Two Short Novels by Samuel R. Delany

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 are my reviews of the two short novels.

Weaker than the short stories were the two short novels that I read, The Jewels of Aptor (originally published by Ace Books in 1967, my copy is a Gollancz edition from 2000) and The Einstein Intersection (also from Ace Books in 1967, my copy is from the Wesleyan University Press and was published in 1998).

The Jewels of Aptor is a post-atomic holocaust novel with elements of fantasy. It's a quest novel (the main characters are ordered to search for a item of power, one of the jewels of the title) that contains many of the elements Delany would use again and again (for example, the character of The Kid). As a post-atomic holocaust novel, it is so-so. Others, such as Walter M. Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz, are much better example of that science fiction sub-genre. But you can see things here that Delany later expanded upon in Dhalgren and other later works, and as I read this in parallel with his autobiographical work (see below), it was interesting to see elements of his life worked into the novel.

The Einstein Intersection (not Delany's title, that was A Fabulous, Formless Darkness) is also a post-atomic holocaust novel with elements of fantasy. The fantasy elements are stronger here, and I was reminded of one of Delany's shorter works (not, alas, in one of the single-author collections I read, so the title naturally slips my mind!). To be honest, I had difficulty reading this one and rushed through it. It did not make much of an impression; so I intend on tackling it again to see if it works the second time through.