#aye gomorrah and other stories
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#short story collection#short story collections#aye gomorrah and other stories#samuel r delany#21st century literature#english language literature#african american literature#black literature#american literature#have you read this short fiction?#book polls#completed polls
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I am SO curious to see if The Mars House is in any way inspired by Aye, And Gomorrah... by Samuel R. Delaney.
Delaney's story is a short story from 1967 and was first published in Dangerous Visions, an anthology of 'risque' new wave sci-fi. (And it's an allegory for being queer during the 60s).
It's about a so-called "Spacer", an astronaut who works physical jobs on different planets -- who has been neutered prior to becoming a spacer to eliminate the risk of harmful mutations of the reproductive cells (don't question the science, it was the 60s). Anyway, on earth Spacers are fetishised because they are androgynous and somewhat of an 'exotic' thing and some of them are sex workers, and pretty much all of them are living at the edges of society and keep to their own community. The plot is about the disconnect between "frelks" (the ones with the spacer kink) and Spacers -- the protagonist wants to be seen as human, as a person, and the frelk fails to view them as anything other than a sexually stunted object of her fascination.
And I get that that's way too sexual and direct for a Pulley novel but somehow with Aubrey being non-binary and January being "Earthstrong", something that sets him apart from the people from Mars, it kind of seems to touch on the same themes. Obviously Spacers and Earthstrongs are different kinds of people entirely -- one too 'childlike' and the other one too strong thus 'dangerous' -- but they are both far removed from the 'normal' population of their (new) homeworlds and therefore misfits of sorts. And given how much Pulley's novels so far have been about a desire for connection... Especially connection that shouldn't exist in the eyes of society, and connection that the MCs (Valery and Raphael come to mind) simply don't think they can or should have. I feel like the parallels are there, but maybe that's just me.
And I don't know how Pulley is gonna treat Aubrey's being non-binary, but I suspect that we're gonna get a whole ass analysis. And if we do, I hope the whole 'living on a different planet on which your body behaves and developes differently until it's in stark contrast to what other human body of your sex/gender look or feel like' is going to be part of it. Which would also be a parallel to what's implied with the Spacers.
Idk if I'm making sense but all in all I'm chewing drywall about it currently.
You can read Aye, And Gomorrah here, btw. Do it. Delaney is one of sci-fi's most prolific writers for a reason and the story has aged pretty well.
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[Samuel Delany]
* * * *
Easily this random screen grab from *Minamata* could be an attempt to film a scene from my 1966 story, *Draftglass.* Just saying. . . .
Though from the beginning my title was "Aye, and Gomorrah, and other stories," Signet Books (New American Library), the original licensee of the project, felt that someone might think the book had something to do with religion, so we/they changed it to the more imaginative *Driftglass.* (The cover art is by the imaginative and highly recognizable Bob Pepper.) It's quite possible that "Driftglass" is the better story, though "Aye, and Gomorrah" won a Nebula Award the year it appeared in Harlan Ellison's anthology *Dangerous Visions,* and so it was even minimally better known.
Then, when Randomhouse took over most of my SF just after the turn of the century, we went back to *Aye, and Gomorrah*; though they are basically just two different tiles for the same collection.
[Samuel Delany]
* * * * *
“Driftglass," I said. "You know all the Coca-Cola bottles and cut-crystal punch bowls and industrial silicon slag that goes into the sea?"
I know the Coca-Cola bottles."
They break, and the tide pulls the pieces back and forth over the sandy bottom, wearing the edges, changing their shape. Sometimes chemicals in the glass react with chemicals in the ocean to change the color. Sometimes veins work their way through in patterns like snowflakes, regular and geometric; others, irregular and angled like coral. When the pieces dry, they're milky. Put them in water and they become transparent again.”
― Samuel R. Delany, Driftglass
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“as the nature of space and time are relative to the concentration of matter in a given area of the continuum, the nature of reality itself operates by the same or similar, laws. The averaged mass of all the stars in our galaxy controls the ‘reality’ of our microsector of the universe. But as a ship leaves the galactic rim, ‘reality’ breaks down and causes insanity and eventual death for any crew, even though certain mechanical laws – though not all – appear to remain, for reasons we don’t understand, relatively constant. Save for a few barbaric experiments done with psychedelics at the dawn of spatial travel, we have not even developed a vocabulary that can deal with ‘reality’ apart from its measurable, physical expression. Yet, just when we had to face the black limit of intergalactic space, bright resources glittered within.”
― Samuel R. Delany, Driftglass
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“Loving someone... I mean really loving someone... means you are willing to admit the person you love is not what you first fell in love with, not the image you first had; and you must be able to like them still for being as close to that image as they are, and avoid disliking them for being so far away.”
― Samuel R. Delany, Driftglass
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“There are certain directions in which you cannot go. Choose one in which you can move as far as you want.”
― Samuel R. Delany, Driftglass
#Samuel R. Delany#Driftglass#science fiction#Sci-Fi#words and writing#my favorites#short stories#quotes
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What I read in September
A good variety this month, though a lot of sci-fi, which I am enjoying a lot!
