Driftglass
Samuel R. Delany
318 pages
published in 1971
Samuel Delany is one of my favourite science fiction writers and in my opinion one of the best science fiction writers ever. Considering the cover blurb on this collection of short stories, I’m not alone in that opinion. According to Frederick Pohl, not a bad writer himself, “Delany may be the only authentic genius among us”. High praise indeed, but Delany deserves it. Everything I’ve read of his, including his earliest novels, displayed a mastery of both language and story, a lively imagination and ability to create novel but believable world and most importantly a grasp of the importance of culture that’s rare in science fiction, especially when he first started writing.
He is however more of a novelist than a short story writer, having written not nearly as many short stories as his contemporaries. in fact, Delany debuted with a novel at a time when science fiction was still largely a magazine driven field. It was only after he had established himself as a writer that he started publishing some of his short stories. Driftglass was his first collection, containing work written between ’65 and ’68 and published between 1967 and 1970. It’s a great collection, with two absolute classics in it: the Nebula winning “Aye, and Gomorrah…” as well as “Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones”, which won both the Hugo and the Nebula awards. Not to mention several other excellent stories.