In my opinion, Asimov’s Foundation trilogy seems to have had a much wider and more transformative influence than has generally been acknowledged. That’s something else you read when you were thirteen. How did it affect you?

SAMUEL R. DELANY: Well, certainly that’s an opinion we share. The first volume—with malice aforethought on Ike’s part, I’m sure: the SF club he belonged to when he was seventeen, the Futurians, was a hotbed of hyperintelligent teenage Trotskyites—taught me what historical materialism was. By the end of the third volume, I had a pretty dramatic picture of what’s wrong with historical determinism, so that when I encountered Popper’s The Poverty of Historicism, say, I’d seen the whole thing on the big screen, as it were, in full color and with stereophonic sound. Why do you think nobody’s ever made a film out of it? It would make Marxists—or, at any rate small-m marxists—of every bright thirteen-year-old in the country. Personally, I think that’s preferable to the demagoguery of Ayn Rand.