DELANY, Samuel R(ay)

(1942-)

   US author and critic, one of the most influential and most discussed within the genre; he has taught at several universities from 1975, and from 1988 has been professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts. He has a somewhat mixed cultural background: he is Black, born and raised in Harlem, New York, and therefore familiar with the Black ghetto; but his father, a wealthy funeral-parlour proprietor, had the family brought up in privileged, upper-middle-class circumstances - SRD was educated at the prestigious Bronx High School of Science (although he left college after only one term). This double background is evident in all his writing.He became famous as one of the youthful prodigies of sf. Unusually, his first published sf was a novel, published when he was 20: The Jewels of Aptor (1962 dos; restored 1968; rev 1971 UK); the later versions restore the third of the book which had originally been excised at ACE BOOKS. This was followed by the The Fall of the Towers trilogy: Captives of the Flame (1963 dos; rev vt Out of the Dead City 1968 UK), The Towers of Toron (1964 dos; rev 1968 UK) and City of a Thousand Suns (1965; rev 1969 UK), all assembled as The Fall of the Towers (omni of rev texts 1970). Another early novel was The Ballad of Beta-2 (1965 dos; text corrected 1977).The early novels had certain similarities, and some of the themes initiated in them have recurred regularly in SRD's work. The plot structure is almost invariably that of a quest, or some form of FANTASTIC VOYAGE. Physically and psychologically damaged participants are common. An economical use of colourful detail, often initially surprising but logical when considered, is used to flesh out the social background of the stories. There is an interest in MYTHOLOGY, taking the form of metaphorical allusion to existing myths or of an investigation of the way new myths are formed; this is central to The Ballad of Beta-2, in which a student anthropologist investigates the facts behind a folk song garnered from a primitive Earth culture which has gone voyaging in a fleet of GENERATION STARSHIPS. This novel also shows an interest in problems of COMMUNICATIONS and LINGUISTICS which was to become central to SRD's work. The Fall of the Towers, too, is full of colourful cultural speculation, although its melodramatic story of war, mutations, mad computers and a malign cosmic intelligence is moderately conventional. The original three volumes of The Fall of the Towers were set in the same post- HOLOCAUST Earth as The Jewels of Aptor; however, the linking references were removed in the revised edition.SRD published two more novels in 1966: Empire Star (1966 dos; text corrected 1977) and BABEL-17 (1966; rev 1969 UK). Both, especially the latter, which won a NEBULA, reveal a notable advance in sophistication. BABEL-17, whose chapters carry epigraphs from the work of SRD's wife (1961-80), the poet Marilyn Hacker (1942-), is about language, and has a poet heroine. In a future galactic society, radio broadcasts in an apparently alien language are received; they are thought to be connected with sabotage and alien invasion. Much of the novel is to do with cracking the language. SRD believes that our PERCEPTION of reality is partly formed by our languages; the invention of different societies in this novel, more intense and imaginative than his previous work, is mostly rendered in terms of thought- and speech-patterns.In 1967 he began publishing short stories also. Algis BUDRYS (Gal Jan 1969) called him "the best science-fiction writer in the world". He was generally seen as being in the forefront of the NEW WAVE, emphasizing cultural speculation, the soft sciences, psychology and mythology over technology and HARD SF. The short story "Aye, and Gomorrah . . ." (1967) won a Nebula, and the novelette "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones" (1969) won both HUGO and Nebula. These two, with BABEL-17 and THE EINSTEIN INTERSECTION, his other Nebula-winning novel, can be found in his The Complete Nebula Award-Winning Fiction (omni 1986). It can be argued that THE EINSTEIN INTERSECTION (1967; 1 chapter restored 1968 UK) is his most satisfying work, along with the next novel, NOVA (1968; text corrected 1969) and the novella The Star Pit (1967; 1988 chap dos). The latter can be found in SRD's excellent first collection DRIFTGLASS (coll 1971) together with all of his best shorter work of the period. THE EINSTEIN INTERSECTION is remarkably compressed and densely patterned with allusive imagery. Earth has lost its humans (how is never made clear) and their corporeal form has been taken on by a race of aliens who, in an attempt to make coherent sense of the human artefacts among which they live, take on human traditions, too. Avatars of Ringo Starr, Billy the Kid and Christ appear; the hero, a Black musician who plays tunes on his murderous machete, is Orpheus and Theseus. The book is a tour de force, though a cryptic one, since the bafflement of the protagonists trying to make sense of their transformed lives tends to transfer to the reader. SRD's own diaries provide part of the text of the novel. NOVA is the Prometheus story and the Grail story combined in an ebulliently inventive space opera/quest; the fire from the heavens, the glowing heart of the Grail, is found only at the heart of an exploding nova. Passages of high rhetoric are mingled (as they often are, too, in the work of SRD's contemporary Roger ZELAZNY) with relaxed slang and thieves' argot. The book features a characteristic SRD protagonist, thecriminal/outcast/musician/artist whose literary genealogy goes back through Jean Genet (1910-1986) all the way to François Villon (1431-1485). The variety of cultures in these and other novels by SRD has the effect of making morality and ethics seem relative, pluralistic. Divers forms of bizarre human behaviour, many of which would have been seen as antisocial in US society of the time, emerge as natural in the circumstances created. The Star Pit, too, is a highly structured work; its central image is that of ant-colony/cage/trap/micro-ecology, and escape is seen to be intimately linked with emotional mutilation, even psychosis.SRD's next novel - not sf, though with elements of the fantastic - was the pornographic The Tides of Lust (1973; vt Equinox 1994); the title was not his. (A second pornographic novel, Hogg, remains unpublished, though The Mad Man (1994), which continues in the same vein, has seen print.) It is likely to shock most readers in its evocation of extreme sado-masochism in imagery which is sometimes poetic and often disgusting - and so intended - perhaps as a Baudelairean ritual of passage. It was, indeed, in the mid-1970s that it became generally known that SRD was bisexual. Certainly, all his later work is deeply concerned with the cultural mechanisms - actual, theoretical and sometimes labyrinthine - of eroticism and love. Much light is thrown on the relationship between SRD's own sexuality and the sf he wrote in the 1960s by his much later book, The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village 1957-65 (1988; exp vt The Motion of Light in Water: East Village Sex and Science Fiction Writing: 1960-65; with The Column at the Market's Edge 1990 UK). This book, frank and priapic to the verge of the scabrous, won a Hugo for Best Non-Fiction.SRD's next two novels were DHALGREN (1975; 6th impression has many typographical errors rectified; text further corrected 1977) and Triton (1976). After a six-year gap in which SRD had published little or no sf, DHALGREN was controversial. It is very long, and his critics see it as perilously self-indulgent and flabby, lacking the old economy of effect. It became a bestseller, however, and other critics saw it as his most successfully ambitious work to date. An anonymous youth, the Kid, comes to the violent, nihilist city of Bellona, where order has fled and there are two moons in the sky, though the rest of the NEAR FUTURE USA is apparently normal. He becomes an artist, couples and fights, and writes a book that might be DHALGREN before leaving the city. The opening sentence completes the unfinished final sentence and an enigmatic circle. It is a book primarily about the possibilities and difficulties of a youth culture, and partly about being a writer. Triton is more traditionally structured, but in some ways more sophisticated. It presents a series of future societies differentiated mainly along sexual lines; the male protagonist, who begins by displaying a rather insensitive, traditional machismo, ultimately chooses to become a woman, but remains alienated. Triton (a moon of Neptune) is an "ambiguous heterotopia" with a bewildering variety of available lifestyles. The book poses interesting questions about sexuality, and also about freedom of choice.Since then SRD has published one singleton novel, Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (1984), and four books in the Neveryon series, which masquerades as SWORD-AND-SORCERY fantasy: Tales of Neveryon (coll of linked stories 1979; rev 1988); Neveryona (1983; rev 1989 UK); Flight from Neveryon (coll of linked stories 1985; rev 1989 UK) and The Bridge of Lost Desire (coll of linked stories 1987; rev vt Return to Neveryon 1989 UK). Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, the first volume of a projected diptych, is an exotic piece set in a galactic civilization. A complex narrative again asks questions about the arbitrary and parochial nature of our ethical expectations, using various forms of enjoyed degradation to make the point. It is probably SRD's most important work of the 1980s. The Neveryon books adopt a similar strategy of culture-building, and play both with and against the readers' expectations. They are, in fact, sf in the sense that they invent alien societies, though technically they are FANTASY, being set in a distant, fantastic, pre-industrial past, and to a degree act as both critique and re-creation of the Mighty-Thewed Barbarian genre. SRD's treatment of the idea of bondage, for example, is infinitely more sophisticated, and somewhat more elusive, than that of, say, John NORMAN in the Gor books. Many ideas are explored, from the erotic to the economic, the concept of slavery appearing in both these idea-sets, and the slave-collar itself coming to be the prime erotically charged symbol; the later volumes make clear reference to the AIDS epidemic. Though allusive, ambitious, self-reflexive, seriously intended books, they do return in style to something reminiscent of the wittier, more economic, more playful SRD of the 1960s, and are among the more accessible works of his past two decades.During the six-year hiatus (from about 1969) in his own fiction, SRD began to pay more attention to other people's. Much of the resulting critical and semiotic writing has been collected in four books: The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction (coll 1977), The American Shore: Meditations on a Tale of Science Fiction by Thomas M. Disch - Angouleme (1978), Starboard Wine: More Notes on the Language of Science Fiction (coll 1984) and The Straits of Messina (coll 1989). Delany's criticism is often post-structuralist and to a degree POSTMODERNIST, very aware of a contemporary literary context that goes well beyond sf, sometimes very wordy, but important in its persistent attempt to describe sf in terms of the protocols required for reading it. As SRD said in his acceptance speech after receiving the 1985 PILGRIM AWARD for excellence in sf criticism, "We must learn to read science fiction as science fiction." The second of the four books, an analysis of the structure and images of the short story "Angouleme" (1971; later incorporated in 334 [fixup 1972]) by Thomas M. DISCH, is written with a spectacularly microscopic fastidiousness. The Straits of Messina collects mostly pieces by SRD that were originally published as by K. Leslie Steiner, a pseudonym he uses when writing about his own work. The first and third books, essays on the language of sf, are perhaps of the most general interest. A fifth critical book, Wagner/Artaud: A Play of 19th and 20th Century Critical Fictions (1988 chap), does not bear directly on sf; though a sixth, Silent Interviews: On Language, Race, Sex, Science Fiction, and Some Comics (coll 1994) contained material of genre interest; With Marilyn Hacker SRD edited a series of original anthologies, QUARK, preferring the term "speculative fiction" to "science fiction", and emphasizing experimental writing. There were 4 vols 1970-71.With hindsight it can be hypothesized that SRD has had different audiences at different points of his career: a very wide, traditional sf readership up to and including DHALGREN, which sold nearly a million copies in the USA alone; and a narrower, perhaps more intellectual, campus-based readership thereafter. There is no doubt that by the 1980s his fiction (and criticism) had become less accessible, and the real debate about his career must be whether or not he gained more than he lost with his adoption of a denser style towards the later 1970s. At this point his fiction also began to include more passages of obviously polemical intent, some of whose thrust, especially in their icons of abasement, did not carry conviction for all readers. But, though admirers of SRD's earlier work tend to be heavily polarized in their views of his later work, he by no means disappeared from popular notice. The first two volumes of the Neveryon series sold around quarter of a million each. Lower sales on subsequent editions may have been partly due to resistance in the publishing and book-distribution worlds to his increasingly and explicitly controversial texts.

