[HN Gopher] Samuel R. Delany Reimagined Sci-Fi, Sex, and the City
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Samuel R. Delany Reimagined Sci-Fi, Sex, and the City
Author : benbreen
Score : 68 points
Date : 2023-07-05 13:31 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.newyorker.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.newyorker.com)
| qlm wrote:
| A good example of the importance of the Oxford comma.
| rsynnott wrote:
| Got to admit that when I first glanced at the title I briefly
| thought it was about an _extremely ill-conceived_ genre-shift
| TV reboot.
| knodi123 wrote:
| That is such a Samantha thing to say.
| linsomniac wrote:
| I recently listened to the Stuff You Should Know episode on
| Afrofuturism, and the mentioned Samuel R Delany as
| revolutionizing sci-fi. Sounds like I need to add him to my
| reading list. Great episode:
| https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-stuff-you-should-know-269...
| bluepod4 wrote:
| Since I haven't seen it recommended yet, his essay collection
| "About Writing" was an interesting read.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| any link to non-paywall?
| ughitsaaron wrote:
| https://archive.li/B8YY2
| [deleted]
| raylad wrote:
| I love all of Delany's earlier SF writing, but felt that after
| getting praise and recognition for it, he decided he should be a
| more "serious" writer and started writing things like Dhalgren,
| which to me was basically unreadable and more about calling
| attention to the writing than telling a story.
| howard941 wrote:
| I'm in the minority here I think. I thought Dhalgren was vivid
| and although some parts were difficult, especially around the
| bits where the story splits down the middle of pages, the
| challenge was rewarding. Those bits I ascribed to The Kid's
| somewhat tenuous mental state. Dhalgren is the only Delany work
| I can specifically recall scenes from some twenty+ years after
| reading it.
| Djle wrote:
| This is an excellent article on a writer that more people need to
| know about.
| User23 wrote:
| Just know that if you support Delany you're supporting the
| sexual abuse of children. "I read the NAMBLA
| [Bulletin] fairly regularly and I think it is one of the most
| intelligent discussions of sexuality I've ever found. I think
| before you start judging what NAMBLA is about, expose yourself
| to it and see what it is really about. What the issues they are
| really talking about, and deal with what's really there rather
| than this demonized notion of guys running about trying to
| screw little boys. I would have been so much happier as an
| adolescent if NAMBLA had been around when I was 9, 10, 11, 12,
| 13." -- Samuel R. Delany, June 25, 1994.
|
| There's certainly more to be found, and it gets considerably
| worse. He's not the only one in that era's sci fi author peer
| group either. Moira Greyland's account of her childhood with
| Marion Zimmer Bradley, her mother, is harrowing.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Equating someone that recommends some magazine, that then
| publishes a story about sex, to child sex abuse, is a bit of
| a stretch. Since you browsed HN, which had a link to an
| interview, with someone that read an article once about sex,
| does that make you a child sex abuser?
|
| A lot of sci-fi authors have 'weird sex' stories. Not only
| was it the sixties, they are sci-fi authors in the sixties,
| writing about alien sex and all kinds of out of the box
| thinking.
|
| I could just as easily say, don't vote Republican, they have
| a large percentage of sex abusers in office. Or, don't be
| Catholic.
| xrd wrote:
| I had never heard of NAMBLA before. The wikipedia page is
| fascinating:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Man/Boy_Love_As.
| ..
|
| Allen Ginsberg was a member as well.
|
| Reading this article, it makes me recall all the pop songs
| from the 80s which had lyrics like "...she's only seventeen!"
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seventeen_(Winger_song)). I
| don't think Winger was a member of NAMBLA.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Is "support" always transitive? To support someone is
| necessarily to support everything they support? What does
| "support" mean, anyway?
|
| To read and enjoy a book by him necessarily means I'm
| "supporting" everything he has ever supported, including in
| the past?
|
| Why would it work that way?
|
| (This is not meant to say anything either way on whether
| Delany "supports the sexual abuse of children". I suppose
| that's another transitive property of support... if I
| 'support' Delany who 'supports' NAMBLA which 'supports'... )
| EatingWithForks wrote:
| This was a statement Samuel Delany had well over two decades
| ago. Additionally it's clear Samuel Delany was himself a
| victim of child sexual assault if you knew anything else
| about him.
| majormajor wrote:
| This is discussed in the article and while not a position I
| support, I think leaving out this detail does him a major
| disservice: "Yet he has refused to retract the comments--in
| part because of his own sexual experiences with men as an
| underage boy, which he refuses to characterize as abusive."
