But, as Browne also suggested, even such unknowable questions are not beyond all speculation. When a significant number of reasonable answers have been marshaled, however (the topics of the books still, to certain readers, seem of interest; still others may remember the writing as having a vitality they liked; the book was commercially successful twenty-five years ago; and Vintage's marketing department feels they may be able to reduplicate that), the greatest and the most humbling one remains: I've been very lucky.

I don't believe, however, I've been any more involved in the process than any other writer having a book reissued by a major publisher.

Over a few months, my baker's dozen Bantam titles, some of which had been in print for as long as ten, fifteen, even twenty years, disappeared from the shelves. At the time, I thought: Well, my hour in the public eye is over. It's happened to writers before. It'll happen to writers again.

I did think it was strange how the sales of title after title had fallen off like clockwork. Later, of course, I learned that, under all sorts of economic pressure -- from rising paper costs to new tax laws to the myriad mergers that transformed the publishing industry over that decade from some eighty or so competing businesses to five corporate monoliths -- Bantam had instituted a new policy, where everything from publishing slots to advertising budgets to catalogue space was being taken away from midlist writers like me and given to far fewer projects with a shot at becoming low-literary quality bestsellers, along with a few slots reserved for brand new writers, who were to be given -- exactly -- three chances each to make it as a bestseller. They were paid low advances, though often a fair amount of promotion went with their books.

If, however, after three tries, these new writers didn't produce something that could be fed into the bestseller machinery, they were dumped -- and were often very surprised (and unhappy) men and women: Up till then they'd assumed that, as writers, they'd actually had a supportive publisher behind them. Nobody ever told them they had only three chances. Presumably they'd look around and figure it out for themselves. Some -- the John Sauls, the Dean Koontzes, the Clive Barkers -- actually did. A lot, however, didn't.

You say "mid-list problems aside," but that's what the problems were. Nor was I the only victim. Not just from science fiction and mysteries, but dozens of writers fell out of the mainstream as well. Science fiction -- however -- has a particularly vociferous and relatively organized fandom, so that calls for reissues and attempts to throw some attention back on worthy writers from the past can come with a bit more force -- another way of saying I've been lucky.

Would that it were like that!

Of course I'd like to think a few people remembered the reading experience my work represented for them, readers who felt that experience was worth making available again to others. Probably, though, that's too utopian. More likely someone I've never met and whose name I'll never know decided that there was money to be made -- either from nostalgia or whatever. Thus the decision to bring Delany back into print.

Half a dozen years after Dhalgren appeared, someone sent me a recently written grammar book, for people learning English, in which -- among the various examples of American writing scattered throughout -- two or three paragraphs of Dhalgren were quoted as an example of economical and informative prose. The writer talked a bit about the structure of the sentences, made one or two points about their arrangement and internal form. At the time, I remember, I was overwhelmed.

Works by many classical poets and writers have survived from Greece and Rome -- in fragmentary form -- because some grammarian used a quotation from the work as a particularly effective example of one grammatical figure or rhetorical trope. The hundred-twenty-four-odd fragments surviving from the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus come to us pretty much this way. So does most of what survives of Sappho and the even more fragmentary work of Achilocus.

After that book showed up in my mailbox, I recall thinking: There's nothing more a writer can ask. That someone might choose a sentence or six of mine to teach others how to read, write, and think in this extraordinary language, American English -- well, when set beside questions of "attention due," I feel that honor simply dissolves those questions.

Fiction -- at least for me -- requires long, relatively uninterrupted time stretches in which to bring it to fruition. I've never been a two-hour-in-the-morning writer, who could put in another six hours on Sunday afternoon. For me, a novel requires weeks of living in a largely mental and wholly internal landscape. Everything else has to be relegated to the odd hour here, the bit of time there. Sadly, however, uninterrupted time blocks are not what life doles out today to any of us with regularity.

From the teens and twenties, there's a whole sub-genre of embarrassing reviews, which explain, in effect, that poets like T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, H.D., Hart Crane or Wallace Stevens really do have quite a bit of talent. As soon as they learn how to write "real poetry" and stop all their experimenting, they just might fulfill their promise and produce something worthwhile...

The New Wave had some extraordinary writers: Disch, Zolines, Ballard. And, yes, they wrote what they wrote back then. Well, Camp Concentration, 334, On Wings of Song, Neighboring Lives (this last, Disch's collaboration with Charles Naylor),... these were -- and remain -- extraordinary. I'm hoping soon people will begin to rediscover the range of Joanna Russ's work -- and the work of the late Roger Zelazny, through Bridge of Ashes and Doorways in the Sand, before he became trapped in the downward commercial spiral of his Amber series.

But, no, I've missed the one you mentioned.

Certainly, though, the situation of that character was different from mine! My race was never concealed. From 1968 on, I was pretty much "the black gay SF writer."

Today, there are Gay Studies Programs in every University worth the name. Forty years ago, not only was there no such thing, there were no Women's Studies, no African American Studies, no Film Studies. Moreover, if you'd proposed any such ideas, for most of them you'd have been laughed out of the department meeting, and for one or two, you might have ended up incarcerated.

In 1996, I gave a talk at a conference at Yale on post-colonialism, in which I discussed ideas and experiences I'd had that reflected on the postcolonial situation, but which had come to me largely because I was a gay man traveling about in the world.

The Egyptian novelist and psychiatrist Nadaal El Sadawi was also at the conference, and when a bunch of us went out for pizza between conference sessions, she remarked: "You know, Chip, if you had given that talk at my University in Cairo at noon the way you did here, by four o'clock you'd probably have been in jail." It was a sobering thought.

It has only been these changes in the academic culture of the United States that have, of course, allowed my personal situation to function in a positive manner.

Most people only know my "persona," as you call it, though my writing. I already do a fair amount of lecturing, but even there I'm reading from lectures I've written down. So I wonder, indeed, if your idea above -- that my "persona" overshadows my work -- isn't something of an illusion, produced by the work itself. The fact is, the fat, forgetful old man, who walks with a cane and stutters a lot when not reading from a prepared text, just isn't that interesting.

Stand close around, ye Stygian set
With Dirce on one barque convey'd,
Or Charon seeing, may forget
That he is old, and she a shade.

Jorge Luis Borges's lectures from the famous Charles Eliot Norton series at Harvard for 1967, This Craft of Verse, form another of those extraordinary books -- Borges is as humble in his suggestions about literature as Pound is arrogant and iconoclastic. Yet both are wonderful turn-ons for the young writer contemplating the range of enterprises that (as they might say in current critical jargon) constitute the literary.

Concepts of what constitute good writing form a conflictual field -- highly so and they always have. That is the only reason why, say, simplicity and concision are just as much esthetic virtues as ornamentation and rich ambiguity. It's also why either one, out of control, can become an aesthetic failing -- dullness and banality in the one case, and overwrought clutter in the other.

But today how many people remember Ottway? Or have ever read a line by him? If he survives at all, it's as a canonical example of just how wrong-headed an era or a local and provisional set of literary opinions can be.