Time to Orbit: Unknown, Derin Edala ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️*
The Invincible, Stanislaw Lem ⭐️⭐️⭐️
The Prefect, Alastair Reynolds ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Myrtha (ss), Victoria Audley ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Archaeology: An Introduction to the World's Greatest Sites (nf), Eric H Cline ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Catching Teller Crow, Amberlin Kwaymullina & Ezekiel Kwaymullina ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Old Man's War, John Scalzi ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Don't Hang Up, Benjamin Stevenson ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Superluminal, Vonda N McIntyre ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
World War Z, Max Brooks ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Flight of the Fantail, Steph Matuku ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Cyteen, CJ Cherryh ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Regenesis, CJ Cherryh ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Mindfulness for Stress Management (nf), Dr Robert Schacter ⭐️⭐️⭐️
The Orange Eats Creeps, Grace Krilanovich ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Kushiel's Dart, Jacqueline Carey ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Aye, and Gomorrah (ss), Samuel R. Delany ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Carnage (nf), Mark Dapin ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Blue Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Unknown, Jordan L Hawk ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Chocky, John Wyndham ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Sword of Empire: Praetorian, Richard Foreman ❌
Revival, Stephen King ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
The Apollo Murders, Chris Hadfield ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
ss= short story
nf= non-fiction
*Time to Orbit: Unknown is hosted online [HERE] and is currently still updating twice a week
Lately I've been actively trying to read more older sci-fi, especially written by women. I found CJ Cherryh and Vonda N McIntyre by searching back through Hugo award lists from the 70s and 80s. There's a fantastic vibe to a lot of these books that I don't really find in a lot of more recent sci-fi, though I'd definitely like to find it.
If I ever pin down exactly what it is, I'll probably have more luck.
I finished Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy this month, I had been eking the series out over a few months to savour it. It really is a masterful hard sci-fi series, managing to dig deep into the scientific concepts, but also to carry a huge, gripping, and deeply human story.
The other notable read this month was Carnage, by Mark Dapin, which is a true crime book, doing a deep dive on Jack Karlson (of Succulent Chinese Meal fame). It's a really fascinating take on Australian crime from the 60s-2010s, and is also a really nuanced character portrait of someone who is largely known as a meme.
And that's September!
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2, 8, 17
ooh these are some really hard ones lol
2. top 5 books of all time
there's no way i could pick, too many! but let's go with
The Lesbian Body by Monique Wittig
The Soft Machine by William S Burroughs
The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K LeGuin
Biomega by Tsutomu Nihei (should probably be Blame! but i'm reading that with someone & still haven't finished it)
Aye, and Gomorrah and Other Stories by Samuel R Delany
(altho honestly that's more like my 5 favorite authors lol i could've put different works for each of them)
8. first book you remember reading yourself
maybe Oh The Places You'll Go by Dr Seuss? in terms of longer stuff probably one of the Boxcar Children books, presumably the first one
17. top 5 children's books
huh this is a difficult one, i don't really read much that would get called children's books & when i was young i very quickly shifted into reading stuff like Stephen King & Michael Crichton
1-- first i'd just say the whole Animorphs series, otherwise it would just be five Animorphs books lol, these books are messed up in a great way & absolutely helped make me who i am / taught me how to survive
2-- The Once and Future King by T.H. White, a rough adaptation of Le Morte d'Arthur that was a great fantasy read for me
3-- the Wishbone series, good solid intro to interesting works of classic literature but about a doggo which is excellent cuz i love dogs
4-- Ramona Quimby Age 8 and the rest of the Ramona series by Beverly Cleary, Ramona was probably my first femspo lol
5-- idk if this counts but like literally any book abt animals that's heavy on the images and illustrations, Zoobooks or Eyewitness or whatever just something to get the imagination going, bonus points if there's like X-ray style cross-section illustrations
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Blog Post #1: Aye and Gomorrah
Aye and Gomorrah by Samuel R. Delany is a work that, thus far in the class, I have found fascinating, especially given that it has managed to stay relevant in context despite being a work written in the 1960’s. I especially gravitated towards the line spoken by the frelk in Istanbul, where she says, “You don’t choose your perversions,” and “My love starts with the fear of love.” It is the most upfront in the entire story that Delany is about the queer metaphor; in a futuristic society where there are “spacers,” people who have been sterilized before puberty, there is a subculture of people who fetishize them due to their asexual nature The line makes the case that love is not a choice, and the frelk’s experience with love resonates deeply with the same kind of fear someone queer experiences when discovering themselves. Both the spacer’s and the frelk’s experience coalesce into a bigger picture of the loneliness one feels being rejected from society for something as simple as sexuality.
There is also a very obvious othering towards spacers by the locals of every city, where they are referred to as “you people,” always immediately identified by their androgynous appearances and looked down upon. This kind of treatment by others made me think of the parallels that could hold to both queerness and race, where distinctive features (i.e. skin color) give way to immediate prejudice. At every turn, the spacer’s are never taken seriously; when they try to speak in a native language to locals, they are rudely corrected, and even when they insist to the frelk that they are not interested in being bought, she is still persistent in her fascination with them. These reactions are two sides of the same coin, and also ones that people of color encounter daily. For example, white individuals in the South are more likely to be outright racist to a black person, but trend analyses show that the top pornography category in those states is Ebony.
Delany’s vision of a future with androgynous, asexual individuals is promising for openmindedness towards gender identity, yet also holds a very depressing thought for me, in that this future with spaceships and jumps between multiple planets still has prejudice and discrimination against certain groups. While I understand the point is to create a general parallel for the way queerness in the modern day, taking a step back and thinking of the future in such a way only makes me fear continued oppression.
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got tagged by @wellnoe in a meme to answer these questions. I’m not tagging anyone but you should do these if you want :3
Last Song: Came Out Swinging by The Wonder Years. Trite perhaps, but really gets me
Three Ships:
Well I have to say Jeanscott for me and Brenna’s Aperture AU of course
Orthibex--I’m really having a FatT moment and Orthibex is IT. That “like a very good dog” Kingdom game scene was lifechanging
Uhhhh I’m currently playing the visual novel We Know the Devil on KV @yrgirlkv’s recommendation, and the route where Jupiter and Venus end up together is A Lot. Excited to go through all the routes
Currently Reading: Very slowly working my way through Aye, Gomorrah...and Other Stories by Samuel R. Delany. It’s dense! Shouts to Nathan @robotbytheriver for finding essays on Delany’s work that contextualizes it better for me
Last Movie: I THINK it was Fallen Angels by Wong Kar-Wai, also with Nathan robotbytheriver. It fucking slapped. He Zhiwu is the deranged autistic guy of all time. I don’t watch movies that frequently, so it’s nice to get back into Wong Kar-Wai stuff. I was in a group that was attempting to watch all his films last year but we dissolved due to the convener moving to California lol.
