Samuel R. Delany

This book, and in particular the essay opening the collection, “About 5,750 Words” is famous (I wouldn’t know whether justly or not) for being the first attempt to define Science Fiction not by way of its content (“It takes place in the future”, “It has robots and starships”) but by way of its literary form. In all honesty, I’m not at all sure there actually is any formal element that would allow to identify a given work as being distinctly Science Fiction, but Delany’s show more attempt at identifying it is both heroic and fascinating.

He does so by way of “reading protocols”, i.e. a certain (mostly implicit) set of rules and skills that is required to actually make sense of SFnal sentences. A phrase like (to quote one of his examples) “the door dilated”, used quite casually by Heinlein in one of his novels, just does not make any sense in a frame of reference that is not Science Fiction and that is not familiar with the concept of iris doors. Of course, one has to ask where this frame of reference comes from, as it needs to exist in some kind of contest; and when Delany finally describes Science Fiction as “What is possible” (as opposed to “what is” of realistic and “what is impossible” of fantastic fiction), he has moved away from strictly formal criteria back towards defining Sciene Fiction as a specific content again, as there is just no way to determine possibility without recourse to some kind of external, non-literary reality that would be independent of any specific form.

But then it is very doubtful whether Delany is interested in the merely formal anyway, for the essays collected in this volume also show him as someone with a keen interest not just in literary theory but also in politics, the politics of literature and even the politics of literary forms. This is at its most pronounced and its most detailed in his long essay on Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, which is in many ways the most remarkable and most important essay in this volume but also the one I had the most issues with. Most important because his examination of Le Guin’s work led Delany eventually to write his own novel Triton, most remarkable because it is such a close and fascinating reading, admiring even where it criticizes and raising many excellent points. But also the most problematic for the particular ad hominem argumentation of much of the criticism Delany levels against The Dispossessed – the homo in this case not being Le Guin but Delany himself, in so far as much of his argument consists simply of claiming that he has experienced things differently than Le Guin describes them and that therefore he must be right and the novel must be wrong.

Now, I agree that a depersonalized, absolutely objective point of view is at best an illusion, at worst an ideology that masks the most impoverished form of subjectivity, that the writing subject is always inextricably involved and engaged in any kind of debate and that therefore it is not automatically illegitimate to appeal to that subject’s experience. However, the simple referral to a subjective, individual experience does not constitute an argument - if it is not in some way mediated or refined through some degree of objectivity or generality, it remains a mere statement of opinion. And this is unfortunately where a large part of Delany’s essay on The Dispossessed remains stuck, a part that contrasts rather strangely with those bits where Delany’s criticism is solidly founded on a close reading of the novel’s text. The whole essay thus remains a somewhat uneven affair, but it is well worth reading – both for its insights on The Dispossessed and the snippets of Delany’s autobiography, as badly integrated as the two may be in this instance. I can’t help but suspect that Delany felt somewhat similarly, and that because of this, the essay might very well have been the starting point not just for Triton but for two of my favourite essays in this volume that explore precisely different ways of melding subjective experience with objective insight, the individual with the general.

The first one is the last piece in the collection, “A Fictional Architecture That Manages Only with Great Difficulty Not Once to Mention Harlan Ellison” - not really an essay, but a series of autobiographical sketches, a kaleidoscopic jumble of scenes where Science Fiction intersected with Delany’s life (or the other way round). As much as I enjoyed getting to Delany as a critic through the course of this volume, this final piece reminded that and why I like him most as a writer – it is dense, almost lyrical and dazzlingly brilliant and as far as I’m concerned, the high point of this collection. Also, you just have to love the title.

The second one is part of the appendix, the essay “Midcentury” which has as its subtitle “An Essay in Contextualization.” It undertakes an examination of the 1950s in the US by way of a parallel reading of some experiences from Delany’s youth and pictures from a contemporary exhibition, The Family of Man, showing both how young Delany’s preconceptions shaped his perceptions of the pictures, and how those in turn led to a certain shift in those very same preconceptions, and inscribing both into the context of their time. It is a brilliant and enlightening piece of work and I am a bit surprised that it was relegated to the appendix (which might have to do with the volume’s publishing history rather than with any perceived slightness of this and the other essay making up the appendix).

