Samuel R. Delany Books

An Ibooks reprint of an earlier collection. having never seen the earlier one, not sure if it was illustrated the same way, but there is a lot of drawing in here, and even one page montages throughout showing several of the illustrations in one circle.

Empire Star here it would seem was actually published as a book quite a long time ago when people still published very short books.

A combination of science fiction and fantasy here.

Distant Stars : Prismatica - Samuel R. Delany
Distant Stars : Corona - Samuel R. Delany
Distant Stars : Empire Star - Samuel R. Delany
Distant Stars : Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones - Samuel R. Delany
Distant Stars : Omegahelm - Samuel R. Delany
Distant Stars : Ruins - Samuel R. Delany
Distant Stars : We in Some Strange Power's Employ Move on a Rigorous Line [Lines of Power] - Samuel R. Delany

A bit of colour about the joint would be good.

3 out of 5


Telepaths can use a good band.

3.5 out of 5


Time to teach ourselves.

3.5 out of 5


Singing shiny password.

4 out of 5


Power symbols.

3.5 out of 5


Ordinary thief problem.

2.5 out of 5


Devil and demon energy overcomes angels.

4 out of 5

DISTANT STARS is a curious re-collection of Delany short stories. It's perhaps notable most for including the story "Omegahelm", which is unavailable elsewhere but interesting in that it is uses the same narrative setting as Delany's well-known novel STARS IN MY POCKET LIKE GRAINS OF SAND. Most of Delany's best-known and award-winning stories are here, alongside several previously-uncollected lesser efforts. The volume also includes some ambitious, if not always entirely successful, illustrations to accompany the tales. In any case, probably a must for Delany devotees, and it's a shame the collection is out of print.

While one essay ("Debased and Lascivious?: Samuel R. Delany's Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand" by Russell Blackford) displays nothing more than its author's ignorance of the realities of contemporary urban gay life (wherein all of the social constructs Blackford dismisses as unrealistic and unbelievable actually obtain today), it is the exception in a volume that is otherwise fascinating, revelatory and worthy of its challenging subject.

Given that Delany is himself a formidable critic, writing about him in a way that is just as incisive as he writes about both himself and others is a particular challenge. This volume delivers in spades, especially in two essays successfully look in detail at Delany's criticism (by David N. Samuelson and Ken James), and in Kathleen Spenser's essay "Neveryon Deconstructed," which offers a fresh and invigorating approach to Delany's already self-deconstructing "Tales."

Highly recommended for anyoine interested in Delany's criticism or critical embroideries of his work that suggest new ways of perceiving those challenging works.

Equinox offers an interesting early glimpse of some themes fully developed in Dhalgren; interracial attraction/aversion, the ambiguous relation of sex and violence, and how people deal with mental and/or physical extremes when suddenly confronted. While not a piece of "great literature", it definitely is a provocative read, and is a must for anybody studying the development of the author's oeuvre.

This is one of those books that should be read for the experience but I have to admit it's far from my favorite science fiction narrative. It starts out quite encouragingly but then gets bogged down in repetition. Violence, sexuality of all kinds, depravity, dirt, grime, and gore are all part of life, particularly when living in chaotic circumstances, but Delany seems transfixed by these aspects of life and replays the same basic scenes too many times within the covers of one book. While he does delve successfully into the human psyche and provides a very realistic picture of human reactions to extraordinary circumstances overall I think he could have cut quite a few pages out and had a better book for it.

Bellona is a city in Midwestern America that has been completely isolated by some unspecified catastrophe. Kid is a man with a history of mental illnesses and no memory of his own name who looks significantly younger than his age. In the novel, he comes to Bellona and slowly adapts to life there, exploring, in detail, the various social castes occupied and coping mechanisms used by the inhabitants of the isolated, post-apocalyptic city where time passes differently for different people and two moons appear through the perpetual cloudcover. He discovers a half-filled notebook that mimics the novel itself in many ways, and begins to fill its pages first with poetry, and then with a journal of his life in Bellona. Intensely detailed and with a slow-moving plot, Dhalgren is largely impenetrable novel with almost no scientific aspects (despite being in the science-fiction genre), but is an interesting investigation into the roles of story, narrator, protagonist, and writer within fictional works. I found this novel disappointing and I don't recommend it, but I also wouldn't steer away an interested reader, because the text does have something to offer.