Craving: Oh hmm....Actually, I could go for an acidic fizzy drink right now.....like a seltzer or a carbonated herb lemondade
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Afrofuturism- Blog 1
I had no expectations or any knowledge of Afrofuturism. This is such a cool lens to look at music and media in general. I have always loved anything that has to do with magical realism, mythology, dystopia, and utopia. I think that these things intrigue me because my identity is so mixed; ethnically (Irish and Filipino), sexuality-wise bi-sexual, using pronouns of she/they, growing up socio-economically in two very distinct social classes. It gives me an insight into nuanced experiences regarding race and the role of race. I think that there are a lot of things that have resonated with me heavily. I think the first piece of literature that resonates with me is “Aye, and Gomorrah”. I think that for me trying to grapple with identity over gender is something that I had to grapple with. For me seeing that I am fine with using she/her pronouns as my biological assigned pronouns but then also when researching and learning about how the two genders are rooted in colonization this westernized binary of gender didn’t exist in the pre-colonial Philippines and that they/them figures were presented in the Pilipinx Pantheon was super fascinating. Diving into that I started to think that I don't want to continue to succumb to those notions of binary and also started to use they/them pronouns to show in my mind that I'm still decolonizing and grappling with identity. I think that there are no distinct differences in the roles of masculine and feminine qualities. I think it is how you are raised and the characteristics of both. For example, boys are strong and are leaders, stereotypes can also and should be applied to girls' upbringing instead of falling into patriarchal views that think that girls aren’t able to be strong and suitable leaders. I don't care to succumb to the limitation of gendering in the westernized world. I also feel attraction to anyone that I like, not just men. These thoughts have made me feel a little isolated and make me think of this sense of “other”. In the story, this other and this grapple of identity in a society that puts labels on you their society takes it a step forward of body mutilation to make you think of gender roles is something that resonated with me. Then I resonated on the theme of loneliness because I think that we all have this sense of desire to be loved. After all, that is human. I think the story talks about emotionally unavailable people in a way that is so relatable. I think my definition of love and the standards I hold my parents to are completely different from when I first started dating. I know that these past relationships made me feel lonely and confused.
I also understand my positionality in this class which lets me see and think critically of the experiences of other minority groups and specifically of African American and African experiences through art. I was talking in my other classes about how sometimes learning and relearning the history of Black history in America and how constantly African Americans/Africans are treated is so defeating. I feel like we live in a system that is working perfectly on white supremacist ideology and that through art we can reimagine a new world with hope. I am learning the power of hope, that this is what keeps communities that constantly get shit on for so long wanting to wake up the next morning. I saw this in Kendrick Lamar’s video in the end when he smiles even though he gets shot.
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I Am Lonely Too
“I am lonely too,” perhaps the only pure and fully true words uttered by a character in Samuel R. Delany’s “Aye, and Gomorrah...,” a tale full of unreliable narrators and characters, all of them seemingly adrift, lost, alienated (no pun intended), and lonely. It’s not a story about sex. Rather, it is a phenomenally prophetic story that deserves a fresh look from scholars now that we have entered a new wave of culture in which gender, sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity are all being redefined and understood in new ways.
There are a couple things that are utterly fascinating about this short story, both of them rather interesting ironies. First, this story became (in)famous, and a little controversial too, because of its subject matter, namely the fact that the entire story is about sex, seeking it, wanting it or not wanting it, wanting sex with certain individuals specifically because they don’t want it. Yes, interpersonal interaction is a complicated sexual patchwork in Delany’s tale. And it strikes me as deeply ironic that this story seemingly about sex, famous because it is about sex, is actually not about sex at all. It is not about closeness, intimacy, all that sex is supposed to be. Rather, it is about loneliness, distance from one another and from ourselves, a profound existential estrangement that leaves humor unfunny, sex a chore or a business, and food or other simple pleasure just a way to numb ourselves. No, it’s not about sex, not really. It is about the loss of everything human, everything that connects us. It is a bleak portrait of the future, indeed.
Okay, but there is another layer of irony in this story too. I first read this story years ago, before non-binary individuals and, asexual individuals, and the entire concept of gender-neutrality entered my own personal range of understanding the world. But today, of course, the full range of human experience is being better understood by all of us, including me. In Delany’s story, Spacers are gender-neutral, and they are fetishized specifically because they are without gender. Now, of course, Spacers are forced to be sterilized as children, and had no choice. This alone makes Spacers fundamentally different from the experience of most people who identity as trans, binary, gender-neutral, or asexual today in the real world. Yet, there is undeniably something prophetic about Delany’s imagining a world in which the genderless, the androgenous are the most desired, and there is something about his futuristic world that somehow resonates with the changing gender norms we are seeing today. I admit I do not entirely yet understand the lesson, though of course that will not stop me from offering some suggestions. Perhaps Delany’s story can be read as a warning about fetishization, a warning particularly relevant for the LGBTQ community and the trans community in particular, after all, fetishization inevitably contains a hefty dose of dehumanization, does it not? Or, perhaps, Delany’s story can be read about the need for human connection; perhaps he is saying that no matter one’s gender, even without gender at all, everyone needs real, emotional connections with others. This story makes me want to be a little nicer to my siblings, to go out of my way for a friend, to finally call my grandma, to remind my mother how grateful I am, to reach out to
someone being bullied, to speak up for someone silenced, basically to do the little parts of forging human connections that really are not so little at all.
