Grand Master of SF Samuel R. Delaney gives us an absolutely fascinating and downright frightening recollection of the terrible past, violent reminders of racism and how he was much a victim himself of racial violence. The recollection of how he was vilified for “destroying SF” by none other than famous editor Fred Pohl was a shock to me.

In that era, even while SF writers were accepting the polyrealistic, multispecies universe of what was being written, there were those who said the black man and woman (or any other human description), don’t belong in the genre, as absurd and ridiculous as that seems. So thank goodness for Delaney.

Included in this collection of stories and essays is the Conjunctions-serialized story, “The Atheist In the Attic” and an interview with Delaney by Terry Bisson.