I believe that my major disappointment with Dhalgren was the lack of science. The novel is billed as sci-fi and is written by a sci-fi author, but the text is primarily an unsolved mystery: Kid becomes increasingly immersed in the irregular events that make Bellona so strange, including the unusual, non-linear passage of time, the hugely oversized sun, and the complete lack of radio signals throughout the town, but he never discovers what causes them. The novel is a puzzle without a solution, and so there is no room for the science-fiction explanations that I would expect in a novel from the genre. The lack of science makes the novel feel more fantastical or surreal than sci-fi, which wasn't what I was expecting and continued to be a disappointment throughout the novel. The unsolved nature of the novel may also make it unsatisfying of even frustrating for some readers: the text comes to no definite conclusion. Indeed, the last sentence is a fragment that loops back the sentence fragment that begins the novel.

The combination of the non-linear, confused timeline and the incredibly detailed writing make the book both lengthy and dense. The plot is loosely-constructed and slow moving--not much happens in the course of the novel, but what does happen is described on a daily basis, action for action, the detail. Reading about what Kid wears and eats, when he washes, who he makes love to, how he moves about town... can get repetitive and frustratingly dull.

Those caveats aside, the novel does provide a detailed, in-world investigation of the roles of text, protagonist/narrator, and writer. The exploration of these themes is not theoretical so much as it is a practical part of Kid's life in Bellona. His discovery of the notebook and the poems and journal entries that he writes, as well as the text of the novel itself and the identities of Kid as author and Delany as author, all interweave, work independently, borrow from each other, and question the underlying identity and nature of all of these roles. Like the mystery of Bellona, the nature of text and authorship is never fully resolved, but the question is given detailed, thorough investigation and provides a wealth of food for through for the reader. It is the saving grace of this difficult and frustrating novel, and I recommend Dhalgren for that purpose only: it is a interesting investigation of the nature of authorship, but not a sci-fi novel nor an enjoyable or satisfying read. I think this book is best for serious, dedicated readers, and don't strongly recommend it either way.

I just finished "Dhalgren" for the second time. Listen: It's not for everyone. I mean, if you're looking for a tight, linear story in which every loose end is resolved, this isn't the novel for you.

Fortunately, there are literally thousands of other novels like that out there. There's only one "Dhalgren," though, and you need to approach it that way: It's not like other stories, and it wasn't meant to be. It *is* quote-unquote literary science fiction. In fact, it's more like an 800-page poem than a novel in the conventional sense. And as a result, it takes some work to read. Hey, so do Proust and Joyce, but people keep saying you should read *them*.

The beauty of "Dhalgren" is that instead of being about extraordinary events taking place in the ordinary world, it's about ordinary events taking place in an extraordinary world -- and it works. Some people might pick nits with that description, because some extraordinary things do happen in the book -- mostly astronomical things -- but they're more or less accepted as part of the bargain of being in Bellona. For the most part, the narrative drifts from scene to scene very organically, very unaffectedly, evoking the bizarre sense of everyday life in a postapocalyptic wasteland. (It's no surprise that the Kid, the book's protagonist, is trying so hard to write a poem in the rhythm of natural speech.)

The whole enterprise is so audacious that it would fall apart if, again, it didn't *work*. In Delany's hands, it does. Resonances fade in and out; when the Kid has a moment of déjà vu, so do you. The philosophizing on art is purely delightful. (Ernest Newboy's comments on poetry and poets ought to be required reading in any lit-crit course.) There's a great bit in there about a comma, of all things. And the final passages are haunting, heartbreaking.

Some people will tell you it's a book about being inside a novel. And no, it's not a spoiler if I mention that, because while you can make a strong case for that reading, "Dhalgren" does not permit itself to be pinned down so easily. Go into it for the first time with whatever preconceptions you want, and it will defy them and leave you with plenty to mull over, or just plenty to feel.

Here is a multiple-choice test; pick as many as you like. "Dhalgren" is:

1) An embalmed relic of the mindset of the 1960s.

2) A demonstration of how to populate a satisfying novel with "marginal people" normally excluded from popular culture -- blacks and latinos; females; the uneducated and mentally ill.

3) A puerile fantasy of sex and asocial escapism.

4) An important work by a masterful writer.

5) A dangerous, morally defective inducement to the spread of AIDS.

6) An absorbing read.

7) Science Fiction.

I would write "true" after all but #7. Dhalgren can't be science fiction because its fundamental situation, the strange condition of the city of Bellona, is not justified by any coherent mechanism. It isn't credible that a whole city could be emptied by disaster (where did the refugees go?); that it would now be in a state in which TV, radio and the telephone don't work; that its skies are filled with strange astronomy and stranger meteorology; that there are no guards or barriers at its limits yet few enter or leave; and so forth.