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On Delany’s “Aye, and Gomorrah”
As a fairly new science fiction lover, Samuel R Delany’s “Aye, and Gomorrah” was an interesting and enjoyable reading experience. While I have read a few tales of space travelers before, it was nothing like Delany’s story. Immediately thrown into Delany’s constructed world, we follow a spacer, who, as their name implies, works in space, whether it be building water conservation units on Mars or servicing communication relay towers on the Moon. These spacers, the readers learn, were altered: selected at a young age for their sexual unresponsiveness, these people were permanently neutered. I found this aspect particularly intriguing: to work in space, one must be neutered. The story itself presents a reasoning for this entire operation: the levels of radiation simply would not allow for any kinds of sexual activity in other worlds anywyas and, aside from that, the protagonist themself states that they were looking for any reason whatsoever to reduce the number of children, especially the “deformed” ones. The idea that a state would target a population who deviates from the norm for such an alteration in order to perform this space work comes as no surprise. Why wouldn’t a government first sacrifice those who they do not view as valuable? History itself has seen this play out. As a result of the alteration of their bodies, spacers have no gender. Essentially, they are Othered. The protagonists’ gender, for example, is ambiguous and left so, perceived as having the look of a female in one instance and of a male in another. Either way, as the spacer themself says, their gender before the alteration does not matter. The fact that Delany renders these spacers genderless and centers these Black queer characters in his work is important, especially considering this story was first published in the late 1960s. Not only are the spacers genderless, but they are consigned to a life with no love, to a life of loneliness, always on the move. This is demonstrated throughout the short story as a group of spacers travel to various places in a short time-span and, unable to have love in the way that people usually think of love, the spacers can only turn to frelks. Frelks are people with a free-fall-sexual displacement complex, that is, they are those who desire spacers for the fact that they are spacers. As described by a frelk, they desire, and even worship, spacers because spacers can’t want them. If someone actually wanted them, they would be repulsed. I found this aspect very interesting because these characters are afraid of love and are unable to accept that someone could desire them. What does it mean, however, for the spacers that the only ones who could want them are those that are afraid of love? What Delany’s intention was with these characters and dynamic, I do not know, but I find it fascinating. The world and characters that Delany built are very intriguing, unlike anything I have read before, and I highly recommend it.
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Samuel R. Delany
Samuel R. Delany (born April 1, 1942), Chip Delany to his friends, is an American author and literary critic. His work includes fiction (especially science fiction), memoir, criticism and essays on science fiction, literature, sexuality, and society.
His fiction includes Babel-17, The Einstein Intersection (winners of the Nebula Award for 1966 and 1967 respectively), Nova, Dhalgren, the Return to Nevèrÿon series, and Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders. His nonfiction includes Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, About Writing, and eight books of essays. After winning four Nebula awards and two Hugo Awards over the course of his career, Delany was inducted by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 2002. From January 1975 until his retirement in May 2015, he was a professor of English, Comparative Literature, and Creative Writing at SUNY Buffalo, SUNY Albany, and Temple University in Philadelphia. In 1997 he won the Kessler Award, and in 2010 he won the third J. Lloyd Eaton Lifetime Achievement Award in Science Fiction from the academic Eaton Science Fiction Conference at UCR Libraries. The Science Fiction Writers of America named him its 30th SFWA Grand Master in 2013.
Early life
Samuel Ray Delany, Jr. was born on April 1, 1942, and raised in Harlem. His mother, Margaret Carey Boyd Delany (1916–1995), was a clerk in the New York Public Library system. His father, Samuel Ray Delany Sr. (1906–1960), ran the Levy & Delany Funeral Home on 7th Avenue in Harlem, from 1938 until his death in 1960. The civil rights pioneers Sadie and Bessie Delany were his aunts. He used their adventures as the basis for Elsie and Corry in "Atlantis: Model 1924", the opening novella in his semi-autobiographical collection Atlantis: Three Tales. His grandfather, Henry Beard Delany, was the first black bishop of the Episcopal Church.
The family lived in the top two floors of a three-story private house between five- and six-story Harlem apartment buildings. Delany envied children with nicknames and took one for himself on the first day of a new summer camp, Camp Woodland, at about the age of 12, by answering "Everybody calls me Chip" when asked his name. Decades later, Frederik Pohl called him "a person who is never addressed by his friends as Sam, Samuel or any other variant of the name his parents gave him."
Delany attended the Dalton School and from 1951 through 1956, spent summers at Camp Woodland in Phoenicia, New York, followed by the Bronx High School of Science, during which he was selected to attend Camp Rising Sun, the Louis August Jonas Foundation's international summer scholarship program.
Delany has identified as gay since adolescence, though his complicated marriage with Marilyn Hacker (who was aware of Delany's orientation and has identified as a lesbian since their divorce) has led some authors to classify him as bisexual.
Upon the death of Delany's father from lung cancer in October, 1960 and his marriage in August 1961, he and Hacker settled in New York's East Village neighborhood at 629 East 5th Street. Hacker's intervention (while employed as an assistant editor at Ace Books), helped Delany become a published science fiction author by the age of 20, though he actually finished writing that first novel (The Jewels of Aptor) while at 19, shortly after dropping out of the City College of New York after one semester.
Career
He published nine well-regarded science fiction novels between 1962 and 1968, as well as two prize-winning short stories (collected in Driftglass [1971] and later in Aye, and Gomorrah, and other stories [2002]). In 1966, with Hacker remaining in New York, Delany took a five-month trip to Europe, writing The Einstein Intersection while in France, England, Italy, Greece, and Turkey. These locales found their way into several pieces of his work at that time, including the novel Nova and the short stories "Aye, and Gomorrah" and "Dog in a Fisherman's Net".
