SAMUEL R. DELANY

'Samuel Ray Delany, Jr.' (born April 1, 1942, New York City) is an award-winning American science fiction author. He has written works that have garnered substantial critical acclaim, including the novels ''The Einstein Intersection'', ''Nova'', ''Hogg'', ''Dhalgren'', and the Return to Nevèrÿon series. Since January 2001 he has been a professor of English and Creative Writing at Temple University in Philadelphia. He is widely known in the academic world as a literary critic.

Contents

Biography

Themes

Selected bibliography

Fiction

Novels

Return to Nevèrÿon series

Short story collections

Anthologies

Nonfiction

Critical works

Memoirs and letters

Trivia

See also

Notes

References

External links

Biography

Samuel Delany, also known as "Chip",^[1] was born to a prominent black family in 1942 and raised in Harlem. His mother, Margaret Delany, was a library clerk in the New York Public Library system. His father ran a successful undertaking establishment, Levy and Delany Funeral Home, on 7th Avenue in Harlem, between 1938 and his death in 1960. Delany's aunts were Sadie and Bessie Delany; Delany retells some of their adventures in his book ''.
Delany attended the Dalton School and the Bronx High School of Science. Delany and poet Marilyn Hacker met in high school, and were married in 1961. Their marriage lasted nineteen years. They had a daughter, Iva Hacker-Delany (b. 1974), who spent a decade working in theater in New York City and is currently in medical school.^{[2] [3]}
Delany was a published science fiction author by the age of 20. He published nine well-regarded science fiction novels between 1962 and 1968, as well as several prize-winning short stories (collected in ''Driftglass'' [1971] and more recently in ''Aye, and Gomorrah, and other stories'' [2002]). His tenth and most popular novel, ''Dhalgren'', was published in 1975. His main literary project through the late 1970s and 1980s was the Return to Nevèrÿon series, the overall title of the four volumes and also the title of the fourth and final book.
Delany has published several autobiographical/semi-autobiographical accounts of his life as a black and gay writer, including his Hugo award winning autobiography, ''The Motion of Light in Water''.
Since 1988, Delany has been a professor at several universities. He spent 11 years as a professor of comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, a year and a half as an English professor at the University at Buffalo, then moved to the English Department of Temple University in 2001, where he has been teaching since. He has had several visiting guest professorships before and during these same years. He has also published several books of criticism, interviews, and essays, and a best-selling book (''Times Square Red, Times Square Blue'', 1999) about the effort to redevelop Times Square and what it means for working class gay men in New York City.

Themes

Recurring themes in Delany's work include mythology, memory, language, and perception. Class, position in society, and the ability to move from one social stratum to another are motifs that are touched on in his earlier work and became more significant in his later fiction and non-fiction, both. Writing itself (both prose and poetry) is also a repeated theme: several of his characters—Geo in ''The Jewels of Aptor'', Vol Nonik in ''The Fall of the Towers'', Rydra Wong in ''Babel-17'', Ni Ty Lee in ''Empire Star'', Katin Crawford in ''Nova'', the Kid in ''Dhalgren'', and Osudh in ''Phallos''—are writers or poets. Delany also makes use of repeated imagery: several characters (Hogg, the Kid, and the sensory syrynx player, the Mouse, in ''Nova'') are known for wearing only one shoe; and nail biting along with rough, calloused (and sometimes veiny) hands are characteristics given to individuals in a number of his fictions. Names are sometimes reused: "Bellona" is the name of a city in both ''Dhalgren'' and ''Trouble on Triton'', and "Denny" is a character in both ''Dhalgren'' and ''Hogg'' (which were written almost concurrently despite being published two decades apart).
Following the 1968 publication of ''Nova'', there is not only a large gap in Delany's published work (after releasing eight novels and a novella between 1962 and 1968, Delany's published output virtually stops until 1973), there is also a notable addition to the themes found in the stories published after that time. It is at this point that Delany begins dealing with sexual themes to an extent rarely equalled in serious writing. ''Dhalgren'' and ''Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand'' include several sexually explicit passages, and several of his books such as ''Equinox ''(originally published as ''The Tides of Lust'', a title that Delany does not endorse), ''The Mad Man'', ''Hogg'' and ''Phallos'' can be considered pornography, a term Delany himself endorses. Novels such as ''Trouble on Triton'' and the thousand-plus pages making up his four-volume ''Return to Nevèrÿon'' series explore in detail how sexuality and sexual attitudes relate to the socioeconomic underpinnings of a primitive--or, in ''Trouble on Triton's case, futuristic--society. Even in works with no science fiction or fantasy content to speak of, such as '', ''The Mad Man'', and ''Hogg'', Delany pursues these questions by creating vivid pictures of New York City, now in the Jazz-Age, now in the first decade of the AIDS epidemic, private schools in the 1950s, Greece and Europe in the 1960s, and--in ''Hogg''--generalized small-town America. ''Phallos'' details the quest for happiness and security by a gay man from the island of Syracuse in the second-century reign of the Emperor Hadrian. ''Dark Reflections'' is a contemporary novel, dealing with themes of repression, old age, and the writer's unrewarded life.
Delany has also published several books of literary criticism, with an emphasis on issues in science fiction and other paraliterary genres, comparative literature, and queer studies.

