Science Fiction Doesn’t Try To Predict The

From 1968 On, I Was Pretty Much The Black, Gay Sf Writer.

I Want To Read About A Character Doing Something Fairly Quiet Where I Can Picture Who The Character Is, And What Their Attitude Towards The World Is - Which I'm A Lot More Interested In Than What They Do Under The Pressure Of A Gunfight.

I Suppose The Problem ... Is That We Have An Inside And An Outside. We've Got Problems Both Places, But It's So Hard To Tell Where The One Stops And The Other Takes Up.

You Know What I Do? I Listen To Other People, Stumbling About With Their Half Thoughts And Half Sentences And Their Clumsy Feelings That They Can't Express, And It Hurts Me. So I Go Home And Burnish It And Polish It And Weld It To A Rhythmic Frame, Make The Dull Colors Gleam, Mute The Garish Artificiality To Pastels, So It Doesn't Hurt Any More: That's My Poem. I Know What They Want To Say, And I Say It For Them.

The Night ... It Is Filled With Bestial Watchmen, Trammeling The Extremities And The Interstices Of The Timeless City, Portents Fallen, Constellated Deities Plummeting In Ash And Smoke, Roaming The Apocryphal Cities, The Cities Of Speculation And Reconstituted Disorder, Of Insemination And Incipience, Swept Round With The Dark.