Epistles from UMass

Abstract

482 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 47 (2020) encourages such an approach. Moreover, in her discussion about Kafer’s “curative imagination,” Cheyne misses an opportunity to discuss how readers might feel towards the lived experiences of those identified as disabled when it comes to dealing with chronic pain or choosing whether or not to undergo curative procedures. Cheyne’s book is relevant to a wide variety of readers, including those interested in genre studies, literary studies, and cultural disability studies, be it critics or scholars. It is important to emphasize the cultural aspect of Cheyne’s approach because those interested in critical disability studies may be troubled by the areas mentioned in the previous paragraph. The book will also be wellreceived by instructors in both writing and literature classes, writers and teachers of creative writing, and those interested in the medical humanities.—Brenda Tyrrell, Miami University, OH Epistles from UMass. Samuel R. Delany. Letters from Amherst: Five Narrative Letters. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2019. xvi+171 pp. $17.95 pbk. Samuel R. Delany (as he is known on the title pages of his books, but Chip Delany in less formal contexts) is not only one of the best and most interesting writers of our time, but also an unusually versatile one. He has excelled in a number of varieties of fiction: most prominently sf, of course, but also historical fiction, sword-and-sorcery, and contemporary realism—not to mention several fictional texts whose genres Delany seems to have virtually invented, such as that remarkable “pornotopic fantasy” (his own term), The Mad Man (1994). He is nearly as distinguished as a writer of nonfiction. He is one of our great autobiographers and also an important scholar, critic, and theorist—of sf, but also of a great many other things, from Wagnerian opera to comic books. The personal letter is yet another of the forms in which Delany has worked, though here his achievement is probably better appreciated by those fortunate enough to be among his correspondents than by the reading public at large. Delany’s letters are notable for their length (the first one I received, before I had ever met him, filled about 20 typed pages), their variety, and their combination of witty high spirits and intellectual rigor. Someday, I hope and expect, industrious scholars will produce a published edition of Delany’s collected correspondence. I cannot guess exactly how large in bulk it will be, but feel sure that it will run to many volumes. So far, however, only a small fraction of this material is available in print. A generation ago, Voyant Publishing brought out 1984: Selected Letters (2000), a fascinating volume that fills 350 closely printed pages and that represents only a selection of the letters Delany composed during or close to the Orwellian year (specifically, between June 1983 and January 1985). I reviewed 1984 in SFS 27.3 (Nov. 2000). Now Wesleyan (Delany’s principal publisher for many years) has brought out this much smaller book. The main text of Letters from Amherst consists of five letters written between February 1989 and September 1991—that is, a few years after the period covered in 1984, and when Delany had taken up his first full-time and permanent academic position as a professor of comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (he would later go on to hold 483 BOOKS IN REVIEW professorships at SUNY-Buffalo and then at Temple University). Each of the letters is the length of a substantial essay (the longest letter in 1984 is as long as a short book). Three are addressed to the late librarian and bibliographer Robert Bravard, one to the scholar and critic Kathleen Spencer, and one to the fiction writer Erin McGraw. The volume also contains an appendix titled “Letters to Iva,” which includes ten much shorter letters that Delany wrote between July 1984 and August 1988 to his daughter Iva Hacker-Delany (born in 1974 to Delany and the distinguished poet Marilyn Hacker) while she was away at summer camp. The five main letters are not quite so purely narrative as the subtitle of the volume might lead one to expect. But they do contain some...