If Bellona doesn't work as a science-fictional milieu, it does work very well as symbol. It stands for the condition of life in all the wrecked neighborhoods of the world: in the first instance the Bronx and Harlem (Delany has always been a New York writer first); but beyond them, it stands for any hopeless ghetto full of empty buildings with broken windows. Such ghettos _are_ ignored by the surrounding nation -- as Bellona is. Burning up and falling down _is_ their natural condition, and nobody cares or notices -- as in Bellona. Vast incomprehensible events take place outside them (wars, recessions, elections...) and pass on changing nothing -- as in Bellona. Marginal people can, in such places, live pretty much as they please, without reference to law or concensus morality -- as in Bellona.

So Bellona is not acceptable as a setting for SF, but it works as symbol. And a book set in a symbol is a fantasy, by definition.

As for charge #1, in those passages that approximate normal narrative, the book describes the lives of people very much like the people in Delany's memoir, "Heavenly Breakfast" (in which, by the way, there is a vivid paragraph about his sighting of a nameless person who is probably the visual model for The Kid). The people living out in the park are parodies of the Diggers of San Francisco. The "straight" (as in un-hip) Mom who features in one brilliantly tragi-comic chapter is patterned on 60s TV characters. And so on: anyone who was young in the 1960s shares a vocabulary of images and attitudes with Delany -- and anyone who wasn't, won't recognize many features of life in Bellona.

As for #3 and #5 -- I suppose we can't blame Delany for liking to write about sex, nor for writing, in the 1970s, about the carefree sex of the 1960s. It wasn't until the 1990s that AIDS was well-understood. But it was exactly the breezy exchange of bodily fluids so poetically depicted in Dhalgren that gave AIDS its big start in the world. And reading Dhalgren now... well, it would be nice if the author would add a sincere forward about Safe Sex. About the writing itself, he has nothing to apologize for.

Somewhere shortly past the middle of this (whatever one wishes to call it) entitled Dhalgren (p.610 in my copy), the ex-astronaut, Kamp, regales our (I suppose) hero here, Kid, with his experiences in a "Sensory Overload Experiment." He describes it thus:

"But after about two hours of testing, two hours of fillips and curlicues of light and noise, when I went outside, into the real world, I was astonished at how rich and complicated everything looked and sounded: The textures of concrete, tree bark, grass, the shadings from sky to cloud. But rich in comparison to the sensory overload chamber. Rich...and I suddenly realized that what the kids had been calling a sensory overload was really information-deprivation."

The above quote describes exactly my experience in reading Dhalgren. I couldn't wait for it to end, and when I finished my (very careful) reading of it, hoping against hope that the dystopian cloud might have at least a bronze lining, I gleefully threw it into the air and took a walk, glad to be out in the world again where everything seemed so, yes, rich, in comparison with this tendentious, overblown, extremely depressing narrative.

Normally, I love reading and regard it as an escape INTO something deeper from which one emerges with a clearer and more impressionable understanding of the world and the people I meet, know and love---I'm thinking, particularly, of Proust. Dhalgren has the opposite effect. It has the effect of Kamp's sensory overload chamber: a cascade of depressingly gratuitous sex, of all sorts, elaborate disquisitions upon semiotics and the narrative art in general, as well as (towards the end) much hocus-pocus concerning gender roles and such like.

Of course, Kamp is portrayed as a "square" herein and his observations not to be taken too seriously by Kid and his Scorpions (and readers who identify with them). ---- I AM A SQUARE!

For those interested, this particular square was constantly reminded, throughout his tortuous and tortured reading of Dhalgren, of a Humean (q.v. Scottish philosopher David Hume) Universe in which the "constant concatenation" of events had ceased altogether. Hume is right, you know, the "law" of gravity could cease tomorrow, two moons could arise tonight etc But don't take my word for it, read Hume (or even just a Wikipedia entry about him and his philosophy). At least, unlike in Dhalgren, you will be learning something. You will, indeed, be provided with fascinating and thought-provoking information.

The premise of the book was a bit mysterious (or vague) even before cracking it open. Opening the first few pages, I was met with more vagueness and continuing through the book I was approached with random scenarios. I had to fight back the urge to flip back through the pages and find any sort of logic which led to the scenario at hand, but I found no trail of crumbs. The story jumps from one place to another simply by whim and the entire vague plot seems to be going in no direction whatsoever. Where does Einstein come into this book? Answer: in a vague sort of logic it touches on the vague plot in a very vague way.

