Samuel R. Delany

Samuel R. Delany

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photo credit: Lynda Koolish

By age 26, Samuel R. "Chip" Delaney had won four Nebula Awards and is arguably the best science fiction writer in the world.

After his seventh novel Empire Star (1966), Samuel Delany began publishing short fiction professionally with “The Star Pit.” It appeared in Worlds of Tomorrow and was turned into a popular two-hour radio play, broadcast annually over WBAI-FM for more than a decade. Two tales, “Aye, and Gomorrah” and “Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-precious Stones,” won Nebula Awards as best SF short stories of, respectively, 1967 and 1969. Aye, and Gomorrah contains all the significant short science fiction and fantasy Delany published between 1965 and 1988, excepting only those tales in his Return to Nevèrÿon series. Born in 1942, the native New Yorker, teaches English and Creative Writing at Temple University in Philadelphia. In July of 2002 he was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame.
—Bio, sourced from Random House, Inc.

Afro-Future Females: Black Writers Chart Science Fiction's Newest New-Wave Trajectory
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Hardcover: 304 pages
Publisher: Ohio State University Press; 2 edition (May 8, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0814210783

Afro-Future Females: Black Writers Chart Science Fiction’s Newest New-Wave Trajectory, edited by Marleen S. Barr, is the first combined science fiction critical anthology and short story collection to focus upon black women via written and visual texts. The volume creates a dialogue with existing theories of Afro-Futurism in order to generate fresh ideas about how to apply race to science fiction studies in terms of gender. The contributors, including Hortense Spillers, Samuel R. Delany, Octavia E. Butler, and Steven Barnes, formulate a woman-centered Afro-Futurism by repositioning previously excluded fiction to redefine science fiction as a broader fantastic endeavor. They articulate a platform for scholars to mount a vigorous argument in favor of redefining science fiction to encompass varieties of fantastic writing and, therefore, to include a range of black women’s writing that would otherwise be excluded. Afro-Future Females builds upon Barr’s previous work in black science fiction and fills a gap in the literature. It is the first critical anthology to address the "blackness" of outer space fiction in terms of feminism, emphasizing that it is necessary to revise the very nature of a genre that has been constructed in such a way as to exclude its new black participants. Black science fiction writers alter genre conventions to change how we read and define science fiction itself. The work’s main point: black science fiction is the most exciting literature of the nascent twenty-first century.

About the Editor: Marleen S. Barr
is a science fiction pioneer who broke new ground in feminist science fiction criticism with her book Alien to Femininity: Speculative Fiction and Feminist Theory. She won the Science Fiction Research Association Pilgrim Award for Lifetime Achievement in science fiction criticism.

About Writing: Seven Essays, Four Letters, and Five Interviews
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ISBN: 0819567167
Format: Paperback, 425pp
Pub. Date: December 2005
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press

Aye, and Gomorrah: And Other Stories
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ISBN: 0375706712
Format: Paperback, 400pp
Pub. Date: April 2003
Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group

A father must come to terms with his son's death in the war. In Venice an architecture student commits a crime of passion. A white southern airport loader tries to do a favor for a black northern child. The ordinary stuff of ordinary fiction--but with a difference! These tales take place twenty-five, fifty, a hundred-fifty years from now, when men and women have been given gills to labor under the sea. Huge repair stations patrol the cables carrying power to the ends of the earth. Telepathic and precocious children so passionately yearn to visit distant galaxies that they'll kill to go. Brilliantly crafted, beautifully written, these are Samuel Delany's award-winning stories, like no others before or since.

Dhalgren
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ISBN: 0375706682
Format: Paperback, 816pp
Pub. Date: May 2001
Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group

When this richly written novel first appeared in 1974, Samuel R. Delany began to sweep up what would eventually exceed a million readers with his tale of Bellona, a city at the center of the United States, shaken by a catastrophe that has unhinged the very structure of reality. Skies darkened by smoke from burning buildings, population reduced to youth gangs, drifters, prophets, and perverts, Bellona is a city where a young man known only as the Kid - poet, lover, and finally a leader of the volatile "scorpions" - tries to create a life for himself and those around him in a landscape where two moons can suddenly shine through the night clouds or a sun thousands of times larger than any ever seen before may rise - and set - in a day. Dhalgren is a novel that interrogates a range of inchoately American oppositions: black and white, male and female, gay and straight, sane and mad.

The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village
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ISBN: 0816645248
Format: Paperback, 440pp
Pub. Date: April 2004
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press

Born in New York City's black ghetto Harlem at the start of World War II, Samuel R. Delany married white poet Marilyn Hacker right out of high school. The interracial couple moved to the city's new bohemian quarter, the Lower East Side, in summer of 1961. Through the decade's opening years, new art, new sexual practices, new music, and new political awareness burgeoned among the crowded streets and cheap railroad apartments. In this edition of his autobiography, Delany calls up this era of exploration and adventure as he details his development as a black gay writer in an open marriage.

Phallos
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ISBN: 0917453417
Format: Paperback, 95pp
Pub. Date: October 2004
Publisher: Bamberger Books

Phallos is the tale of a tale. Neotpolomus pursues mystic knowledge through the Mediterranean world in the time of emperor Hadrian. From Egypt to Syracuse, from Athens to Byzantium and further, filled with wit and erudtion--and deeply homoerotic--this is a Lacanian riddle to delight and intrigue fans of Delany's more recent fiction, The Mad Man, and his Return to Neveryon series.

