Samuel R. Delany

This is science fiction where the most relevant science is linguistics! I’m not a linguist, but I’ve always found the field really interesting, so I loved that. The Earth is under attack by aliens of a kind we’ve never encountered before, and we’ve hacked their transmissions coordinating the attacks, but the only way to make use of this information is to find someone who can translate their langauge.
And that’s where Rydra Wong, world famous poet and linguist and code-breaker, comes show more in. Our protagonist is the only person with a hope in hell of teaching herself to comprehend the incredibly complex alien langauge, and therby saving humanity. She’s explicitly, canonically a bisexual, polyamorous, autistic woman of colour, and she’s a starship captain adored by her crew, and she has telepathic powers, and she’s brave and kind and beautiful and full of human fears and doubts. Which is all really cool - what a great power fantasy! - but even more so when you remember that she was written by a male author in 1966. I know people didn’t just abruptly start wanting to read and write about awesome diverse characters with the advent of tumblr, but it’s still so surprising and delightful to actually see it in a book from almost fifty years ago. show less

I’m pretty sure I first read this on a family holiday in Paris in the early 1980s. I have a memory of buying Delany’s collection, Driftglass (the Panther/Granada paperback edition), from an English-language bookshop in Paris, chiefly because I’d taken the 1977 Sphere paperback of The Ballad of Beta-2 & Empire Star with me to read during the holiday. While both ‘The Ballad of Beta-2’ and ‘Empire Star’ had stayed with me during the nearly forty years since, ‘Empire Star’ more show more than ‘The Ballad of Beta-2’, it must be said, I’d never bothered to reread them. Until now. And this despite being a big fan of Delany’s fiction and non-fiction. True, some of his output is hugely dated. But some of his output is brilliant precisely because it is dated. The two novellas here have aged extremely well, and while the clever Moebius-strip narrative of ‘Empire Star’ I’d remembered pretty much accurately over the last four decades, I’d forgotten how good was ‘The Ballad of Beta-2’. An anthropology student is sent to study the eponymous song, the only original piece of art created by the Star Folk, the degenerate survivors of a convoy of generation starships, who were beaten to the rest of the galaxy by progress. The story behind the song is pretty much handed to the student on a plate, but it’s an interesting story, and not at all what the reader would have expected. ‘Empire Star’ has a simple plot: Comet Jo, a plyasil farmhand in a “simplex” asteroid-based community finds a crystallised Tritovian and is told to take it to Empire Star to deliver a message. And that’s what he does. Along the way he meets people who have previously interacted with him at different points in their lives, and learns about the Lll, the only enslaved people in the galaxy and the galaxy’s greatest builders, and the war fought over them and their emancipation. I’ve long considered ‘Empire Star’ one of my favourite novellas – I reread it early this century, I seem to remember – and on this reread, my admiration of it remains undiminished. Read both of these novellas, they’re worth it. But definitely read ‘Empire Star’. show less

Dhalgren, the classic novel from Samuel R. Delany that’s been called “the Ulysses of science fiction” (in reference to James Joyce’s masterwork), is definitely not what you’d call “brain candy.” It is, in fact, a wild bit of fantastical, post-apocalyptic (or perhaps apocalyptic, in the sense of “unveiling”) metafiction that happens to be classified as science fiction.

The caliber of the writing was top-notch, but it took some thought to follow. Dhalgren opens with a bit of show more poetry, then narrative that finds a man awakening in a strange place with no memory of who he is or what he’s to do. He immediately meets a woman and has sex with her; then she leads him away before turning into a tree.

My degrees are in English, so when I see a woman turning into a tree, I tend to think, “mythology!” Yep, that’s a dryad. And, in fact, this novel seems to be a new, post-atomic retelling of Joyce’s novel, using the same framework of Greek mythology as an organizing principle. It also functions as a sort of ouroboros, coming around to its own beginning in the end. Most readers will either love it or hate it, but it’s definitely apocalyptic in the most traditional literary sense.

Review on Lit/Rant: www.litrant.tumblr.com show less

This is one of the furthest-out-there science fiction books I have ever read. It presupposes fundamental shifts in human culture, especially gender relations. Hlepful hint: Delany uses "woman" and "she" to refer to male-identifying humans. "He" is only used when referring to a male-identifying human object of desire. Our cultural fascination with locating political perspectives on a left-right spectrum is satirized with a system that classifies them by color. The protagonist goes on an show more odyssey that, by means not entirely explained, threatens the order of several societies. I had the privilege of posing a question to Mr. Delany; he described the novel as a reflection of notions of difference in contemporary America, based I imagine on his identity as a gay Black male. If you want the same old thing, pass this by. If you want a cold-water bath in sci-fi, give it a read. show less