There is no doubt Delany can write well but I think you either like his style or you don't with not much in between. Much of his writing is more like science fiction poetry than prose and Einstein Intersection is the most extreme example of that I have read so far. Delany leaves a lot to the imagination and a lot to figure out on your own. I think his reputation as writing "literary" science fiction is well deserved. If you want everything laid out for you this isn't the book for you and Delany is probably not the author for you. On the other hand, if you want great writing that you will enjoy and that will make you think, then this and his other books will fit the bill. Babel-17, Empire Star and Nova are easier to read although even there everything is not laid out in great detail. Nova is probably the easiest to follow and most traditional if that is what you are looking for.

Don't get me wrong. I'm kind of a fan of Chip Delany. I think that "Aye, and Gomorrah..." is one of the best stories in the disorienting-loss-of-personal-control-and-bodily-integrity subgenre since Cordwainer Smith's "Scanners Live in Vain." However...

This book is potentially successful only as a send-up of fantasy/sf subgenre conventions. The dragons and the ornate city are hilarious in the context of fantasy and sf as they existed at the time. However, the rest of the book amounts to nothing more than pretentious crap. The plot is, relatively, pointless and never resolved, Delany's insistence on inserting pointless, self-important, page-long quotations from his own journals to begin chapters (such as they are) is annoying to the nth degree (to see how inserting long quotations can torpedo an otherwise good story, see exhibit A, "'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman," by Harlan Ellison," and many of his sentences verge on utter incoherence. (Few things piss me off more than declarative sentences without verbs, and Delany has them here in spades). A lot of the book comes across to me as if I were watching "The Beast of Yucca Flats" again: "Flag on the moon. How did it get there?"

Granted, we can probably give Delany a little bit of leeway because he was supposedly engaging in some sort of linguistic experimentation, but one might rightly expect him to go all-out, rather than mixing what amounts to what would be a fairly decent short parody of genre conventions with spells of half-cocked Joyce imitation that leaves this critic absolutely at sea.

How this book won a Nebula is a mystery to me. Delany himself loves to tell the story about how one of the old guard cussed out the SFWA membership for handing it to him, but I believe that the SFWA in its early days had a bias definitely in favor of the most severe, alienating avant-garde writing possible, and I can prove it: In 1967, the year The Einstein Intersection won the Nebula for best novel, the attendees of the World Science Fiction Convention decided to bestow the Hugo Award for best novel upon an obscure, now-forgotten work by Robert A. Heinlein entitled The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. I rest my case.

While many of the "New Wave" science fiction writers of the 1960s did little more than adapt long-dead literary styles to their own work (as John Brunner, in "Stand on Zanzibar" adapted the style of John Dos Passos), Delany forged a new style of his own, telling a science fiction story through the creative use of ancient and modern myth. Warning--this is not a book for a lazy reader or a slow one. But if you've got the chops, this book has the chops for you.

This is essentially a retelling of myths and archetypes using what seems to be aliens or mutants. Now, bear with me for a second: This book is extremely well-written. I place it in the sci-fi section even though it is more like a fantasy on the surface. This is a world where people actually quote Ringo Starr and treat the rise and fall of the Beatles the way we treat the rise and fall of Achilles. We know it is our world, but something has gone awry. What, we never know.

This book won the Nebula and is full of rich, poetic prose. But I recommend it only to those people who love fantasy sci-fi with a good dose of poetic language on the side. For Delany's more straightforwardly "sci-fi" novels, see NOVA or THE FALL OF THE TOWERS.

Lewd. Lascivious.Vile.Depraved.Graphic rape and violence. This book has it all! The characters are literally filthy, dirty and without one lick of guilty conscience or decent thought in their head! Every act of sexuallity is graphically described in this book except beastiality! Every page has either rape, torture, sodomy or incest. The main character Hogg has not one redeeming feature even going to the point of never changing his clothes even though he deficates and urinates in them. This books is extremely grahpic and [...] to the nth degree! Yet the story moves along smoothy and quickly. Some pages made me gag (eating snot) yet I had to keep on reading! It was fascinating!

This has to be one of the most disturbing books I've ever read. I can understand why it was so difficult to get published. Even Olympia Press refused to publish this book because of its sexual content.

Bravo to FC2 for publishing this work. Although it is incredibly disturbing, it is also brilliantly written. Delany is a master of his craft, and spared nothing to make this a meaningful work.

