| Article: 393
From: [email protected] (Dani Zweig)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews
Subject: REPOST: Belated Reviews PS#7: Samuel R. Delany
Organization: Netcom Online Communications Services (408-241-9760 login: guest)
Date: 06 Oct 93 22:25:35 GMT
Belated Reviews PS#7: Samuel R. Delany
Delany's books range from fairly to extremely good. A number of them
would be superb if he weren't so self-conscious a stylist: You can almost
see him putting the symbols in place, dusting off his myths and archetypes,
designing nonstandard narrative styles and gimmicks, being clever even
when it gets in the reader's way. His later books, especially, tend to be
easier to admire than to enjoy.
(Another way of looking at it is that he's the sort of author who is more
likely to win Nebulas than to win Hugos. (Yes, I know...) Delany is
exceedingly self-conscious about the process of writing, of communicating
with a reader, and this is a major theme in a number of books -- again,
something likely to interest fellow authors.)
I think of Delany primarily as a writer of the sixties and seventies --
though he might disagree. If there is such a thing as a typical Delany
novel, it involves a search for identity: The protagonist, often a
youngster from a backwater, goes out into the big world for whatever purpose.
In the course of this protagonist's learning and mastering this larger and
more complicated world (a process usually accompanied by long expository
lumps), the reader also learns about the world or society of the author's
creation. Delany's earlier books are less polished, but more accessible.
The reverse is true of his later ones. I'll admit to being a Phillistine,
and preferring the more user-friendly ones.
If you haven't read anything by Delany, his short story "Time Considered
as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones" (****) may be a good place to start:
It is, like many of his works, a slice of very odd life -- thirty pages
spent with interesting people in an interesting culture, in this case --
and it doesn't suffer from the loss of focus to which some of his longer
works are prone. The story is told from the perspective of a rising member
of the solar system's demimonde, who has become the target of a special
police department devoted to people who make waves. (I'm not trying to be
vague in this description. The frustrating thing about reviewing one of
Delany's books is how little information any plot summary conveys.) It's
a Hugo-winner, so it should be fairly easy to find.
"Sometime soon you will come back; and that time you will want
to buy out my share of The Glacier, because I'll have gotten
too big; and I won't want to sell because I'll think I'm big
enough to fight you. So we'll be enemies for a while. You'll
try to kill me. I'll try to kill you."
On his face, first the frown of confusion; then, the indulgent
smile. "I see you've caught on to the idea of hologramic
information..."
"Empire Star" (***+) is probably the last book Delany wrote which falls
cleanly into what I characterized as earlier Delany. It's not his best
book, or even a major one, but it's a personal favorite. It's about Comet
Jo, a simple boy from a backwater planet, who is sent by a dying man to
take a message to Empire Star. In the course of his travels (during which
he ceases to be a simple boy), he encounters a number of people and
entities at multiple stages in their lives -- the time-paradox aspects of
the book are handled gently -- and eventually figures out what message
he's supposed to deliver. It's a very short novel, only about a hundred
pages, and has been reprinted with another short Delany novel, "The Ballad
of Beta-2", which I thought a good pairing.
"I shall try and explain something to thee, Comet. Tell me,
what's the most important thing there is."
"Jhup," he answered promptly, then saw her frowning. He got
embarrassed. "I mean plyasil. I din' mean to use no dirty words."
...
"If thou passeth through the second gate, and ask a ride of
a transport captain -- and thou wilt probably get it, for they
are a good lot -- thou wilt be in a different world, where
plyasil means only forty credits a ton, and is a good deal less
important than derny, kibblepobs, clapper boxes, or boysh, all
of which bring above fifty credits. And thou might shout the
name of any of them, and be thought nothing more than noisy."
"Babel-17" (***) has as its main theme the effect of language on perception.
Humanity has been fighting a long and nasty war against an invader, and now
is being subjected to truly serious acts of sabotage, in the course of which
brief transmissions have been picked up. Finally, after repeated attempts
to decipher them, the military turns to Rydra Wong, the greatest poet of
the day, who identifies the transmissions as a very special language -- one
which shapes the abilities and world-views of those who learn it -- and
as she comes to understand the language, it begins to shape her, as well.