Weeks after returning, Delany and Hacker began to live separately; Delany played and lived communally for five months on the Lower East Side with the Heavenly Breakfast, a folk-rock band, one of whose members, Bert Lee, was later a founding member of the Central Park Sheiks (the other two members of the quartet were Susan Schweers and Steven Greenbaum [aka Wiseman]); a memoir of his experiences with the band and communal life was eventually published as Heavenly Breakfast (1979). After a very brief time together again, Hacker moved to San Francisco and then England. Delany published his first eight novels with Ace Books from 1962 to 1967, culminating in Babel-17, The Einstein Intersection, and Nova, which were consecutively recognized as the year's best novel by the Science Fiction Writers of America (Nebula Awards). Calling him a genius and poet, Algis Budrys listed Delany with J. G. Ballard, Brian W. Aldiss, and Roger Zelazny as "an earthshaking new kind" of writer,and Judith Merril labelling him "TNT (The New Thing)."
Delany's first short story was published by Pohl in the February 1967 issue of Worlds of Tomorrow, and he placed three more in other magazines that year. After four short stories (including the critically lauded "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones") and Nova were published to wide acclaim (the latter by Doubleday, marking Delany's departure from Ace) in 1968 alone, an extended interregnum in publication commenced until the release of Dhalgren (1975), abated only by two short stories, two comic book scripts, and an erotic novel, The Tides of Lust (1973), reissued in 1994 under Delany's preferred title, Equinox.
On New Year's Eve in 1968, Delany moved to San Francisco to join Hacker, who was already there, and again to London in the interim, before Delany returned to New York in the summer of 1971 as a resident of the Albert Hotel in Greenwich Village. In 1972, Delany directed a short film entitled The Orchid (originally titled The Science Fiction Film in the Latter Twentieth Century, produced by Barbara Wise. Shot in 16mm with color and sound, the production also employed David Wise, Adolfas Mekas, and was scored by John Herbert McDowell. In November 1972, Delany was a visiting writer at Wesleyan University's Center for the Humanities. From December 1972 to December 1974, Delany and Hacker lived in Marylebone, London. During this period, he began working with sexual themes in earnest and wrote two pornographic works, one of which (Hogg) was unpublishable due to its transgressive content. Twenty years later, it found print.
Delany wrote two issues of the comic book Wonder Woman in 1972, during a controversial period in the publication's history when the lead character abandoned her superpowers and became a secret agent. Delany scripted issues #202 and #203 of the series. He was initially supposed to write a six-issue story arc that would culminate in a battle over an abortion clinic, but the story arc was canceled after Gloria Steinem complained that Wonder Woman was no longer wearing her traditional costume, a change predating Delany's involvement. Scholar Ann Matsuuchi concluded that Steinem's feedback was "conveniently used as an excuse" by DC management.
Delany's eleventh and most popular novel, the million-plus-selling Dhalgren, was published in 1975 to both literary acclaim (from both inside and outside the science fiction community) and derision (mostly from within the community). Upon its publication, Delany returned to the United States at the behest of Leslie Fiedler to teach at the University at Buffalo as Butler Professor of English in the spring of 1975, preceding his return to New York City that summer. Though he wrote two more major science fiction novels (Triton and Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand) in the decade following Dhalgren, Delany began to work in fantasy and science fiction criticism for several years. His main literary project through the late 1970s and 1980s was Return to Nevèrÿon, the overall title of the four-volume series and also the title of the fourth and final book. Following the publication of Return to Nevèrÿon, Delany published one more fantasy novel. Released in 1993, They Fly at Çiron is a re-written and expanded version of an unpublished short story Delany wrote in 1962. This would be Delany's last novel in either the science fiction or fantasy genres for many years. Among the works that appeared during this time was his novel The Mad Man and a number of his essay collections.
Delany became a professor in 1988. Following visiting fellowships at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee (1977), the University at Albany (1978) and Cornell University (1987), he spent 11 years as a professor of comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, a year and a half as an English professor at the University at Buffalo, then, after an invited stay at Yaddo, moved to the English Department of Temple University in January 2001, where he taught until his retirement in April 2015. He served as Critical Inquiry Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago during the winter quarter of 2014.
Beginning with The Jewel-Hinged Jaw (1977), a collection of critical essays that applied then-nascent literary theory to science fiction studies, he published several books of criticism, interviews, and essays. In the memoir Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999), Delany drew on personal experience to examine the relationship between the effort to redevelop Times Square and the public sex lives of working-class men in New York City.
He received the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement from Publishing Triangle in 1993.
In 2007, his novel Dark Reflections was a winner of the Stonewall Book Award. That same year Delany was the subject of a documentary film, The Polymath, or, The Life and Opinions of Samuel R. Delany, Gentleman, directed by Fred Barney Taylor. The film debuted on April 25 at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival. The following year, 2008, it tied for Jury Award for Best Documentary at the International Philadelphia Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. Also in 2007, Delany was the April "calendar boy" in the "Legends of the Village" calendar put out by Village Care of New York.
In 2010, Delany was one of the five judges (along with Andrei Codrescu, Sabina Murray, Joanna Scott and Carolyn See) for the National Book Awards fiction category. In 2015, the Caribbean Philosophical Association named Delany the recipient of its Nicolás Guillén Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2013 he received the Brudner Award from Yale University, for his contributions to gay literature. Since 2018, his archive has been housed at the Beinecke Library at Yale where it is currently being organized. Till then, his papers were housed at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center.
In 1991, Delany entered a committed, nonexclusive relationship with Dennis Rickett, previously a homeless book vendor; their courtship is chronicled in the graphic memoir Bread and Wine: An Erotic Tale of New York (1999), a collaboration with the writer and artist Mia Wolff. After fourteen years, he retired from teaching at Temple University.
Delany is an atheist.
Themes
Recurring themes in Delany's work include mythology, memory, language, sexuality, and perception. Class, position in society, and the ability to move from one social stratum to another are motifs that were touched on in his earlier work and became more significant in his later fiction and non-fiction, both. Many of Delany's later (mid-1980s and beyond) works have bodies of water (mostly oceans and rivers) as a common theme, as mentioned by Delany in The Polymath. Though not a theme, coffee, more than any other beverage, is mentioned significantly and often in many of Delany's fictions.
