Ah, the 70's. The Nebula Awards collections found in the library. The piles of books from the Science Fiction Book Club that my parent's would buy me. Writers like Robert Silverberg writing about sex and drugs. New authors such as Gene Wolfe and Samuel R. Delany.
I first encountered Delany as an author of short stories. Tales such as Aye, and Gomorrah..., Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones and Driftglass appeared in a few collections that I read (such as the Nebula Awards collections).
During high school I encountered Delany as a novelist, in two books (Nova and Dhalgren). Nova was a space opera, a wonderfully baroque space opera. Dhalgren was...well...even now it's hard to explain. It was certainly the novel that moved Delany from the likes of Ace Books (where his first book, The Jewels of Aptor, was published) into even more prominence than the winning of the Nebula for various works, e.g., Babel-17, Aye, and Gomorrah..., Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones) seemed to have done. I even had a chance to meet Delany briefly at a convention in New York City; he was very nice, much less snobbish than some of the other authors at that convention.
(I plan to re-read Nova, Dhalgren and other works in 2005, so maybe I'll have something more detailed to say.)
In 2004, I read two collections of short works, two short novels and a long autobiographical work by Delany. The autobiographical work came close to being considered one of the best books I read in 2004 (there was a lot of tough competition for that slot!). Here is my review of the autobiographical work.
The best of the the books by Samuel R. Delany that I read in 2004 was The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village (University of Minnesota Press, 2004, greatly expanded from an earlier edition).
This was a bizarre book. And a wonderful book. I read it in two very long sittings, at work. It's an autobiographical work, covering Delany's childhood up until the time when he had published works such as The Jewels of Aptor and several short works. There's a lot going on in this work. In some parts, Delany plays with perception (such as the beginning, where he gives two different accounts of an incident involving his father). In others, he talks about the problems of memory (where, for example, he discusses the early days of his marriage to poet Marilyn Hacker).
There's a bit about Delany and the process of writing, but not as much as I had hoped. For this, I suspect I'll have to track down various collections of essays, especially the (sadly) out-of-print The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Essays on Science Fiction (2019 update: now back in print since this was first written in 2004!). Sure, there are descriptions of his struggles to write, his habit of keeping a notebook with him, etc., but not the detail I wanted. And, as the book ends before such works as Nova and Dhalgren, it doesn't discuss some of the works that I like to learn more about.
So what in the book fascinated me that most? Oddly enough, the sex and the relationships. Taking a look back into the "scene" in the 1960's from the perspective of 2004 (tossing in AIDS, various other sexual diseases, various moral outrages raised by people of various moral stripes, etc.) and I found the sections where Delany talks about his relationship with Marilyn Hacker, the various long- and short-term relationship he had, and the (ahem) orgies that occurred in the Village at that time...and you see the depiction of a society that feels more like science fiction than most science fiction. It's utterly bizarre, utterly foreign, but Delany does such a good job of writing about it that its utterly fascinating. Good stuff.
A few quotes from the book...
Every once in a while I would get up to wander into the kitchen to stir the skillet full of spaghetti sauce I'd done up from a recipe on the back of the small white-and-green cardboard box of oregano leaves, the counter still flaked with bits of onion and three fugitive pieces of tomato. Or I'd wander into the front bedroom—just as another arc from the hydrant below broke between the black fire escape slats to sing across the glass, and five hundred purple crescents would gem and drool across the pane, while I stood watching the motion of light in water. (Page 122)
***
One was simply the graduate student problem. The titles she picked up from our living room bookshelves to read, or purchased from the selves of the Village bookstores farther west, came from an ideal list of Great Literary Works. These were the works you were supposed to read. Finishing all the books on that list was a lifetime chore. And the general perception was, I think, that there just wasn't time to read anything that had not, somehow, gotten into that strangely and mysteriously maintained canon.
The second problem was probably an outgrowth of the first. The possibility that she might actually find one of these noncanonical works as entertaining, if not as intelligent, as she clearly found her confrontations with classical writers (and Sue, Marilyn, and I talked about writers and novels constantly and entertainingly) would itself threaten all the unexpressed and unanalyzed notions that made the idea of a canon valid. (Page 280
***
When we met at the office, he gave me the single fan letter Captives of the Flame had managed to elicit: the writer explained that he had figured out that "Samuel R. Delany" had to be a pseudonym of A.E. van Vogt. If you took the first and last letters from Samuel and followed them by the fourth and fifth letters in "Delany," it spelled Slan, the title of van Vogt's most famous SF novel. And, besides, the writer went on, he'd never heard of an SF writer named "Samuel R. Delany" before and he knew all the SF writers there were.(Page 306-307)
***
Science fiction has always been attractive to young writers. It offers a possibility of writing for a living rather more quickly than certain other practices of writing, literary or paraliterary. But to the extent that young writers take their work seriously, it opens them to great internal strife for very meager rewards. And it's arguable that the nil-reward situation that greets most young literary writers is finally healthier, because it does not hold out the initial illusion of economic stability, which becomes hopelessly muddled with the thrill of seeing your work in print—in embarrassingly ugly packages! (Page 410)
***
In Asimov's Foundation stories from the forties, or even in Bester's The Stars My Destination from the mid-fifties, no matter how festooned with scientific gewgaws and technological gadgets, the "spaceports" in these tales were not modeled on any contemporary airport, but rather on some ancient train station, or even a set of boat docks such as the ones I'd just been working at. (Page 538)
***
I began a short book (really a long story) called Empire Star soon after I received Ron's second letter. There were at least three motivations behind it, and at this distance I can't honestly say which was the strongest. More money for the trip was one of them. Also, the final strain of the affair with Bob had left Marilyn and myself both exhausted with, and distanced from, one another. In an emotionally drained state myself, I felt I had to take on some new project that I could complete and feel some satisfaction in, if only to bolster my own shaky sense of well-being. Never a fast writer nor, by my own estimation, a very disciplined one, I wanted to do a thoroughly planned-out work.
More important, I wanted to write to a rigorous schedule, just to see if I could. The long story (which I'd initially thought would appear on the back of Babel-17 in an Ace Double format) was written as a kind of endurance test, writing in the morning, writing in the afternoon. The third reason was that there was still much from Marilyn's and my time with Bob (including the trip to Texas) that would not settle until at least some of it had become art.
It had been true of Babel-17.
It was true of Empire Star.
And it was true of The Star Pit, the story whose first two thirds I completed right afterwards.
Empire Star's thirty thousand words were finished in eleven days. (Page 550-551)
***
Suited, tied, and "imperially slim," as E.A. Robinson has written of someone else, (James) Gunn was leaning against the icebox after having had perhaps a drink or so more than he might have. "And what does this young man do?" he asked.
"Well, he writes SF," Hans explained.
"Have you published anything?" Gunn asked.
"Oh," I said, "three or four SF novels," I thought that was a modest way to say five.
"And what's your name—again?"
"Chip Delany," I said. "Eh...Samuel R. Delany."
"That's amazing. I've never seen any of them. I really thought I kept up with the field." Then he turned and announced over his glass, "Now, you see, these are the people whom we should be paying attention to. This is where the future of the field lies. Right here, in people like this." (Page 568)
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