I'm not sure how audiences might have responded to this work in the early seventies. I imagine it would have been even more shocking to them. But since then we've had decades of depravity (fictional: American Psycho and historical: Abu Ghraib). There were moments when I had to mentally distance myself from the page, but one can get used to just about anything. It was the sustained level of sexual violence and total lack of compassion in the characters that was most troubling.

But there was also something I recognized in the narrator (a young boy taken in by a rapist-for-hire). His attitude towards the suffering of others is often one of curiosity. Unlike most of the characters in the book, the narrator is able to empathize with others. But for this narrator, empathy doesn't translate into compassion. His morality and ethics have developed in a world brimming with violence and abuse. He is a survivor in a world where, as the book jacket says: "pity becomes a betrayal".

Well, I first heard about Hogg via a friend, during a discussion about the Anne Rice "Sleeping Beauty Trilogy". If you thought SBT was extreme, nothing quite prepares you for reading Hogg. I was disgusted with the characters, but felt that he did a good job in portraying their personalities in a very direct and unapologetic way. I was fascinated by the extreme violence and sex, and by how such a story could be told in such graphic detail. It's an excellent example of story telling....but definitely not for the sexually weak of heart or sensitive.

The biggest problem with this book isn't the graphic aberrant sex scenes, it's that Delany (who I firmly believe IS a good writer) is trying so hard to shock that it just comes off as boring. If you want to explore the pathology of the psychotic killer, read The Killer Inside Of Me. If you want to examine the psychology of bizarre sexuality, read the works of the Marquis de Sade or Anais Nin.

Murderers. Pedophiles. Rapists for hire. Misogynists and misanthropes. Scatologists. And they're the good guys. Welcome to Samuel R. Delany's "Hogg," a story of characters so vile they barely deserve to be called human. And all these people are described through the voice of an 11 year old boy that the title character, Hogg, enlists as his main source of self-pleasuring deviant activity. Along the way, our little man meets a cast of characters that delight in sex shaded through all colors of perversity. There's nothing this cast of marauding baby-killers won't try if they think it will get them off.

The story takes place in the course of a couple of days, as the little narrator gets sucked into the vortex of Hogg's world. The most disturbing thing about Delany's book is not that Hogg and his insane crew of racist murdering thugs do their deeds with gleeful sadistic abandon, but that the young man sees this as activity that he can just tag along and feel no compulsion to leave. In fact, as the book continues, it becomes obvious that the young narrator not only enjoys it but finds that it isn't fulfilling enough.

To that extent, "Hogg" works like Brett Easton Ellis' "American Psycho," Anne Rice's "Sleeping Beauty" series or Kubrick's "Clockwork Orange" does. You keep wondering how far the depraved indifference will extend before any one of the characters develops any sort of redeeming quality. As is becomes more apparent that regret, remorse or redemption ain't happening, you continue with the reading because you feel desperate to see where the train is going to wreck. (Having one of the main characters die in a car crash seems unironically metaphoric.)

Delany has written about the tendency for violent sex to erupt from the psyche before ("The Madman" in particular), but never has the violence been so much to the fore. If you have a weak stomach or a fragile sensibility, then by all means you should avoid "Hogg." But if you're willing to have your literary limits tested, wade in.

TRITON is the story of Bron Helstrom, an ex-Martian gigolo residing in a male dormontory on Triton. Delany's "science" is ludicrous to say the least, but his characterizations and portraits of society breaking apart into tribes of people with similar notions or physical appearances is fascinating. Bron's exposure to some street art shakes him up and by the end of the book Bron is not the same character he was at the beginning. This book is a tough read, but it is worth the effort. If you want accurate depictions of satillite life, see Arthur C. Clarke's Odyssey series; if you want to explore the eternal mysteries of sexuality and gender, then read TRITON and join Bron on his quest for finding his place within society.

In the light of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center
today, I was immediatley reminded of "Triton", and the way the
war was fought in that book. The attack on the gravity
generators on Triton was similar in many ways to what happened
today in New York City. I have not identified the here and now
with a Sci Fi novel so strongly since Chernople blew up and I was
reminded of Lester Del Rey's "Nerves"! ...

A book is a machine to generate interpretations, as Eco wrote. Thus, not one interpretation can be the correct one, and all we can do is to add to what other people have experienced at some point while reading a book.

