaszek’s essay “An Afrofuturist Reading of Ralph Ellison’s
Invisible Man
” (2005).
    Works Cited
    Anderson, Sherwood.
Winesburg, Ohio
. 1919. New York: Dover, 1995. Print.
    Berger, Albert I.
The Magic That Works: John W. Campbell and the American Response to Technology
. San Bernardino: Borgo, 1993. Print.
    Bould, Mark. “The Ships Landed Long Ago: Afrofuturism and Black SF.”
Science Fiction Studies
34.2 (2007): 177-86. Print.
    Delany, Samuel R. “Aye, and Gomorrah…”. 1967.
Aye, and Gomorrah: and Other Stories
. New York: Vintage, 2003. 91-101. Print.
    ---.
Babel-17
. 1966. New York: Vintage, 2001. Print.
    ---.
Dhalgren
. 1975. Hanover: Wesleyan UP, 1996. Print.
    ---.
The Einstein Intersection
. New York: Ace, 1967. Print.
    ---.
The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction
. 1977. Revised Edition. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 2009. Print.
    ---.
Longer Views: Extended Essays
. Hanover: Wesleyan UP, 1996. Print.
    ---.
Nova
. 1968. New York: Vintage, 2002.