{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.03598774885145482, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0, 'mean_word_length': 5.502487562189055, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 1, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
"A Sort of Double Writing": They Fly at Çiron's Generic Identities

Samuel R. Delany is not only an award-winning author of science fiction (SF) and standard fiction; he is also, arguably, SF’s foremost scholarly analyst, demonstrating a facility with critical theory in both his fiction and his expository essays. The significance of Delany’s creative and critical writings to discussions about identity categories—of race, gender, and sexuality, for example—has been well-documented; however, Delany’s writing also has important implications for genre theory. This essay identifies nominalism as a philosophical context of relevance to both of these topics as well as to Delany’s writing in general and to They Fly at Çiron in particular. Çiron is an underappreciated and understudied text that deserves more attention for how it illustrates its author’s sophisticated critical insights regarding genre, including its movement among the categories of “science fiction,” “fantasy,” and “literature.” Those same categories, which Delany’s critical comments differentiate as well as interrogate, are useful in making legible the revisions he made to this twice-published story. Both Çiron and Delany’s complex attitudes toward genre and identity, therefore, can be characterized as a sort of double writing.