   PN

   Other works: Empire: A Visual Novel (graph 1978), a GRAPHIC NOVEL written by SRD and executed by Howard V. CHAYKIN; Heavenly Breakfast: An Essay on the Winter of Love (1979), autobiographical, about life in a commune in New York; Distant Stars (coll 1981), which includes Empire Star and contains 3 stories not included in DRIFTGLASS; We in Some Strange Power's Employ, Move on a Rigorous Line (1968 FSF; 1990 chap dos); They Fly at Ciron (fixup 1993), a text based on "They Fly at Ciron" (1971 FSF) with James SALLIS, plus other material by SRD alone, all thoroughly revised.As Editor: Nebula Award Winners 13 (anth 1980).

   About the author: The Delany Intersection: Samuel R. Delany Considered as a Writer of Semi-Precious Words (1977 chap) by George Edgar SLUSSER; Worlds out of Words: The SF Novels of Samuel R. Delany (1979) by Douglas BARBOUR; Samuel R. Delany: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography, 1962-1979 (1980) by Michale W. Peplow and Robert S. Bravard; Samuel R. Delany (1982 chap) by J.B. Weedman; Samuel R. Delany (1985) by Seth MCEVOY.

   See also: ARTS; CHILDREN IN SF; CITIES; CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH; CRIME AND PUNISHMENT; CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL WORKS ABOUT SF; CYBERPUNK; CYBORGS; DEVOLUTION; FABULATION; FANTASY; FAR FUTURE; GALACTIC EMPIRES; GAMES AND SPORTS; GENETICENGINEERING; GOTHIC SF; HEROES; The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION ; MILFORD SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS' CONFERENCE; MUSIC; MUTANTS; NEW WORLDS; OUTER PLANETS; PARANOIA; PSYCHOLOGY; SCIENCE FANTASY; SEX; SOCIOLOGY; SPACE OPERA; SPECULATIVE FICTION; UTOPIAS; WOMEN AS PORTRAYED IN SCIENCE FICTION.