Samuel R. Delany, Dhalgren (1974)

'Where is this city? Struck out of time! Where is it builded? On the brink of truth and lies' (p. 469)

Delany's Dhalgren is perhaps the literary nadir of the 1970s fashion for 'finding oneself' in a very public and self-indulgent manner. Right down to the protagonist's addiction to writing terrible, self-obsessed poetry, the myopic, preening pomposity of the work seems childish and such insights as it has to offer appear glaringly obvious to the contemporary reader 40 years after the fact. However, from a more charitable perspective the novel's preoccupations are also entirely understandable when considered within the context of its own historical moment.

Flawed though it may be, Dhalgren is also an hypnotic, transcendent meditation on the mysterious and elusive nature of what Martin Heidegger called dasein or 'Being-in-the-World'.

The urban environment within which the novel is set smoulders like a 1970s American inner city after a riot, and we discover that 'you've got to walk around in it, because there isn't anything else' (p. 225).

Upon entering the ruined, burning city of Bellona, the initially anonymous protagonist, who comes to be called Kidd before before discovering (possibly) his identity later in the work, is both anti-heroic and yet also an Everyman figure. Both 'good and bad at once' (p. 661), Kidd is paradox personified, and is described as having 'lost bits and pieces of [himself]' (p. 769). As the narrative in this experimental work shifts from the third to the first person, and even bifurcates to offer twin pathways through its final third, the reader is left to ponder the reason for his ruined hands (p. 440) and what his hallucinations signify (p. 385).

Bellona is both identical with and symbolic of the lives of the characters played out inside it. Within its confines we encounter a panoply of characters the scope and scale of which is Dickensian in aspiration, with headonists, aesthetes, thugs, scholars, prophets and those who are 'nice in a useless sort of way' (p. 260) wandering, wondering, loving and brawling through its pages. Much like its protagonist, the reader comes to understand that within this work 'if people are busy living out myths you don't like, leave them to it' (p. 24).

Delany quickly establishes the unlikely but nevertheless existing pre-conditions for the possibility of his characters to survive within this disintegrating space, with subsistence in the form of accommodation, food, and company appearing to be freely available although even the characters accept this to be an impossibility (p. 377). With the acquisition of money as a means of survival having been rendered unnecessary, the author affords his characters the liberty to focus on the rather more challenging question of what their lives mean: 'how else are we to retain the inflationary coinage and cheap paper money of sanity and solipsism? (p. 481).

Delany goes to some lengths to disorientate the reader as if to remind them that there are no truths to be found within the work, just as the lived experiences of its characters (and also its readers) are incapable of providing definitive answers to any of the questions that they may ask. Like the questing restlessness of the human spirit, Bellona is a journey rather than a destination. Wreathed in smoke and flame, its shattered urban geography morphs constantly, with distances altering, street signs changing, and time dilating (p. 327; pp. 363, 367, 414). Characters muse as to what has happened in the city (p. 371) which seems to have assumed the status of a place of pilgrimage. However, the majority of Bellona's population gives the impression of being transient, just as the protagonist himself is at the beginning of the work, and as those individuals are whom he meets when leaving the city at its conclusion in search of that which 'would be better than here' (p. 801).

Dhalgren is full of mysterious artefacts: knife-like weapons that encase the hand known as Orchids (p. 557), red eye caps (p. 555), lamps that project colourful holograms of animals and beasts of myth and legend around the person of their wearer, and the strange 'optical chains' (p. 553) worn around the body, the adorning of oneself with which seems to manifest in some way a willing enslavement to the urban environment.

One of the things that irritated me about Delany's Nova (1968) was the author's apparent inability to restrain himself from name-dropping philosophers and their tropes, seemingly for no reason other than to indicate to the reader that he had heard of the thinkers in question. Sadly, this is not a habit that the he appears to have been able to rid himself of in the intervening years, and Dhalgren too is blighted by Delany's embarrasing info-dumps (pp. 470, 531, 625 et al).

Despite its shortcomings, Dhalgren remains a rich and extraordinary addition to the SF Masterworks series. Its graphic content, looping, rambling structure and elusive nature may not be to every reader's taste, but for those who are willing to lose themselves within its bewildering topography, there is much pleasure to be found.

'Apocalypse has come and gone. We're just grubbing in the ashes' (p. 745)

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Samuel R. Delany, Nova (1968) SFMW 37

In the thirty-first century, intergalactic travel is facilitated by means of the use of the rare element Illyrion.

