Samuel R. Delany

(Caveat: I couldn't finish this book. I made it to page 87 of an Ace edition in what appears to be a 70s reprint).

I picked this up from a second-hand shop thinking I've never read a Delany novel I didn't like. Well now I've found one. The first twenty pages or so are quite promising and built up some expectations, but it has taken me over two weeks to plod through nearly 90 pages. I know it's his first novel and I was willing to cut him some slack. But, honestly, it's just awful.

The book seems more in the vein of the "sword and sorcery" genre than what one usually expects from Delany. It's not a surprise that he didn't stick with this style for very long because in my opinion (again, based solely on 87 pages of this first novel) he was not very good at it. However, I am not familiar with any other work spanning 1962-65: the earliest I've gone is Babel-17, which is fantastic. What a difference three years made. It has some of the same flavor of a grand adventure story but with a lot more going on to keep you interested. This novel has made me think that perhaps certain kinds of "adventure stories" are better when you are younger. But I'm not so sure. I had similar - but much less pronounced - reactions to reading Fritz Lieber's "Fafnir and the Grey Mouser" books at age 39, but I made it through three of those and enjoyed myself for a least a good portion of that time. "Aptor" has made me think about the kind of function that pulp sci-fi and fantasy books performed for readers in the 60s and 70s, and how that same function is now being filled by other kinds of storytelling like role-playing games. Much of the "adventure and hi-jinx" in The Jewels of Aptor, with its horrible dialogue and impoverished descriptions, is on a level with the worst of any random Forgotten Realms contract writer, and I feel like I'm reading some random Dungeon Master's narrative hand-scribbled on notebook paper and not an actual novel by someone I consider a luminary of science fiction. My eyes start to gloss over, I realize I haven't really been conscious for most of the last page or two that I've read, and I begin to wonder why I am reading an awful novel when there are so many good ones out there I have yet to discover. Including a solid handful of titles by Delany that I'm still looking forward to reading. Perhaps I'll pick one of those next to wash the taste of this from my palette.

I am putting this down right around the part where he seems to have decided to rewrite the script from The Blob. Perhaps I will pick it up at some future date, but I'll have to get a copy from the library because I am putting this in my "to donate to charity" pile. Maybe when someone makes Jewels of Aptor into a tabletop campaign setting or a CRPG, I'll play it, but as a novel this just seems to tank on so many levels.… (more)