SOURCE: “Allegory in Delany's Einstein Intersection,” in Forms of the Fantastic: Selected Essays from the Third International Conference on the Fantastic in Literature and Film, edited by Jan Hokenson and Howard Pearce, Greenwood Press, 1986, pp. 87-90.

In the following essay, Collins contends that The Einstein Intersection illustrates Delany's theme that American blacks, in the interest of establishing their own cultural identity, must “exorcize” and “discard” the inherited myths and religion of white Westerners.

In an epigraph to one of the late chapters of The Einstein Intersection (they are not numbered), Samuel Delany quotes a bit of conversation recorded in his journal: “What’s a spade writer like you doing all caught up with the Great White Bitch?” Gregory Corso says to him, and then adds an afterthought, “I guess it’s pretty obvious.”¹ Both the content and the tone of these epigraphs, mostly from his journal, suggest that...