…but as a text about race it at least avoids presenting race as a hidden issue, something hardly worth talking about.
Samuel Delany, himself a black SF writer and critic, has made a similar point when asked to comment on the Rastafarian characters in William Gibson's celebrated Neuromancer (1984). Some critics have seen Gibson's Rastas as a positive racial representation that reflects well on the novel as a whole, a novel, we might argue, that is particularly aware of the varieties of difference. The Rastas live in a jury-rigged orbital colony where they can follow their religion, and their music, in peace; they keep themselves to themselves, although they are not averse to helping Case and his colleagues in their campaign against the international capitalist edifice of Tessier-Ashpool; they are a positive representation, we might think, of strong, ideologically sound, self-reliant otherness. Delany sees it differently. However much he admires the novel as a whole, he sees Gibson's Rastas as too passive to dramatise the tensions of racial difference effectively; they are 'computer illiterates;, 'women are not part of the rasta colony at all', they are represented as being easily manipulated by the sinister Artificial Intelligence, Wintermute. 'As a black reader', he has said, he finds it difficult to applaud 'this passing representation of a powerless and wholly non-oppositional set of black dropouts by a Virginia-born white writer' (Delany in Dery 1993: 751).
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