Babel-17/Empire Star (two novels in one)
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Format: Paperback, 336pp
Pub. Date: January 2002
Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group

Author of the bestselling Dhalgren and winner of four Nebulas and one Hugo, Samuel R. Delany is one of the most acclaimed writers of speculative fiction.

Babel-17, winner of the Nebula Award for best novel of the year, is a fascinating tale of a famous poet bent on deciphering a secret language that is the key to the enemy’s deadly force, a task that requires she travel with a splendidly improbable crew to the site of the next attack. For the first time, Babel-17 is published as the author intended with the short novel Empire Star, the tale of Comet Jo, a simple-minded teen thrust into a complex galaxy when he’s entrusted to carry a vital message to a distant world. Spellbinding and smart, both novels are testimony to Delany’s vast and singular talent.

Times Square Red, Times Square Blue
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ISBN: 0814719201
Format: Paperback, 203pp
Pub. Date: November 2001
Publisher: New York University Press

If one street in America can claim to be the most infamous, it is surely 42nd Street. Between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, 42nd Street was once known for its peep shows, street corner hustlers and movie houses. Over the last two decades the notion of safety-from safe sex and safe neighborhoods, to safe cities and safe relationships-has overcome 42nd Street, giving rise to a Disney store, a children's theater, and large, neon-lit cafes. 42nd Street has, in effect, become a family tourist attraction for visitors from Berlin, Tokyo, Westchester, and New Jersey's suburbs.

Samuel R. Delany sees a disappearance not only of the old Times Square, but of the complex social relationships that developed there: the points of contact between people of different classes and races in a public space. In Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, Delany tackles the question of why public restrooms, peepshows, and tree-filled parks are necessary to a city's physical and psychological landscape. He argues that starting in 1985, New York City criminalized peep shows and sex movie houses to clear the way for the rebuilding of Times Square. Delany's critique reveals how Times Square is being "renovated" behind the scrim of public safety while the stage is occupied by gentrification.

Times Square Red, Times Square Blue paints a portrait of a society dismantling the institutions that promote communication between classes, and disguising its fears of cross-class contact as "family values." Unless we overcome our fears and claim our "community of contact," it is a picture that will be replayed in cities across America.

Nova
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ISBN: 0375706704
Format: Paperback, 256pp
Pub. Date: June 2002
Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group

Given that the suns of Draco stretch almost sixteen light years from end to end, it stands to reason that the cost of transportation is the most important factor of the 32nd century. And since Illyrion is the element most needed for space travel, Lorq von Ray is plenty willing to fly through the core of a recently imploded sun in order to obtain seven tons of it. The potential for profit is so great that Lorq has little difficulty cobbling together an alluring crew that includes a gypsy musician and a moon-obsessed scholar interested in the ancient art of writing a novel. What the crew doesn't know, though, is that Lorq's quest is actually fueled by a private revenge so consuming that he'll stop at nothing to achieve it. In the grandest manner of speculative fiction, Nova is a wise and witty classic that casts a fascinating new light on some of humanity's oldest truths and enduring myths.

The Einstein Intersection
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ISBN: 0819563366
Format: Paperback, 135pp
Pub. Date: June 1998
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press

The surface story tells of the problems a member of an alien race, Lo Lobey, has assimilating the mythology of earth, where his kind have settled among the leftover artifacts of humanity. The deeper tale concerns, however, the way those who are 'different' must deal with the dominant cultural ideology. The tale follows Lobey's mythic quest for his lost love, Friza. In luminous and hallucinated language, it explores what new myths might emerge from the detritus of the human world as those who are 'different' try to seize history and the day.

Stars In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand
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ISBN: 0819567140
Format: Paperback, 356pp
Pub. Date: November 2004
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Edition Description: 20th Anniversary Edition

"Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand is a science fiction masterpiece about the inexplicability of sexual attractiveness, and a story that foresaw the World Wide Web. Originally published in 1984, its central issues - technology, globalization, gender, sexuality, and multiculturalism - have only become more pressing with the passage of time." The novel's topic is information itself. What are the repercussions of the discovery, once it has been made public, that two individuals have been found to be each other's perfect erotic object out to "point nine-nine-nine and several nines percent more"? What will it do to the individuals involved, to the city they inhabit, to their geosector, and to their entire world society, especially when one is an illiterate worker, the sole survivor of a world destroyed by "cultural fatigue," and the other is - you!

Neveryona, or: The Tale of Signs and Cities : Some Informal Remarks Towards the Modular Calculus, Part Four
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ISBN: 0819562718
Format: Paperback, 402pp
Pub. Date: October 1993
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press

This full-length novel tells how Pryn, who can write in the largely pre-literate land, flees her mountain village to aid Gorgik's slave revolt.

The Fall of the Towers
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ISBN: 140003132X
Format: Paperback, 448pp
Pub. Date: February 2004
Publisher: Vintage

Come and enter Samuel Delany's tomorow, in this trilogy of high adventure, with acrobats and urchins, criminals and courtiers, fishermen and factory-workers, madmen and mind-readers, dwarves and ducheses, giants and geniuses, merchants and mathematicians, soldiers and scholars, pirates and poets, and a gallery of aliens who fly, crawl, burrow, or swim.