|
| I find that overall hard to fully condemn the person for, vs
| to separate out those views from his work, as I've never seen
| anything about him personally acting that way himself with
| any boys. (Though you say there's more to be found,so... what
| is it?) I'm no doctor, but the "standard" media-presented
| look at a situation like that would probably be something
| like manifestations of trauma from those encounters at young
| ages combined with the other traumas of growing up gay in
| America at the time, which I largely file in the "bad but
| understandable and not actively harming others" bucket.
| Insanity wrote:
| What does "support Delany" mean? Imo you need to separate the
| art from the artist, and thus one can enjoy the art without
| necessarily aligning with the artist' views.
| addaon wrote:
| Agreed. By far the most influential writer in my life.
| germinalphrase wrote:
| What would you recommend as a first read?
| squidsoup wrote:
| Dhalgren is his masterpiece really, but it's not what you
| would describe as typical science fiction.
| addaon wrote:
| I would /not/ suggest starting with Dhalgren. You will
| enjoy it more if you learn how to read Delany from his
| other works. Work through his super-accessible shorts,
| then Stars in my Pocket for an intro to theme and style,
| then Triton for an intro to disagreeable protagonists in
| his work. Then back to Babel-17 / Nova for use of
| language, and then -- if you enjoyed all of those -- on
| to Dhalgren for the first attempt.
| addaon wrote:
| "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones." Short
| story, bootleg scan available online; I have no qualms
| telling people to start with that since they'll want to buy
| the rest of the collection soon enough. It's my favorite of
| his stories in a lot of ways. The characters are fun, every
| word (or at least every sentence) is essential to building
| the world, it has a very strong sense of place that's so
| common in his work.
| daverol wrote:
| BABEL-17
| bluepod4 wrote:
| Can you elaborate on this?
| skmurphy wrote:
| If you are looking for good books by Delany
|
| Jewel Hinged Jaw is literary criticism and advice for writers
| https://www.amazon.com/Jewel-Hinged-Jaw-Language-Science-Fic...
|
| His three most pure "science fiction" novels are Babel-17,
| Trouble on Triton (originally published as Triton), and Nova.
| They are all very imaginative but grounded in scientific
| extrapolation.
|
| His Neveryona series of stories and books are set in a medieval
| frame but are really about modern life. I found them interesting
| and thought-provoking.
|
| He wrote a short autobiographical piece about some time he spent
| in a commune called "Heavenly Breakfast" that I found insightful.
|
| He has a number of very good shorts science fiction stories from
| the 60's and 70's that are very good as well. Two in particular I
| enjoyed:
|
| "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones"
|
| "We, in Some Strange Power's Employ, Move on a Rigorous Line"
|
| are collected in "Driftglass"
| cgh wrote:
| I notice you skipped "Dhalgren". Probably for the best.
| lifefeed wrote:
| I never recommend Dhalgren to anyone.
|
| When you are ready for Dhalgren, it will find you.
| ineedasername wrote:
| I tried one, maybe 20 years ago. I barely remembered it
| existed. I know I gave it a decent go, at least 100 pages,
| but it didn't stick. But I've had 20 more years to consume
| formulaic books, and then more that did quite a bit to
| subvert those overlapping genres in interest ways. Maybe
| I'll appreciate what might have been subtleties more
| nuanced than I had an eye for the first time around, and
| come at it with a more experienced set of eyes a second
| time. I'll go dig up something online to go through the
| beginning, and see if Dhalgren's found me now and buy a
| copy.
| skmurphy wrote:
| I have read many of his books, including Dhalgren, which is a
| complex and dense book that does not make for easy reading. I
| recommended the ones that were more "hard science fiction"
| that were full of interesting ideas. The protagonist in
| Triton is not really a hero but Delany's world building is
| very thought provoking.
| squidsoup wrote:
| I would say Dhalgren's not particularly difficult to read,
| or complex - the Kid's experience in Bellona is not
| comparable to Bloom's allusive and metaphore laden journey
| through Dublin in Ulysses. Bellona is just fucking weird.
| skmurphy wrote:
| Starting with Section 7 "the Plague Journal" on page 723
| the single narrative splits into multiple streams on the
| same page, there are gaps in all of the streams, and
| finally on pages 831-32 there is this
|
| "My life here more and more resembles a book whose
| opening chapters, whose title even, suggest mysteries to
| be resolved only at closing. But as one reads along, one
| becomes more and more suspicious that the author has lost
| the thread of his argument, or more upsetting, have so
| changed by the book's end that the answers to initial
| questions will have become trivial."
|
| It continues in this multi-stream format until page 869
| and then ends ten pages later on 879 with sentence
| fragment "Waiting here, away from the terrifying
| weaponry, out of the halls of vapor and light, beyond
| holland and into the hills I have come to" At which point
| you remember it began with a sentence fragment "to wound
| the autumnal city." and realize that the book has wrapped
| on itself and will not reach a conclusion.