Due to my own life experience, I perceive, perhaps, several more levels to this novel. The first time I read it, about 20 years ago, I was 10 and didn't understand many of the subtleties. However, the fact that the main character was so out of touch with the reality around him and that he had failed miserably to adapt to his changing surroundings, and, in the end, finds a "way out" for all the wrong reasons, made me think.

And think hard.

This book forced me to re-examine my own motivations several years later, because, besides the humour (sometimes even mockery) of our current socio-political systems, the book has a point. Bron Helmstron, the main character, becomes a woman not because he feels he's one, but because he wants to please the image of women she had as a man. He becomes a woman created from an intellectual male psyche.

Of course the issue of gender is at the core of the novel. Adaptation, sexism (Bron is perhaps the last old-mindset sexist in this heterotopic future) and monosexism -that is, the loving yourself as a projection but in a different gender role.

I asked myself many questions after re-reading this book at 22 (I'm a male-to-female transsexual): what are my motivations? I'm doing this as a rebellion against the rigidity of gender in our society? Am I doing this because I'm so selfish I've fallen in love with my own image in a different gender-role? Am I doing this out of selfishness, or because I've failed adapting myself to the world? Or because I'm so utterly sexist that, by adhering to the stereotype of what femineity should be, I am trying to put order to my own world?

This is one of my "top ten" books of all times. It made me grow as a person, and discover in myself that, unlike Bron, I was going through this route because I wanted to be honest with myself, not out of selfishness or emotional laziness.

Highly recommended if you don't mind some pretentiousness and have an open mind -and some background on feminist theory wouldn't hurt.

It was with this book that Delany systematically began to dash the hopes of fans who had breathlessly awaited every new book up through "Nova". The writing skill is still there, no question. But Delany's pornographical and intellectual self-indulgence begin their corrosive process on his work. How sad. All that imagination and storytelling skill undermined by meaningless (and often tasteless) philosophical and sexual noodlings. In a parallel universe, Delany kept writing appealing and entertaining books in the vein of his early science fiction. Too bad we don't live in that universe.

This is a hell of a good book. Reading it a second time through, I was most impressed by Delaney's subtle irony--Triton is an itnensely comic novel. But it's also a profound interrogation of gender. Delaney's important, and Triton is a great read.

Terribly dated first attempt at speculative fiction by a soon-to-be-great writer... it bears his name but not the quality of Delany's later work. One can only wonder why it is again in print. I can't supply any answers to that but I can say that the absurd writing here borders on absurdism without quite breaking through, even though the extreme hokey-ness of the prose wedded to the writer's modernist aspirations achieves a veritable surrealism that will literally force you again and again to wonder "did I just read that?"

Those who come to a Delany novel with preconceived notions inevitably will be disappointed, turning away in disgust and incomprehension, but those who approach his books with an open mind will invariably rewarded. In this brilliant early novel, composed in three parts, Delany examines a society on the verge of change and revolution through the eyes of a collection of laser-etched characters whose lives intersect in complicated and subtle ways. Delany's intelligence at 21 was fierce, and one of the beauties of this novel is the way it intertwines the intellectual and the everyday, how it is beautifully written and fiercely opinionated.

Though the action nominally concerns two gestalt beings from another universe, and their interactions with the empire of Toromon on Earth, Delany's true concern is human society in general, ours in particular, its cyclical fate and all-renewing possibility. It's not your typical science fiction. It's a thousand times better, science fiction idealized, then actualized.

I stayed up late to get to the end of the third volume, "City of a Thousand Suns," and closed the book with one word: "Amazing." Even more amazing, I truly meant it. Oscar Wilde famously said that anyone who seeks to write a novel in three parts knows nothing of Art and Life. Here, Delany gloriously proves him wrong.

If you want an intro to Delany, get "Babel-17". If you have read several of his works and enjoyed them, consider this one. If you don't care about reading Delany per se, but just want a darn good read, give it a try.

This book was my introduction to Delany. I read it first at the tender age of 14 in the Fall of 1974. Not his best work, but ten times better than most of the drivel masquerading as SF on the shelves today. It sparked my interest, and led me to read any and all books by Mr Delany.

This is a guy who generally evokes two kinds of response. One venerable reviewer stated, and I quote, that his books were well beloved by academics ever in search of "grist for the mills of exegesis." Interpretation: I don't think he likes him. Others are excited by his ideas about language, science, human sexuality, and how these are/were interweaving to create original novels that expand the human consciousness.

Me, I just thought he told a darn good story.

Why does all this stick in my mind?

