I remember, as a teen, encountering Brian Aldiss’s remark on the fiction of Samuel R. Delany in his original critical history of SF, Billion Year Spree: quoting C. S. Lewis, Aldiss commented that Delany’s telling of how odd things affected odd people was an oddity too much. And that puzzled me, then and now, because I found, and still find, nothing odd or strange about Delany’s characters. They are fundamentally human; or, more to the point, they are, fundamentally, us.

And that is what fiction is for.

My foreword to the 1998 Wesleyan Press edition of Samuel R. Delany’s The Einstein Intersection.

On the Fortieth Anniversary of the Nebula Awards: A Speech, 2005

Welcome, to the Nebula Awards, on this, the fortieth anniversary of the founding of the SFWA.^* That’s the ruby anniversary, for anyone wondering what sort of gift to give.

And forty years is a very short time in the life of a genre.

I suspect that if I had been given the opportunity to address a convocation of the most eminent writers of science fiction and fantasy when I was a young man—say around the age of twenty-three or twenty-four, when I was bumptious and self-assured and a monstrous clever fellow—I would have had a really impressive sort of speech prepared. It would have been impassioned and heartfelt. An attack on the bastions of science fiction, calling for the tearing down of a number of metaphorical walls and the building up of several more. It would have been a plea for quality in all ways—the finest of fine writing mixed with the reinvention of SF and fantasy as genres. All sorts of wise things would have been said.

And now I’m occupying the awkward zone that one finds oneself in between receiving one’s first lifetime achievement award and death, and I realize that I have much less to say than I did when I was young.

Gene Wolfe pointed out to me, five years ago, when I proudly told him, at the end of the first draft of American Gods, that I thought I’d figured out how to write a novel, that you never learn how to write a novel. You merely learn how to write the novel you’re on. He’s right, of course. The paradox is that by the time you’ve figured out how to do it, you’ve done it. And the next one, if it’s going to satisfy the urge to create something new, is probably going to be so different that you may as well be starting from scratch, with the alphabet.

At least in my case, it feels as I begin the next novel knowing less than I did the last time.

So. A ruby anniversary. Forty years ago, in 1965, the first Nebula Awards were handed out. I thought it might be interesting to remind you all of the books that were nominees for Best Novel in 1965 . . .

All Flesh Is Grass by Clifford D. Simak

The Clone by Theodore Thomas and Kate Wilhelm