Writing itself (both prose and poetry) is also a repeated theme: several of his characters — Geo in The Jewels of Aptor, Vol Nonik in The Fall of the Towers, Rydra Wong in Babel-17, Ni Ty Lee in Empire Star, Katin Crawford in Nova, the Kid, Ernest Newboy, and William in Dhalgren, Arnold Hawley in Dark Reflections, John Marr and Timothy Hasler in The Mad Man, and Osudh in Phallos – are writers or poets of some sort.
Delany also makes use of repeated imagery: several characters (Hogg, the Kid, and the sensory-syrynx player, the Mouse, in Nova; Roger in "We .. move on a rigorous line") are known for wearing only one shoe; and nail biting along with rough, calloused (and sometimes veiny) hands are characteristics given to individuals in a number of his fictions. Names are sometimes reused: "Bellona" is the name of a city in both Dhalgren and Triton, "Denny" is a character in both Dhalgren and Hogg (which were written almost concurrently despite being published two decades apart; and there is a Danny in "We ... move on a rigorous line"), and the name "Hawk" is used for five different characters in four separate stories – Hogg, the story "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones" and the novella "The Einstein Intersection", and the short story "Cage of Brass", where a character called Pig also appears.
Jewels, reflection, and refraction – not just the imagery but reflection and refraction of text and concepts – are also strong themes and metaphors in Delany's work. Titles such as The Jewels of Aptor, The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones", Driftglass, and Dark Reflections, along with the optic chain of prisms, mirrors, and lenses worn by several characters in Dhalgren, are a few examples of this; as in "We (...) move on a rigorous line" a ring is nearly obsessively described at every twist and turn of the plot. Reflection and refraction in narrative are explored in Dhalgren and take center stage in his Return to Nevèrÿon series.
Following the 1968 publication of Nova, there was not only a large gap in Delany's published work (after releasing eight novels and a novella between 1962 and 1968, his published output virtually stopped until 1973), there was also a notable addition to the themes found in the stories published after that time. It was at this point that Delany began dealing with sexual themes to an extent rarely equaled in serious writing. Dhalgren and Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand include several sexually explicit passages, and several of his books such as Equinox (originally published as The Tides of Lust, a title that Delany does not endorse), The Mad Man, Hogg and, Phallos can be considered pornography, a label Delany himself endorses.
Novels such as Triton and the thousand-plus pages making up his four-volume Return to Nevèrÿon series explored in detail how sexuality and sexual attitudes relate to the socioeconomic underpinnings of a primitive – or, in Triton's case, futuristic – society.Even in works with no science fiction or fantasy content to speak of, such as Atlantis: Three Tales, The Mad Man, and Hogg, Delany pursued these questions by creating vivid pictures of New York and other American cities, now in the Jazz Age, now in the first decade of the AIDS epidemic, New York private schools in the 1950s, as well as Greece and Europe in the 1960s, and – in Hogg – generalized small-town America. Phallos details the quest for happiness and security by a gay man from the island of Syracuse in the second-century reign of the Emperor Hadrian. Dark Reflections is a contemporary novel, dealing with themes of repression, old age, and the writer's unrewarded life.
Writer and academic C. Riley Snorton has addressed Triton's thematic engagement with gender, sexual, and racial difference and how their accommodations are instrumentalized in the state and institutional maintenance of social relations. Despite the novel's infinite number subject positions and identities available through technological intervention, Snorton argues that Delany's proliferation of identities "take place within the context of increasing technologically determined biocentrism, where bodies are shaped into categories-cum-cartographies of (human) life, as determined by socially agreed-upon and scientifically mapped genetic routes." Triton questions social and political imperatives towards anti-normativity insofar that these projects do not challenge but actually reify the constrictive categories of the human. In his book Afro-Fabulations, Tavia Nyong'o makes a similar argument in his analysis of "The Einstein Intersection." Citing Delany as a queer theorist, Nyong'o highlights the novella's "extended study of the enduring power of norms, written during the precise moment—'the 1960s'—when antinormative, anti-systemic movements in the United States and worldwide were at their peak." Like Triton, "The Einstein Intersection" features characters that exist across a range of differences across gender, sexuality, and ability. This proliferation of identities "takes place within a concerted effort to sustain a gendered social order and to deliver a stable reproductive futurity through language" in the Lo society's caging of the non-functional "kages" who are denied language and care. Both Nyong'o and Snorton connect Delany's work with Sylvia Wynter's "genres of being human," underscoring Delany's sustained thematic engagement with difference, normativity, and their potential subversions or reifications, and placing him as an important interlocutor in the fields of queer theory and black studies.
The Mad Man, Phallos, and Dark Reflections are linked in minor ways. The beast mentioned at the beginning of The Mad Man graces the cover of Phallos.
Delany has also published seven books of literary criticism, with an emphasis on issues in science fiction and other paraliterary genres, comparative literature, and queer studies. He has commented that he believes that to omit the sexual practices that he portrays in his writing would limit the dialogue children and adults can have about it themselves, and that this lack of knowledge can kill people.