The character and actions of Rydra Wong herself carry the book, but its
philosophical side is weakened by the implausibility of the claims Delany
makes for his fictional languages.
"Butcher, there are certain ideas which have words for them.
If you don't know the words, you can't know the ideas. And
if you don't have the idea, you don't have the answer."
(A side note: "Empire Star" appears as a work of fiction in "Babel-17".)
"The Einstein Intersection" (***) finds Delany getting exotic in his
themes, but still sticking to relatively standard storytelling. At least,
it starts in a relatively standard way, giving the impression of a post-
holocaust Earth of small communities with low technology and high mutation
rates. When the narrator, a young androgyne named Lobey, goes out into
the larger world, we begin to see that it is a far stranger world than we
thought. For reasons it would be a serious spoiler to recount, the
inhabitants have become very fuzzy about what being human entails. Which
gives Delany an excuse to play new games with old myths and archetypes.
(Sorry, I *said* plot summaries of Delany's books weren't very helpful.
I wish I could do better.)
"There are an infinite number of true things in the world
with no way of ascertaining their truth. Einstein defined
the extent of the rational. Goedel stuck a pin into the
irrational and fixed it to the wall of the universe so that
it held still long enough for people to know it was there.
And the world and humanity began to change."
"Dhalgren" (*? ****?) is Delany's great unfinished work. That is, *Delany*
finished it -- all nine-hundred-odd pages of it -- but most readers don't.
On the other hand, of those who do, many consider it time very well spent.
How to describe it? I consider it a mainstream novel, rather than science
fiction, although it was marketed as the latter. It's set in Bellona,
which is more an urban mythscape than a real city -- an almost deserted
city, well stocked with supplies and even some services, in which a few
hundred people stay on and live as they please. (How do oddballs with
plenty of canned goods and no law occupy their time? Sex, gossip, a
smidgeon of violence, a smidgeon of racial tension, for the most part.)
The viewpoint character -- call him the Kid -- is a man whose identity is
anchored weakly enough that he is primarily -- as he keeps repeating, and
for all the importance he acquires in Bellona -- an observer, reacting to
his environment and reflecting it.
"Dhalgren" is a showoff piece: The author portrays a squalid city of
lotus-eaters, and sets out to keep the reader reading through sheer mastery
of language and technique. With some readers, he succeeds. Indeed, more
than anything else, the book is *about* language and story-telling and the
process of filtering the writer's reality through them (which is one
reason "Dhalgren", even more than Delany's other books, tends to be
thought more highly of by writers than by readers -- if one may make such
a distinction). So: If you have little patience with books in which the
author plays games with the reader but never properly tells his story,
this book isn't for you. If you think a sufficient degree of technical
brilliance might make such a book worth while, give "Dhalgren" a try:
Push your way past the first few pages and read at least thirty or forty
before deciding whether to continue or abandon it. (I'm on the border:
I'm not sorry I read it, but there were better things I could have done
with the time.)
"But there's never more than one Sunday every seven days.
Or one Tuesday, either. Now, Thursdays slip up. I went to
see him about that. A very polite man. And very concerned
about what goes on in his city, despite what some people find
a trying sense of humor. I had noticed about the frequency
of Sundays myself. He explained about Tuesdays; but he held
out for arbitrary Thursdays. He quite nicely offered to
declare a Thursday any time I asked -- if I would give him
twenty-four hour notice."
Some takes on some other books:
"The Jewels of Aptor" (**+) is Delany's first novel. I enjoyed it --
a relatively standard fantasy/sf/adventure that already shows many of the
characteristics of his later works. "The Fall of the Towers" (**) (a
trilogy composed of "Captives of the Flame", "The Towers of Toron", and
"City of a Thousand Suns") is also an early work, but one which is too
long for what it offers, and which at the same time tries to incorporate
too many plot elements that don't carry their weight. Nor did I care much
for "Nova" (**-), a short novel into which Delany also tries to squeeze
too many elements.
