Samuel R. Delany – Wis[s]e Words

Unexpected treasures

Published on December 1, 2015Leave a comment

Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones reference in Dantalian no Shoka

Dantalian no Shoka is a 2011 well written weird mystery anime series with a decidedly bookish bent, set in the nineteen twenties. It stars an ex-World War i fighter pilot who inherits his grandfather’s title and estate, but in return has to take care of his mystical library, which this being an anime, comes in the form of a gothic lolita girl called Dalian. I’ve been watching it off and on for the last couple of days and episode four was a particular delight. Not only was it basically an adaptation of Misery, with a deranged fan keeping a writer prisoner, killing him each day to motivate him to write the proper ending to his trilogy, there was also the shipping war between her and Dalian about which of the characters should end up with whom and as the icing on the cake, a shoutout to Delany right at the start of the episode. Which you just don’t expect to see in an anime, even such a literary one.

Dhalgren — Samuel R. Delany

Published on August 6, 2014Leave a comment

Cover of Dhalgren

Dhalgren
Samuel R. Delany
879 pages
published in 1975

Question: what are the two places man will never reach? Answer: the heart of the sun and page 100 of Dhalgren.

A corny old joke, with a kernel of truth because Dhalgren is not an easy book to read. Almost 900 pages long it’s a monster of a book, even more so when you remember it was published at a time when any science fiction novels over 200 pages was a bit on the long side. And unlike certain modern novels of that length, Dhalgren demands your attention on every page; you can’t get through it on the autopilot. It’s therefore no wonder that it took me most of February to read it, with no time for other books. But it was worth it as even almost forty years later this still is one of the most ambitious and challenging science fiction novels ever written.

Some people think it’s the symbol of everything that went wrong with science fiction. That “joke” I opened is less a joke than a sneer, repeated by people still mad at what the New Wave did to science fiction though they were born long after it. According to them Dhalgren is dense, impenetrable and unreadable, elitist fodder for literary snobs. What really sticks in their craw though is that Dhalgren was one of the biggest science fiction bestsellers of the seventies, going through fifteen printings between 1975 and 1980. Somebody must’ve liked it; in fact, like Dune or Stranger in A Strange Land, much more palatable bestsellers to these embittered fans, it must’ve appealed to people outside science fiction’s core readership.

Driftglass — Samuel R. Delany

Published on November 16, 2008

Cover of Driftglass

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.