Science Fiction: The Illustrated Encyclopedia Entry for Samuel R. Delany

Born: 1942

Nationality: American

Other Name: K. Leslie Steiner

Key Works: The Einstein Intersection, "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones," Dhalgren, the Nevérÿon series, The American Shore

Delany might be called a tearaway, back in 1962. Something of a child prodigy, he rocketed through a high-powered education, and sold his first novel, The Jewels of Aptor, before he was 20. He enjoyed a singularly complex life, much of it engagingly exposed in Heavenly Breakfast: An Essay on the Winter of Love and The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village 1957-65, memoirs he published long after the events described in them. He was black, bisexual, intensely social, precocious, and extremely glad to be alive.

For five years his career continued this happy course. His relationship with Marilyn Hacker, now an extremely well-known poet, flourished (they married, had a child, and then divorced after several years), and the novels flooded out. Babel-17 is the easiest to admire; but all are overflowingly rich.

The climax of Delany's first period, The Einstein Intersection, was one of the most ambitious novels yet to appear under the label of SF (astonishingly, it was first published by a mass-market house, as a paperback). In a baroque far future, an alien race has taken over the abandoned Earth. The hero's resemblance to the Orpheus of myth is anything but accidental; his quest into a Jungian underworld, where human archetypes roam the labyrinths of the collective unconscious, is to capture a sense of meaning for the new inhabitants of the dying planet. Nova was also a climax, but in this case, instead of concentrating on complex interior quests, it focused on a search across a Space Opera universe for a grail-like object. And, for a while, that seemed to be that; Delany had fallen silent. In reality he was very busily at work on two projects: a language, based on modern literary critical theory, with which to describe and defend SF as a genre of importance; and what was to be his magnum opus to date.

That huge work was Dhalgren, and it is perhaps the most difficult SF novel that has still sold in large numbers. It is the circular story of a typical Delany hero - a lone artist named Kidd - who comes to a mysterious city, has complex adventures there, writes a book which is almost certainly called "Dhalgren," and who leaves the way he came (as in James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, the last sentence of the book is the beginning of the first sentence of the book). Dhalgren became a cult text, and Delany became something of a guru. Ever since, his pronouncements on issues of gender, race, genre, and politics have been given - and have fully deserved - very careful attention.

At the same time, however, his career in fiction faltered somewhat. The knotted intensity of some of his earlier work began to seem clotted and self-consciously insistent in later novels like Triton and Stars in my Pocket like Grains of Sand, although the Nevérÿon series retained much of the old vigor. Into these stories, ostensibly sword-and-sorcery adventures set in an imaginary land, Delany subversively inserts gender, sex, and race issues. There is a lot of sado-masochism in these stories, and in Stars in my Pocket too, but always designed to shock readers out of their preconceptions, never simply to give a quick vicarious thrill.

Delany's most important work in recent decades may well be pedagogical. He has become an influential professor of English Studies, and has published several intensely demanding works of criticism, whose account of SF must be grappled with by any critic of the field. The most remarkable of these may be The American Shore, a full-length book devoted to the analysis of one short story, "Angouleme," by Thomas M. Disch; in reworked form, the tale forms part of Disch's novel 334. The two collections Starboard Wine and The Straits of Messina contain most of Delany's most readable essays. He is not an easy read, but he is a necessary one.

Delany has had several careers and addressed many issues. He has energized every role he has taken on. He is a large presence, and seemingly a grave one; but for decades he has guaranteed that those who listen to him will be chaffed, amused, challenged, and understood.

Last updated: Jan 21 1996 at 15:39

Forrest L Norvell