Works
FictionNovelsReturn to Nevèrÿon seriesShort storiesComics
Wonder Woman, 1972
Anthologies
Quark/1 (1970, science fiction) (edited with Marilyn Hacker)
Quark/2 (1971, science fiction) (edited with Marilyn Hacker)
Quark/3 (1971, science fiction) (edited with Marilyn Hacker)
Quark/4 (1971, science fiction) (edited with Marilyn Hacker)
Nebula Winners 13 (1980, science fiction)
NonfictionCritical works
The Jewel-hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction (Dragon Press, 1977; Wesleyan University Press revised edition 2009, with an introduction by Matthew Cheney)
The American Shore: Meditations on a Tale of Science Fiction (Dragon Press, 1978; Wesleyan University Press 2014, with an introduction by Matthew Cheney)
Starboard Wine: More Notes on the Language of Science Fiction (Dragon Press, 1984; Wesleyan University Press, 2012, with an introduction by Matthew Cheney)
Wagner/Artaud: A Play of 19th and 20th Century Critical Fictions (Ansatz Press, 1988) 0-945195-01-X
The Straits of Messina (1989), 0-934933-04-9
Silent Interviews (1995), 0-8195-6280-7
Longer Views (1996) with an introduction by Kenneth R. James, 0-8195-6293-9
Shorter Views (1999), 0-8195-6369-2
About Writing (2005), 0-8195-6716-7
Conversations with Samuel R. Delany (2009), edited by Carl Freedman, University of Mississippi Press.
"Racism and Science Fiction" (1998), New York Review of Science Fiction, Issue 120.
Memoirs and letters
Heavenly Breakfast (1979), a memoir of a New York City commune during the so-called Summer of Love, 0-553-12796-9
The Motion of Light in Water (1988), a memoir of his experiences as a young gay science fiction writer; winner of the Hugo Award, 0-87795-947-1
Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (NYU Press, 1999; 2019, 20th anniversary edition with foreword by Robert Reid-Pharr), a discussion of changes in social and sexual interaction in New York's Times Square, 0-8147-1919-8; 978-1-4798-2777-0
Bread and Wine: An Erotic Tale of New York (1999), an autobiographical comic drawn by Mia Wolff with an introduction by Alan Moore, 1-890451-02-9
1984: Selected Letters (2000) with an introduction by Kenneth R. James, 0-9665998-1-0
In Search of Silence: The Journals of Samuel R. Delany. Volume 1, 1957-1969 (2017), edited and with an introduction by Kenneth R. James, 978-0-8195-7089-5. 2018 Locus Award Finalist (non-fiction)
Letters from Amherst: Five Narrative Letters (Wesleyan University Press, 2019), with foreword by Nalo Hopkinson, 9780819578204
Introductions
The Adventures of Alyx, by Joanna Russ
We Who Are About To..., by Joanna Russ
Black Gay Man by Robert Reid-Pharr
Burning Sky, Selected Stories, by Rachel Pollack
Conjuring Black Funk: Notes on Culture, Sexuality, and Spirituality, Volume 1 by Herukhuti
The Cosmic Rape, by Theodore Sturgeon
Glory Road, by Robert A. Heinlein
Microcosmic God, by Theodore Sturgeon
The Magic: (October 1961-October 1967) Ten Tales by Roger Zelazny, selected and introduced by Samuel R. Delany
Masters of the Pit, by Michael Moorcock
Nebula Winners 13, edited by Samuel R. Delany
A Reader's Guide to Science Fiction, by Baird Searles, Martin Last, Beth Meacham, and Michael Franklin; foreword by Samuel R. Delany
The Sandman: A Game of You, by Neil Gaiman
Shade: An Anthology of Fiction by Gay Men of African Descent, edited by Charles Rowell and Bruce Morrow
Interviews
Sci-Fi Legend Samuel R. Delany Doesn't Play Favorites (2017)
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SAMUEL R. DELANY’s science fiction and fantasy tales are available in Aye and Gomorrah and Other Stories. His collection Atlantis: Three Tales and Phallos are experimental fiction. His novels include science fiction such as the Nebula-Award winning Babel-17 and The Einstein Intersection, as well as Nova and Dhalgren. His four-volume series Return to Nevèrÿon is sword-and-sorcery. Most recently, he has written the SF novel Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders. His 2007 novel Dark Reflections won the Stonewall Book Award. Other novels include Equinox, Hogg, and The Mad Man. Delany was the subject of a 2007 documentary, The Polymath, by Fred Barney Taylor, and he has written a popular creative writing textbook, About Writing. His website is: www.samueldelany.com.
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Tales of Nevèrÿon is the first volume of the Return to Nevèrÿon series and contains the first five stories of the series. It also contains what is becoming my most anthologized short story, "The Tale of Dragons and Dreamers" (next to the prize-winning ". . .Aye, and Gomorrah"). Currently you can find it here at the end of the book, and you can find it as well as in 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘉𝘪𝘨 𝘉𝘰𝘰𝘬 𝘰𝘧 𝘔𝘰𝘥𝘦𝘳𝘯 𝘍𝘢𝘯𝘵𝘢𝘴𝘺 (2020). The last two times it was anthologized, I seriously suggested that the editors choose another of the stories—𝘢𝘯𝘺 of the other stories—and both times was told, no, 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 was the tale they wanted. Certainly it's the one that makes the series seem most like an ordinary Sword-and-Sorcery series. When Welselyan first began to re-release the books, in 1993, the genre ascriptions of the back of the first two volumes were "Fantasy/Literature/Gay Studies." One of the things that became clear, however, between 1993 when the first two volumes were released, and 1994, when the second two books appeared, was a) that only the first catagory mattered and only the first endorsement really counted for anything: thus the new genre ascription was "Literature/Fantasy/Gay Studies," and volume three carried an Umberto Eco endorsement in boldface and volume four carried boldface one by Fredric R. Jameson. The only problem was that Fred called it "the Nevèrÿon series" instead of "Return to Nevèrÿon." This is no more serious than calling "The Ring of the Nibelung" "The Ring." Still, in work that does not have that much scholarly literature behind it editors are still a bit frightened of mentioning "gay" or "black" in a fantasy context, afraid that it might hurt sales. via Facebook https://ift.tt/337YpQi
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The four books pictured below are essentially the same collection of short fantasy and science fiction short stories. All that changes is the cover and the format—and the title:
In 1970, the original publisher who purchased the collection was New American Library (aka Signet Books). It contained two award-winning stories, "Aye, and Gomorrah," which had received a Nebula award, and "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-precious Stones," which had taken both a Hugo Hugo Award in Heidelberg and a Nebula in Berkeley.
