PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF SAMUEL R. DELANY
“I consider Delany not only one of the most important SF writers of the present generation, but a fascinating writer in general who has invented a new style.” —Umberto Eco
“Samuel R. Delany is the most interesting author of science fiction writing in English today.” —The New York Times Book Review
Dhalgren
“Dhalgren’s the secret masterpiece, the city-book-labyrinth that has swallowed astonished readers alive for almost thirty years. Its beauty and force still seem to be growing.” —Jonathan Lethem
“A brilliant tour de force.” —The News & Observer (Raleigh)
“A Joyceian tour de force of a novel, Dhalgren … stake[s] a better claim than anything else published in this country in the last quarter-century (excepting only Gass’s Omensetter’s Luck and Nabokov’s Pale Fire) to a permanent place as one of the enduring monuments of our national literature.” —Libertarian Review
The Nevèrÿon Series
“Cultural criticism at its most imaginative and entertaining best.” —Quarterly Black Review of Books on Neveryóna
“The tales of Nevèrÿon are postmodern sword-and-sorcery … Delany subverts the formulaic elements of sword-and-sorcery and around their empty husks constructs self-conscious metafictions about social and sexual behavior, the play of language and power, and—above all—the possibilities and limitations of narrative. Immensely sophisticated as literature … eminently readable and gorgeously entertaining.” —The Washington Post Book World
“This is fantasy that challenges the intellect … semiotic sword and sorcery, a very high level of literary gamesmanship. It’s as if Umberto Eco had written about Conan the Barbarian.” —USA Today
“The Nevèrÿon series is a major and unclassifiable achievement in contemporary American literature.” —Fredric R. Jameson
“Instead of dishing out the usual, tired mix of improbable magic and bloody mayhem, Delany weaves an intricate meditation on the nature of freedom and slavery, on the beguiling differences between love and lust … the prose has been so polished by wit and intellect that it fairly gleams.” —San Francisco Chronicle on Return to Nevèrÿon
“One of the most sustained meditations we have on the complex intersections of sexuality, race, and subjectivity in contemporary cultures.” —Constance Penley
Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand
“Delany’s first true masterpiece.” —The Washington Post
“What makes Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand especially challenging—and satisfying—is that the complex society in which the characters move is one … which contains more than 6,000 inhabited worlds and a marvelously rich blend of cultures. The inhabitants of these worlds—both human and alien—relate to one another in ways that, however bizarre they may seem at first, are eventually seen to turn on such recognizable emotional fulcrums as love, loss and longing.” —The New York Times Book Review
“Delany’s forte has always been the creation of complex, bizarre, yet highly believable future societies; this book may top anything he’s done in that line.” —Newsday
Nova
“As of this book, [Samuel R. Delany] is the best science-fiction writer in the world.” —Galaxy Science Fiction
“A fast-action far-flung interstellar adventure; [an] archetypal mystical/mythical allegory … [a] modern myth told in the SF idiom … and lots more.” —The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
“[Nova] reads like Moby-Dick at a strobe-light show!” —Time
The Motion of Light in Water
“A very moving, intensely fascinating literary biography from an extraordinary writer. Thoroughly admirable candor and luminous stylistic precision; the artist as a young man and a memorable picture of an age.” —William Gibson
“Absolutely central to any consideration of black manhood … Delany’s vision of the necessity for total social and political transformation is revolutionary.” —Hazel Carby
“The prose of The Motion of Light in Water often has the shimmering beauty of the title itself … This book is invaluable gay history.” —Inches
Dhalgren
Samuel R. Delany
This book about many things
must be for many people.
Some of them are
Joseph Cox, Bill Brodecky, David
Hartwell, Liz Landry, Joseph
Manfredini, Patrick Muir, John
Herbert McDowell, Jean Sullivan,
Janis Schmidt, Charles Naylor, Ann
O’Neil, Baird Searles, Martin Last,
Bob & Joan Thurston, Richard Vriali,
& Susan Schweers
and
Judy Ratner & Oliver Shank
also
Thomas M. Disch, Judith Merril,
Michael Perkins, Joanna Russ, Judith
Johnson, & Marilyn Hacker
Contents
The Recombinant City: A Foreword by William Gibson
I Prism, Mirror, Lens
II The Ruins of Morning
III House of the Ax
IV In Time of Plague
V Creatures of Light and Darkness
VI Palimpsest
VII The Anathēmata: a plague journal
A Biography of Samuel R. Delany
“You have confused the true and the real.”
GEORGE STANLEY / In conversation
The Recombinant City
A Foreword by William Gibson
SAMUEL DELANY’S DHALGREN IS a prose-city, a labyrinth, a vast construct the reader learns to enter by any one of a multiplicity of doors. Once established in memory, it comes to have the feel of a climate, a season. It turns there, on the mind’s horizon, exerting its own peculiar gravity, a tidal force urging the reader’s re-entry. It is a literary singularity. It is a work of sustained conceptual daring, executed by the most remarkable prose stylist to have emerged from the culture of American science fiction.
I have never understood it. I have sometimes felt that I partially understood it, or that I was nearing the verge of understanding it. This has never caused me the least discomfort, or interfered in any way with my pleasure in the text. If anything, the opposite has been true.
Dhalgren is not there to be finally understood. I believe its “riddle” was never meant to be “solved.” I do not believe that this has to do with any failure of coherence on the part of either the author or the text. I find both to be exceptionally coherent. Author and text are determinedly self-aware, in ways that less exploratory authors and their tales never are. Dhalgren is quite literally an experimental novel, an exploration of the cultural envelope of fiction. Delany, equipped with the accumulated tool-kit of literary modernism, heads straight for the edges and borders and unacknowledged treaties of the consensual act of fiction. And, most remarkably—almost uniquely, in my experience—he succeeds; the text becomes something else, something unprecedented.