EINSTEIN INTERSECTIONALITY, UNIVERSALIZED

My meditation on Ralph Bakshi's WIZARDS got me thinking about apocalyptic scenarios generally, most of which are generated by post-nuclear holocausts. And this reminded me of a book I liked somewhat back in the day, and which I loosely plan to re-read in future, Samuel R Delany's 1967 EINSTEIN INTERSECTION. I don't know if I will be as impressed the second time around, but I couldn't resist the temptation to see how a few modern online reviewers regard this Nebula-winning novel. 

Here's a summation from a review reasonably sympathetic to Delany's goals, though not without criticism.

Plot: In the far future humans have moved on and an alien race have come to inhabit our abandoned shells. Unfortunately, they are devolving into mutants. One of them, Lobey, gifted with music, sets out to find his love Friza, the latest to die by a mysterious hand. He leaves his village, battles a minotaur, travels with dragon herders haunted by the spectre of a supernatural Billy the Kid and arrives in a city where the myths of Orpheus and Christ are about to go down.

And here's one which is a little more disparaging:

The other key theme is mutation as a metaphor for being “different,” and when we consider that Delany himself was a gay black poet growing up in Harlem, that makes sense. He married high-school classmate poet Marilyn Hacker after high school, but they experimented with polygamy and had affairs with both men and women, and Marilyn later declared herself lesbian after their divorce. So it’s fair to say Delany would consider himself different. The underlying theme of the story also strongly identifies with the mutants, and at the end of the story Lo-Lobey realizes that instead of imitating the traditions of the extinct human race, the aliens (for that is what they are) need to embrace their differences and live on their own terms. This may make sense thematically, but to shoehorn such a complex idea into the fragile vessel of this story is really over-reaching in my opinion.

What makes these reviews significant to me is that back in the day, Delany did not make his message so limited (unlike, say, a modern like N.K. Jemisin) that I, a White reader, felt hit over the head with the author's status as a gay Black male. In those pre-Internet days I'm sure I had no way of knowing that. Will it effect my future re-read? Possibly.

But even merely in the act of remembering the novel's broad plot, I found myself thinking of matters that transcend intersectionality. I've been meditating off and on about what sort of intellectual legacy I would leave if I popped off tomorrow, and I found myself attracted by Delany's image (not totally original to him, I'm sure) of a depopulated Earth, where metamorphic aliens settle and begin "appropriating" the myths of mankind.

Regardless of ethnicity or religion, every mortal being's "cosmos" ends this way, leaving behind a detritus of personal effects, family connections, and sometimes intellectual/artistic accomplishments. But all of those things will be "inhabited" by the living, and they in turn will forge their own re-interpretations, world without end.

So even if Delany had some sort of sixties intersectionality in mind when he wrote EINSTEIN, I think he may have "universalized" his project more than he intended. Food for future thought (assuming I don't pop off tomorrow, that is.)

ADDENDUM: One of the reviews mentions in passing a later work by Delany, and though I only read that one once as well, it DID strike me as a cesspool of pretentious intersectionality-- so I'll almost certainly never give it a second chance.