My very clever then-agent, Henry Morrison, suggested: "Why don't you back sell it to a shadow hard-cover company, who will do a hardcover version that will get a few reviews that you can then use to sell the paperback.
So a hardcover company was drawn up on paper—Nelson Doubleday—who published the first edition, with cover art by Frank Wilcox, shown on the lower right. Also all the tales carry place/date subscriptions (the place and date the story was completed), which I think is particularly important for SF stories.
One of the things the early hardcover is notable for is that, on the title page, they actually misspell my last name.
Fortunately, that has only happened once.
Initially, however, I wanted to name the collection "*Aye, and Gomorrah* and Other Stories," but I was told, well, we're going change it to something else, because everybody will think it's a book about religion. Thus it became *Driftglass: Ten Tales of Speculative Fiction,* with Bob Pepper's cover art, till eventually Vintage brought it out.
By that time they were quite willing to let me put the original title on it—which is what it bears today.
It just shows you how the world changes.
Reading over the tales, I saw that there was a shared them to them all: I think it was given to me by the Southern diaspora that had brought so many blacks from the south and moved folks around in the endless wars: very few people die, it would seem, in the same town in which they were born. And that is meaning of the little but of prose poetry at the head of all four volumes, which I wrote contemplating the fact that in his entire life Shakespeare only traveled, that we know, one hundred and six miles—and back.
[Samuel Delany]
#Samuel R. Delany#Driftglass#words and writing#stories#short stories#quotes#Aye and Gomorrah#how the world changes
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Week 1 Nov 16-23/20
HEY ITS MY INAUGURAL POST! Ok ok I’m just glad to get this out there. I want to document my readings (books / short stories / sometimes articles or interesting transcribed curious) I want to read a variety and respond to the things I read for like mechanical output sake, it feels productive and I can review my notes for certain books I remember just to reminisce and yada yada.
[ 3rd volume of frankenstein
( I’ve already read through the first two for class w/o this tumblr)
Alright I didn’t think the creation of “bride of Frankenstein’s monster” was a real plot in the source material... I thought it was an adaptational retrofit to satisfy the heteronormative media audience. Can the monster--ya know?
ok maybe the monster can--ya know. At least it doesn’t R-word any women (although there was a cautiously implied opportunity) This is why all books should be written by women um anyway...
Multiple cues for mobs with pitchforks and torches, but no mob??? I thought the mob was the one thing the adaptations got right or was the mob thing a Dracula thing? I want to read Dracula, but since I have my own copy that will take...... forever. Why don’t I read any of the books I buy, what a shame it’s like my bookshelf is some kind of vortex and all titles housed have gone to the oblivion section of my TBR list
[ aye, and gomorrah samuel r. delany
Awesome title, also author’s writing style is the transcribed version of impressionism (uuuH now I’m gonna go through his bibliography and up the digits of my already packed TBR inventory which I already did, mind you i’m going to relish dalgren and the rest of the ‘aye and gomorrah’ short-story compilation), it’s very abstract and breaks every rule, exactly how I want to write. Wrong but valid via finesse, doesn’t help my essay grades much tho-besides the point. Also what a fuckin plot. Space Eunuchs selling themselves to the fetish market demand? Ok, also weird that the astronauts are considered pre-pubescent. If you are a 40 yo with your parts chopped off before you could initiate puberty and therefore eternally prepubescent is it.... pedophilia? You cant have sex with someone without parts thats weird? actually to be fair they still have their buttholes. How do you do this to a women? nipped tubes, but do they still keep the vag? how can you take away the vag you can’t take away vag like you can’t take away a mouth or an earhole
ok anyway... after reading I realized that spacers are like this allegory for human sub-division what i mean is that they are basically minorities,,,
-they are hyperaware of What they are and also of how others see them in the way that they’ve internalized being fetishized that they question if every non-spacer they encounter is a frelk
-the narrator's encounter with that girl and she just like word vomits non-spacer apologetics interspersed with offenses whenever her projected guilt is not met with commiseration and sympathy by the spacer (what its like to interact with a “socially self-conscious” liberal white as a black person or muslim or any that apply). She’s guilty of being a fetishizer and she looks to the narrator for some absolution or relief, and when she doesn’t get it she turns tetchy. Also it’s the world-building expedient, one conversation gives the entire story context.
-none of the spacers are referred to with individual pronouns no he’s, she’s or even the singular they/them. This is why I find the sentences perplexing sometimes, the narrative structure disallows the usage of spacer pronouns to promote the spacers are androgynous and sexless world-building agenda. I think its neat. Glad I caught it. Non-spacers are gendered and pronouned bleh.
-now i’m wondering if the elixir of youth isn’t la’mer but complete puberty blockage.
-ok but also why are Spacers called corpses and frelking is analogous with necrophilia? the girl calls the spacer a child so wouldn’t they be more allied with pedophiles?
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In Aye, and Gomorrah, Spacers are a group of astronauts who are neutered before puberty so that the radiation in space does not affect their gametes. In society, they are fetishized by a group of people called frelks. The Spacers in this story almost seem to be an alien race because they have no sexuality and are unattainable by other people. In addition, the Spacers are often ask to leave when they visit places on Earth. This again shows how they are treated almost as another species.
This story demonstrates the human expansion to outer space because these Spacers work on other planets. In doing this, they create an alien group of people. These two groups only interact for their own motives. The Spacers only want money and company from the frelks while the frelks have their sexual motives. The Spacers also do not seem to belong on Earth which demonstrates the inability of Spacers to assimilate to the “normal” human race.
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