"The Ballad of Beta-2": Science Fiction and the African American Tradition

Samuel R. Delany has made valuable contributions to the pantheon of science fiction literature in both his short stories and novels. His works, like “Dhalgren” and “Aye, and Gomorrah and Other Short Stories” are widely read and discussed for their depictions of sexuality and their commentary on society and its progress. While many of his later, more polished works have been poured over by literary analysts, some works from his early years have been passed over with little thought, including “The Ballad of Beta-2”.

Robert Elliot Fox explores Delany's overt references to matters of race in “Dhalgren” with an informative close reading; teasing out similar social issues toyed with in Delany’s earlier work is not so quickly done. At first, “The Ballad of Beta-2” seems to bear only central themes that are science fiction classics. The background has a basic set up; an advanced human race has vaguely explained technologies sprung from the authors imagination and allowing for a human presence across the stars. Also, the sexuality that pervades many of Delany’s later works is scarcely evident. Unlike many science fiction works that address issues of racism obliquely through xenophobia and the use of a nonhuman race, Delany makes his address subtly through the use of this downtrodden segment of future humanity.

There are several themes that link this novel to the centuries of African American literature that preceded it. The protagonist, Joneny, is a gifted student and anthropologist of the future, analyzing races on a galactic scale. He is forced by a mentor to unwillingly examine a people that fell unnoticed from the history of civilization; they were a selection of people that had been sent to transverse interstellar space in giant ships and colonize new lands. However, while they were generations into the journey, space travel advanced allowing the main mode of travel to utilize a spatial jump that avoids actual interstellar space. With this, civilization and colonization occurred without these travelers trapped on their ships. The student wants to ignore these people in his anthropological studies; he makes a protest strikingly similar to Enlightenment thinkers 18^th century view of blacks brought across the Atlantic; “Their contributions to the arts were entirely derivative… they produced nothing” (6).

The very act of making the “most dangerous journey imaginable” is akin to the journey taken by African prisoners across the Atlantic; while the people described were not at the time considered oppressed as black slaves had been, Delany creates this parallel journey (8). Nothing but a thin hull of metal kept the people in Delany’s book from the vacuum of space, and nothing but a wooden hull kept the people in slave ships from the black Atlantic. The culture in Delany’s work even call the vast space they hurtle through a ‘sea’ (24). Another jarring reference comes from the planned breeding of the people on the ships; their sole purpose is to provide foundation stock for future planets, so their child bearing is run out of their own hands (25). Though it is cold, scientific, and not taken as an insult to their humanity as it was to slaves, there is none the less a dehumanizing aspect to the unions that Delany depicts; children are borne for their genetics and physical usefulness (25). The investigation that the young scholar, Joneny, is pursuing takes on increased interest as he investigates “The Ballad of Beta-2”, one of the many songs that are the key part of the culture of the remaining descendents of the interstellar travelers. He tried to originally dismiss this work as a primitive piece, unimportant and not worth examining, but the words hide deeper meaning that is gradually revealed. The language of the people studied is a language of euphemisms, akin to African literature’s habit of hiding meanings under layers of words for protection.
In the surprising conclusion of the novella, Joneny’s examination of this dismissed culture yields the discovery of a new race that can offer double insight and invaluable assistance in the study and expansion of humanity as it travels further in colonization efforts (95). There is a vague, and not fully formed explanation that sees to offer a link to double consciousness, akin to DuBois, but it is not fully explored as the ending of the novella seems slightly abrupt. While not immediately a story that is identified with African American literature, this piece offers a reminder not to dismiss the contributions made by races that may have the hallmarks of civilization as determined by the dominant race. The works from the canon of slave literature and oral tradition might offer scholars temptation to focus on more refined pieces, but there could be a wealth of undiscovered information in these pieces. While, thematically, "The Ballad of Beta-2" is simpler than some of Samuel Delany’s later works, it offers an introduction to science fiction elements as they connect to African American literature, and provides a base with which to explore his longer, richer works.