|
| I am used to academic texts with footnotes and some how-
| to books with sidebars that provide details and examples
| from the primary flow, but this becomes a scrapbook that
| juxtaposes incongruous blocks of text. Sometimes I could
| tease out the connection but not always.
|
| If your argument is that Ulysses or Finnegan's Wake are
| more complex then I agree. But I found Dhalgren much
| harder to follow or understand than the French
| existentialist novels (e.g. "The Flanders Road", "The
| Marquise went out at 5" or "Jealousy") that were stream
| of consciousness but maintained a consistent perspective
| Talanes wrote:
| I haven't read Dhalgren, but "It's not as difficult as
| Ulysses" isn't saying much.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| I love Dhalgren so much. but also in non-fiction, _Times
| Square Red, Times Square Blue_, on public sex and
| sociality, is pretty amazing.
|
| He has a few other memoirs too, that are really insightful
| looks into ways of living I would not ordinarily have a
| view on.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| The Neveryon books and 'Times Square Red, Times Square
| Blue' are my favorite Delany.
|
| My introduction to Delany was randomly stumbling on the
| first Neveryon book in the stacks of a university
| library, being intrigued by the (wholly untrue) intro
| about Linear B translations of ancient stories, and then
| getting completely sucked in by the storytelling. The
| world needs more pan-sexual barbarians, IMO.
|
| The Neveryon story about the invention of writing and its
| complex set of unintended consequences was perhaps my
| favorite in the series. ("The Tale of Old Venn" in Tales
| of Neveryon.)
| xrd wrote:
| My ten year old son loves sci-fi. And, it sounds like many of
| Delany's stories deal with adult-ish subject matter (of a sexual
| nature). I know he has a complicated history as a gay man in
| America, and I'm interested in knowing if there are good stories
| for young adults? My son can handle complicated things, but as
| his dad I want to be cautious as well.
| kbingman wrote:
| I read Dhalgren at 14 and I would definitely not recommend
| that. I'd avoid the Neveryon books as well, while they are
| among my favourites, their themes are very adult.
|
| Babel-17 and Nova are probably both good places for him to
| start. They are both pretty interesting stories.
| paraboli wrote:
| Nova
| kabdib wrote:
| The short stories in _Driftglass_ were pretty good, and
| relatively tame. Read them at 13 or 14.
|
| The sex in _Tales of Neveryon_ is basically off-screen, with
| heavy allusions.
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| Have you considered sending him some of Nnedi Okorafors Binti
| series? You might also think Iron Widow by xiran jay zhao
| (giant mechs vs aliens), anything by marie lu, aurora rising by
| amie kaufman & jay kristoff, invictus by ryan graudin
| quesera wrote:
| I've only read Dhalgren, which I have extremely mixed feelings
| on.
|
| The hazy liminal atmosphere and writing was impressive and
| moving. The people were generally shallow or neutral, but the
| main character was very difficult to appreciate and was
| borderline repulsive (not the sex, but the person and sometimes
| the vivid descriptions of his putrescence).
|
| I was interrupted about 50 pages from the end (of like 800
| total), and never bothered to finish it.
|
| ...
|
| Any recommendations on another book from Delany?
| zabzonk wrote:
| "Triton" (but this has another somewhat repulsive protagonist)
| and "Stars in my pocket like grains of sand"
| ilamont wrote:
| Great article. I had seen pictures of his writing den, but this
| really opens up his day to day routine in a way that I hadn't
| envisioned.
|
| This is depressing:
|
| _The only complication involved a pension that Delany thought
| he'd earned from the university; it didn't exist._
|
| Makes me wonder about his other business relationships and if
| there was a mismatch between what he expected vs. what was
| delivered. The fine print of employment and publishing contracts
| is often very restrictive and/or requires additional steps to
| unlock certain rights or benefits.
|
| For anyone who hasn't read Delany, _Nova_ is a solid starting
| point. Forget the "space opera" label, it's just a great story
| with interesting characters and vision of humanity's far future.
| swayvil wrote:
| I recommend HOGG.
|
| There's nothing else like it.
| karaterobot wrote:
| The existence of this piece had me worried that he'd passed away.
| It's always nice when people get to be appreciated before they
| die.
| bluepod4 wrote:
| I remember the first time someone said a "joke" to me that was
| similar to Isaac Asimov's.
|
| I remember the second, third, fourth, and fifth times too.
|
| On to the sixth!
| ubermonkey wrote:
| His 1988 memoir THE MOTION OF LIGHT IN WATER is pretty great;
| it's mostly about his experiences being young, gay, and black in
| the late 1950s/early 1960s.
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(page generated 2023-07-06 23:01 UTC)