My first college degree was in English Lit. To graduate I had to write a thesis paper on a contemporary writer. At the time, my favorite was Delany. [the title was "Science Fiction: the New Mythology". Hey, 25 years ago this was original stuff, okay?]

So, why read THIS book? Quite simply, it really IS is a darn good read. It has good guys, bad guys, interesting characters who undergo heroic trials, simpletons, Ubermensch, street performers, new looks at how technology changes human lives, insightful observations in to individual behaviors, and, long before "The Matrix" and "Neuromancer" were even dreamt of, a foggy Virtual Reality world in which a war is fought. [!??!]

So, get on board, give it a try, help yourself to some lemonade.

Those unfamiliar with Samuel R. Delany's excellent science fiction might be better served by reading his great 1960s work, most notably, "The Einstein Intersection", "Nova", "Dhalgren" and "Triton" than "The Fall of the Towers". Other early novels which I've enjoyed reading include "The Ballad of Beta-2" and "Babel-17". I've stumbled upon by accident this latest reissue of Delaney's early work, which is a fine post-apocalypse/alien contact saga comprised of the three short novels ("Out of the Dead City", "The Towers of Toron", and "City of a Thousand Suns") assembled in this volume. Thematically, 'The Fall of the Towers" is an intriguing adventure saga devoted to the nature of humanity, which Delany would later return to in the more compelling Neveryon fantasy saga.

I agree with a previous reviewer that although "The Fall of the Towers" isn't Delany's best work, it was certainly much better written and far more interesting than much of the mediocre science fiction published back in the early 1960s or frankly, even today. For this reason alone, this early Delany saga deserves ample attention from fans of science fiction literature. I am amazed that at such a relatively young age, Delany was capable of creating a spellbinding literary post-apocalypse fantasy, set sometime in the distant future after a devestating nuclear war on Earth (Most readers may not know that he started writing and publishing science fiction while attending the Bronx High School of Science here in New York City, and decided to pursue a professional writing career without attending college.). Fans familiar with Delany's writing for gay/lesbian audiences may find "The Fall of the Towers" memorable alone for its intriguing cast of characters. For these reasons I can highly recommend reading "The Fall of the Towers", but I strongly urge those unfamiliar with Delany's work to read any of the books I have cited above.

This is very different from Delany's later work (of which Triton is my favorite) being more accessible and lighter on hardcore philosophical theories. At the same time, the writing never falls short of brilliant, the storyline will keep you at the edge of your seat till the end, and the author's ideas about the social dynamics of race and sex in the future world are so far ahead if his time that it is hard to believe that the trilogy was finished in 1964.

But more than anything, it's a great story. Read it, and see for yourself.

I was young when I first read "We who are about to..." Too young, really, to grasp the full concept of life and death, the two main currents that lie within the book.

A cruise vessel of the future manages to miss the point in space that it was attempting to fold to, spinning amazingly far off course and crashing into a planet that is in no way guaranteed not to kill the survivors. A politician, an upper class family, a "jock", a young sex object, a washed up waitress, a supposed tactical expert, and a musician (our heroine) all help make an ensemble from Hell. Nothing goes according to protocol, and chaos ensues as the musician experiments liberally with her psychoactive drugs.

While in a science-fiction setting, Ms. Russ manages to maintain a surprising lack of the technological; the underlying concept of the story being Gilligan's Island on Acid. As Social Darwinism takes its course, the value of life itself is called into question.

This is not a book for those who are set in their ideas of God and living; this is for those who remain unsure as to what lies in store for them, and what may be the meaning of life.

This a story of a woman being bored to death. Really, she dies of it. There are some other characters to begin with, but they're a bit boring and she kills them half way through the book. Then we're left with this murderer, and her morbid fascination with, well, death, and her slow, well, death. There's that D word again. The book's actually more interesting then it sounds, but it's still dead boring. The writing is pretty good, but really, the plot is a killer. There's nothing going on, and the murderer's morbid thoughts and recollections are not that interesting, especially as the sane reader will probably not sympathize with the one and only character offered in the second half of the book.
Other reviewers seemed awed by the fact this book deals with, you guessed it, death. This book should have been killed in its infancy.

John W. Campbell's formula for great science fiction was, famously, "ask the next question." That's exactly what this bracing, challenging, bleak, funny, deeply subversive novel does, elegantly undercutting decades of unexamined science-fiction adventure cliches.

Recommended for anyone who ever wanted to lay into Compulsory Optimism with a meat ax. "The human race is fine. We're just not there."