"The Ballad of Beta-2" (**+) is another of Delany's earliest books, in
which a student of anthropology is sent to study one of the ballads of a
failed generation-ship culture -- and learns the truth behind the
apparently fanciful ballad. (The weakest aspects of this short novel are
the patness with which the answers fall into his lap, and the fact that
nobody learned them earlier. Both, I suspect, are artifacts of the
procrustean page limits imposed upon Ace Doubles.) The ballad itself blew
me away when I first encountered this book. Coming back to it, I still
like the ballad, but it looks better suited to recitation than to singing.
"She walked through the gates and the children cried,
She walked through the Market and the voices died,
She walked past the court house and the judge so still,
She walked to the bottom of Death's Head hill..."
...
The only lines of "The Ballad of Beta-2" that Nella had
ammended occurred in the seventh stanza. The recorder had
given the lines as:
"She walked through the gates and the voices cried,
She walked through the Market and the children died."
Well, that was an obvious correction...
"Triton" (**) is largely about gender identity, placed in a future world
which has solved its economic problems, but is still searching for solutions
to its social ones. The viewpoint character is a messed-up and unlikable
man whose idea of intimacy is a monologue about himself. Towards the end
of the novel, he undergoes a sex change -- and becomes a messed-up and
unlikable woman. Even more than most of Delany's books, "Triton" is
characterized by numerous expository lumps. (One, about genetics, is
memorable by virtue of having basic facts wrong.) One of the neater
throwaways in this book is the war that's going on in the background.
Periodically, characters describe it as the nastiest war in history,
giving the reader the impression that those characters are naive about
*real* war. The impression turns out to be mistaken. Still, it's not
one of Delany's better books.
"Neveryona" (***+) is typical early-Delany -- albeit in a fantasy setting,
rather than a science-fictional one -- except that it wasn't written early.
The viewpoint character is Pryn -- a girl who flies away from her home on
dragonback, and into a much larger world than she knew existed. (Sound
familiar?) This novel is placed in the same world as "Tales of Neveryon"
(**), which most people with whom I've discussed these books seem to have
preferred to "Neveryona", but which I didn't much enjoy. I *did* enjoy
"Neveryona".
"I am pryn, the...adventurer, pryn the warrior, pryn the
thief!" said pryn, who had never stolen anything in her
life other than a ground oaten cake from the lip of her
cousin's baking oven three weeks before -- she'd felt
guilty for days!
Samuel R. Delany is more a stylist than a storyteller. He brings
considerable skill to the task of hanging complex societies and complex
ideas onto narrative skeletons that are long on meaning and short on story.
(Not that there's any law that states that a novelist must be a story-
teller.) Some readers are going to find this a delightful change of pace
from the plodding and ugly prose which characterizes so much science fiction.
Others will find that his refusal to simply start at the beginning,
continue until he finishes, and stop, will make their teeth ache. There's
no particular virtue in belonging to one class or the other but, on the
chance that you belong to the former, if you haven't read any of his
books, you could do worse than try. I've attempted to give an indication
of which books might best reward such a try.
There is only one 'e' in 'Delany'.
%A Delany, Samuel R.
%T Time Considered As a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones
%T Empire Star
%T Babel-17
%T The Einstein Intersection
%T Dhalgren
%T The Ballad of Beta-2
%T Triton
%T Neveryona
=============================================================================
The postscripts to Belated Reviews cover authors of earlier decades who
didn't fit into the original format -- whether because the author seemed
an inappropriate subject, or because I was unfamiliar with too much of the
author's work, or whatever -- or sometimes just isolated works of such
authors. The emphasis will continue to be on guiding newer readers
towards books or authors worth trying out, rather than on discussing them
comprehensively or in depth. I'll retain the rating scheme of ****
(recommended), *** (an old favorite that hasn't aged well), ** (a solid
lesser work), and * (nothing special).
-----
Dani Zweig
[email protected]
If you're going to write, don't pretend to write down. It's going to be the
best you can do, and it's the fact that it's the best you can do that kills
you! -- Dorothy Parker
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