You searched for book_author:"Samuel R. Delany"
I tend to read books one at a time in quick succession. I have to, for the same reason I am so assiduous in writing reviews: I have a poor memory for these types of details. However, every so often I'll have a "project" book that takes me weeks or months to read, in parallel with my other books. I tend to do this with lengthy anthologies; I've been doing it with the Iliad.…
That classic cover, tho, with the weird … fishnet? bikini thing on Gorgik, and his awesome ponytail mullet. The 1980s were a wild time.
Neveryóna: The Tale of Signs and Cities is another visit to the fantasy time and place of Nevèryön. Whereas the previous book was a series of connected stories, this one follows a single protagonist, Pryn, a mountain girl from Ellanon as she makes her way to Kolhari and into the world.…
If you have read any Samuel R. Delany, you know he is a complex dude, and even his simplest stories are complex in some way. Tales of Nevèrÿon is no exception. Largely branded sword-and-sorcery, it’s actually an attempt to deconstruct this subgenre and provide commentary on the relationship between capitalism and slavery. And, for bonus points, if you read closely enough you start to see patterns and echoes from some of his other work, including …
Sunday, the beginning of my week off at the end of the summer. What better way to start it off than with a golden oldie? As with many authors, I’ve been gradually collecting any Samuel R. Delany books that show up at the used bookstore in town, and I haven’t read any for a while. So I picked up The Fall of the Towers, an omnibus of a trilogy that Delany wrote in his…
I’m teaching part of an AS Level English Literature class this year, including the creative writing component. As I finally got around to reading this, I couldn’t stop thinking, “Why didn’t I read this at the beginning of the school year? I could teach practically the whole class using this.” As it is, I ended up photocopying three of the essays for my students to mull over. About Writing, despite its embrace of the…
It’s been almost five weeks since I did this, so let’s hope my skills haven’t atrophied too much! My student teaching practicum was awesome, but it left me little time for reading and no time for reviewing. Now I need to catch up. So please forgive me if the details in this review are sparser than ordinary; there is a very good reason why I write reviews as soon as possible after finishing a book!
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So … I don’t think I’d go as far as The New York Times Book Review does in praising this book. According to the blurb on the back of my edition, “it invites the reader to collaborate in the process of creation, in a way that few novels do”. Umm … yeah. Sure. Someone has been critiquing literature a little too long. But the blurb is right about one thing: Stars in My Pocket Like…
Ah, classic space opera: futuristic setting, oddball characters with oddball philosophies, and ships and science well beyond what we ken. Unlike a good deal of space opera, Nova is not a doorstopper. It is more modest in length and in focus, though not in scope. The cast of characters is small, but the events have large repercussion. Captain Lorq von Ray certainly has much in common with Captain Ahab, and obsession is an important…
Delany remains one of the authors who most consistently fascinates, educates, and challenges me. His science fiction and fantasy novels are never exactly what they seem—or perhaps are exactly what they seem—and if Dhalgren is perhaps his most widely-known inscrutable work, his Return to Nevèryön series, and particularly Flight from Nevèryön, are the most obviously inscrutable.
I’m not sure how to summarize this book. I wanted to say that the first two tales are…
I recently rediscovered this book hiding in a crate in my home library, waiting several years to be read. As with most of my experiences reading Samuel R. Delany, Babel-17 proved at various times frustrating, inscrutable, exceptional, and interesting. When a friend asked me if I had enjoyed it, I replied, “I respect it.” That’s perhaps the best way to sum up a lot of my feelings about Delany’s science fiction.
Babel-17 takes place in…