If I had read this book when I was fifteen, I do believe my life would have been entirely different. This is wonderfully subversive stuff, addressing all the problems any science fiction fan has with the "starship separated from civilization" plot, with a protagonist you will love to be appalled by.

This is an old book, in print more than 30 years, but as it has minimal topical references it has not become as dated as some SF of the 70s. It is a gray, gloomy, depressing story that remains a downer right through the last sentence--there's no last-minute discovery of a meaning to life to redeem the book.

The first-person narrator is a highly capable, intelligent woman with loads of forethought and a sardonic attitude. If she mustered any of these qualities in support of anything positive, she'd be -- well, she'd be Alyx, Russ's better-known hero. But this is Alyx's depressed, repressed evil twin. Alyx has a wise tolerance for people who are weaker or slower-witted than she; this person has only contempt.

The circumstances are that that a few people have survived a crash-landing on a completely unmapped planet in an unknown place. The narrator instantly and clearly apprehends that they will never be rescued; they have neither the skills nor the equipment to create a viable colony; and they will probably all die of allergies to the unfamiliar planet's biota as soon as their stored food runs out -- and at best will die in squalor as their equipment wears out and life descends to the stone age. None of the others are ready to admit this reality; they cling to the hope that they can somehow survive. The guys start planning cabins and latrine systems and talking about which women should first contribute babies to the colony.

The narrator just wants to die and get it over with. And she has quick, painless poison capsules. Why doesn't she just off herself and be done with it? Well, because if she did, the book would only be 20 pages long (and not a bad thing at that). Instead, and from motives that are never clear to me, she wants all the others to agree with her, to see as clearly as she does that they are doomed. She plays games with them, out-thinking them at every turn. She leads them on and when they try to dominate her by force, she begins killing them. Having slain everyone else in the party, she still doesn't kill herself. She hangs on for many more pages reviewing her past and hallucinating conversations with the people she killed. If she achieves any insight or clarity in these pages, I missed it.

P.S. Why is Samuel R. Delaney listed on this edition as a co-author? The edition I just reread (Dell Publishing Co. paperback, printed 1977) lists Russ as the sole author, with an enthusiastic cover blurb by Delaney.

Over and over, Shorter Views violently expanded the way I think about sex, about language, about literature, about science fiction, and even about thinking. Reading it was bracing, challenging, frustrating, and thrilling. Parts of it are thick with critical jargon, parts of it are shockingly obscene, and a few bits manage to be both. The powerful, lucid intelligence that shines through makes all the difficulties worthwhile.

Delany is a brilliant man and his work speaks to a number of audiences. Here's a black gay man who has a large science fiction following. I have read his autobiography and it is a really challenging book on race and sexuality in the 1950s and 1960s. Academics love Delany too. But this book was a sleeper. It's hundreds of pages of nothing. It drones and doesn't say much. Only his most hardcore fans could enjoy this rambling book. I don't even know where my copy is and don't care either.

Over the life of his career, Delany has astounded, shocked, awed, and confounded a large and very varied audience. From his early fantasies and science fiction works, to his pornographic novels Equinox and Hogg, to his critical papers that have helped place science fiction on the radar screen of academia, to his extraordinarily structured Dhalgren, each piece of his writing displays his broad erudition, his impeccable sense of language, and a finely honed mind that is not afraid to challenge the accepted and the norm. This collection of essays, reviews, and interviews mirrors this broad range. Like most collections, the quality and style varies considerably, and the average reader may find only a few of these pieces interesting and informative, depending on the reader's own interests.

For myself, I found the second section of the book, "The Politics of the Paraliterary" to be the most interesting, with an incisive look at literary criticism as applied to science fiction, and excellent overview of the writings of Zelazny, Varley, and Gibson and what distinguishes their work as 'quality', and some revealing insights about his own works: Hogg, Trouble on Triton, Mad Man, and the Neveryon series. At places the language used is very abstract, and it helps if the reader is least somewhat familiar with the history and terms of formal literary criticism. At other places, especially in the 'Appendix' to this work, Delany, by providing some very concrete examples and clear explanations, gives the reader a great look at just what it is that 'great' writing is and how it is done.

The other two major sections of this work, "Some Queer Thoughts" and "Some Writing/Some Writers" did not interest me as much, at least partially due to the feeling that, in several of the essays within these sections, Delany was writing with an axe to grind (or a compliment to pay to a fellow writer).

Those who are interested in understanding both Delany and the world of literary criticism should read this work. Everyone who does read it will come away with a larger understanding of not just writing but politics, life, love, and the world around them.