The spur to action for Lorq Von Ray, the protagonist of Samuel R. Delany's 1968 novel Nova, is neither epic nor heroic, but merely a tedious exercise in economics. A sense of disappointment must inevitably pervade the novel once the reader learns that Lorq's intention to sail through a nova and collect several tonnes of Illyrion in one maneouvre is not going to prevent some catastrophic galactic event or overthrow an ancient, nameless evil, but merely secure the future of his family's industrial empire. His father adumbrates the economic determinates that drive Nova's scant plot forward in one of the numerous passages of prolix, coma-inducing verbiage that litter the novel: "I've figured that at the present rate of expansion, in fifteen years the Outer Colonies will be able to lower the cost of Illyrion by almost a quarter. During that time, [rival company] Red-shift is going to try to kill us[...] The only way we can survive is to kill them first: and the only way we can do that is to figure out a way to get Illyrion down to half price before it goes down to three quarters" (p. 92). Why anyone should care is another question altogether.

Delany attempts to imbue the narrative with some of the colourful hues of space opera by portraying Lorq's antagonist Prince, the aristocratic leader of the Red-shift empire, as a semi-cyborg psychotic. However, the effort he expends in attempting to provide a motivational back-story by portraying the youthful encounters between Lorq, Prince and his sister Ruby backfire badly as the reader can think of Prince as nothing more than a spoilt child on encountering him again later in the work.

There are some enjoyable elements tucked away within Nova; despite the woefully heavy-handed use of the hoary metaphor of 'the musician who speaks through his instrument' ("a gypsy with a syrynx instead of a larynx", p. 136), Delany's descriptions of Mouse's virtuosity on the 'sensory syrynx', which projects sounds, holographic images and scents as well as music, are probably the most entertaining passages in the text.

Additionally, some of the ideas that Delany was thinking through in the late Sixties have a contemporary resonance beyond that which he may have expected: "At the beginning of that amazing century [namely, the twentieth], mankind was many societies living on one world; at its end, it was basically what we are now: an informatively unified society that has lived on several worlds" (p. 148). Obvious corrections regarding global economic inequality aside, the former element of this proposition stands without the need for annotation; replace physical worlds with virtual worlds, and the latter also has more than a ring of truth about it. Consider also the following passage, with its interesting contemporary use of the metaphor of the 'net': Katin reflects on how "each individual is a junction in [the] net, and the strands between are the cultural, the economic, the psychological threads that hold individual to individual. Any historical event is like a ripple in the net[...] it passes over and through the web, stretching or shrinking those cultural bonds that involve each man [sic] with each man" (p. 163).

Delany's imagining of a world where trades and skills are facilitated by means of sockets that plug into the operator's central nervous system (a concept invented in the novel by 'Ashton Smith' (pp. 203-5), perhaps echoing Clark Ashton Smith?) has become something of a SF mainstream trope since Delany's exposition of the same, although other writers such as Cordwainer Smith examined the idea first.

Delany's attitudinal dispositions and habitual ticks more than conspire to destroy any pleasure that the reader may have been able to take in the novel had he not resorted to such bouts of wilful self-indulgence. Delany is the very worst offender for 'info-dumping' that I have ever encountered in genre fiction, and Nova is littered with his heavy-handed erudition, which is not what I would have expected from an author who has had a parallel career as an educator. The shrill tone of these sections bespeaks a distasteful condescension which a twenty-first century readership, expecting its information to be mediated through communities of purpose rather than be disseminated through the dull drone of éminence grise, will not receive well in the future.

Delany's development of 'alien' language patterns grazes the eye within pages of the commencement of the novel, taking delight as he does in constructing a hall of mirrors for unsuspecting grammatical elements to trudge through and endure their unwelcome distortion. As if narrated by Yoda much of this novel is. Delany's insistence on the truth-value of tarot cards is another Sixties excresence that dates the novel badly: 'If somebody had told me I'd be working in the same crew, today in the thirty-first century, with somebody who could honestly be skeptical about the Tarot, I don't think I would have believed it' (p. 118).

Many more objectionable and pretentious elements coalesce in the person of the crew member Katin who is collecting hundreds of thousands of notes on a voice recorder in anticipation of his embarking on the writing of his magnum opus novel, a mode of discourse which has become redundant by the Novas imagined contemporary present. It is hard to say whether Delany mocks or reifies Katin's delight in knowledge for knowledge's sake, but the reader has lost the will to consider such issues having had their natural inclination to question Delany's intentions beaten out of them by lecture after purposeless, directionless, joyless lecture: '"History? Thirty-five hundred years ago Herodotus and Thucydides invented it"' (p. 124). I may never be able to pick up the Landmark editions of either of these authors again without thinking of Nova, which is another reason why I am glad to return it to the shelf posthaste. Mouse's dismissal of Katin's agonies of indecision regarding an appropriate subject for his work are, however, amusing: "I was born[...] I must die. I am suffering. Help me. There, I just wrote your book for you" (p. 164).

The final encounter between Von Ray and Prince is predictably anti-climactic, and the premise that a ship could fly through a nova so under-considered that even Delany thinks it only appropriate to draw a veil over the event that the entire novel has been building up to, and not describe it. An irritating entry to the SF Masterworks series that I cannot see myself returning to at any point in the near future, or come to that the far future.

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