While The Jewel-Hinged Jaw is not Delany’s final word on Science Fiction and he apparently revised some of his views in later works, this still remains not only a groundbreaking collection, but also one that continues to excite and stimulate, with many thought-provoking essays not just on the theory of Science Fiction in general but also on individual authors (like Thomas M. Disch, Joanna Russ, Roger Zelazny) and works, as well as several particularly astringent observations on gender and race in the genre which sadly are almost as valid today as back in the seventies. show less

Of course, this book comes with a story.

1982, junior year of high school, my SF and fantasy reading expanding out in desperation from the serious traumas of my life. This book lived in a particular set of shelves in the middle of my school's "media center". I remember that the cover caught my attention. I picked it up and started reading. I fell right into the first story, sensing a level of experiences and ideas new to me, so new they were guaranteed to take me out of my own life for a show more while. I checked it out.

I read the book in a few days, then reread it. And, in time, I returned it to the library.

Cut to a few months later, just before the end of the school year. I returned to that spot in the library, that particular shelf, and that book. I'd combed my favorite used and new stores without finding a copy, but I knew I had to have that book. I needed to be able to get back into that world, all those worlds, all those places that hinted at things I wanted, needed, couldn't get at 17 years old living in a small town in Florida. I'd already hunted down other Delany books by then, but I had to have this one. So I opened the cover and checked the list in the back -- this was before bar codes and computer tracking, in the dark ages -- and the list had no dates stamped in it since I'd checked it out last. In fact, I was the only person to check it out in two years, and only one other person had checked it out before me. So I checked it out again. And, after my two weeks were up, I reported it lost. I paid the $5.00 fine. I put it on my shelf.

I still have that copy. I feel no guilt about it. That's how much I wanted it. show less

At first glance, the title and table of contents for this book make it look like a set of disparate fantasy stories in a shared setting, but it is in fact an integrated novel. Each "Tale of" people and doings in Nevèrÿon ends up linked to the others on multiple levels, and all of them take place over roughly a single generation.

This fantasy is imaginative, but far less "fantastic" than most. There are no supernatural elements, no storybook giants or fairies.* If Tolkien's Middle Earth was show more a step closer to our world than Dunsany's Pegāna, Delany's Nevèrÿon is a considerable stroll in our direction. I was a little puzzled by the characterization of this book in the appended note on the author as "sword and sorcery," since there is certainly no sorcery in it at all. But on reflection, it does represent a new turn for the sort of fabulous prehistory supplied by Robert E. Howard's seminal stories of that genre, and I can easily imagine that Delany was responding to them (among other fictions and factualities) when writing Nevèrÿon.

The appendix ("Some Informal Remarks on the Intermodal Calculus, Part Three," alluding to the appendices of his prior science fiction novel Triton) summarizes some fictional scholarship to place Nevèrÿon in our actual (pre-)history, via the study of the apocryphal Culhar' Text. The effect of this retroactive framing--in combination with the philosophical motifs of the main text--is positively vertiginous.

The epigrams for the individual tales are drawn from post-structuralist philosophy, while the book as a whole is concerned with the imagined genealogies of cultural systems: language, money, gender roles, slavery, politics, and so on. There are nested stories and digressions that highlight these concerns, but the characters of the general narrative are unusual and vivid, and the setting is carefully developed, so that the book doesn't degenerate into a string of deconstructivist parables.

Those chiefly seeking escapism from their fantasy reading should avoid this book, while philosophical readers will find much to enjoy in it.
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* I realized on my return to this review that the key characters Gorgik and Small Sarg might be read as a "giant" and a "fairy" respectively. But not in the customary fantasy sense. show less

Incredibly strange, sometimes self-indulgent, often brilliant. As I've been reading it I've been comparing it a lot to The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions by Larry Mitchell--radically different books in almost every way, but still, something about these two gay writers in the 70s writing about shambling collapsing cities and people with intricate chosen names and networks of connections and a combination of filth and fantastic creatures and an eye for the materiality of show more experience that I want to mine into. show less