Selected bibliography

Fiction

Novels

★ ''The Jewels of Aptor'' (1962)

★ ''Captives of the Flame'' (1963) - also published as ''Out of the Dead City''

★ ''The Towers of Toron'' (1964)

★ ''City of a Thousand Suns'' (1965)

★ ''The Ballad of Beta-2'' (1965)

★ ''Empire Star'' (novella) (1966)

★ ''Babel-17'' (1966, Nebula Award)

★ ''The Einstein Intersection'' (1967, Nebula Award)

★ ''Nova'' (1968), ISBN 0-553-10031-9

★ ''The Tides of Lust'' (1973), - later reprinted under Delany's preferred title of ''Equinox'' (1994), ISBN 1-56333-157-8

★ ''Dhalgren'' (1975), ISBN 0-553-14861-3

★ ''Triton'' (1976), ISBN 0-553-12680-6, also published as ''Trouble on Triton''

★ ''Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand'' (1984), ISBN 0-553-05053-2

★ ''They Fly at Çiron'' (1993)

★ ''The Mad Man'' (1994), ISBN 1-56333-193-4

★ ''Hogg'' (1995), ISBN 0-932511-91-0

★ ''Phallos (novella)'' (2004), ISBN 0-917453-41-7

★ ''Dark Reflections'', (2007), ISBN 0-786719-47-8

Return to Nevèrÿon series

★ Return to Nevèrÿon series main article

★ ''Tales of Nevèrÿon'' (short stories) (1979), ISBN 0-553-12333-5

★ ''Neveryóna'' (novel) (1983), ISBN 0-553-01434-X

★ ''Flight From Nevèrÿon'' (novellas) (1985), ISBN 0-553-24856-1

★ ''The Bridge of Lost Desire'' (novellas) (1987), ISBN 0-87795-931-5, revised as ''Return to Nevèrÿon'' (1994), ISBN 0-8195-6278-5

Short story collections

★ ''Driftglass'' (1971)

★ ''Distant Stars'' (1981, illustrated), ISBN 0-553-01336-X

★ '' (1995), ISBN 0-8195-5283-6

★ ''Aye, and Gomorrah, and other stories'' (2003), ISBN 0-375-70671-2
(''Driftglass'' and ''Distant Stars'' include the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones." ''Aye, and Gomorrah, and other stories'' is a compilation of all of Delany's short fiction, excepting the Nevèrÿon tales and the tales from ''Atlantis''. All stories in Driftglass and Distant Stars (and more) are included in Aye, and Gomorrah.)

Anthologies

★ (edited with Marilyn Hacker) ''Quark 1'' (1970, science fiction)

★ (edited with Marilyn Hacker) ''Quark 2'' (1971, science fiction)

★ (edited with Marilyn Hacker) ''Quark 3'' (1971, science fiction)

★ (edited with Marilyn Hacker) ''Quark 4'' (1971, science fiction)

Nonfiction

Critical works

★ ''The Jewel-hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction'' (Dragon Press, 1977)

★ ''The American Shore: Meditations on a Tale of Science Fiction'' (Dragon Press, 1978)

★ ''Starboard Wine: More Notes on the Language of Science Fiction'' (Dragon Press, 1984)

★ ''Wagner/Artaud: A Play of 19th and 20th Century Critical Fictions'' (Ansatz Press, 1988)

★ ''The Straits of Messina'' (1989), ISBN 0-934933-04-9

★ ''Silent Interviews'' (1995), ISBN 0-8195-6280-7

★ ''Longer Views'' (1996, with an introduction by Kenneth R. James), ISBN 0-8195-6293-9

★ ''Shorter Views'' (1999), ISBN 0-8195-6369-2

★ ''About Writing'' (2005), ISBN 0-8195-6716-7

Memoirs and letters

★ ''Heavenly Breakfast'' (1979, a memoir of a New York City commune during the so-called Summer of Love), ISBN 0-553-12796-9

★ ''The Motion of Light in Water'' (1988, a memoir of his experiences as a young gay science fiction writer; winner of the Hugo Award), ISBN 0-87795-947-1

★ ''Times Square Red, Times Square Blue'' (1999, a discussion of changes in social and sexual interaction in New York's Times Square), ISBN 0-8147-1919-8

★ '' (1999, an autobiographical comic drawn by Mia Wolff with an introduction by Alan Moore), ISBN 1-890451-02-9

★ '' (2000, with an introduction by Kenneth R. James), ISBN 0-9665998-1-0

Trivia

★ Delany's name is one of the most misspelled in science fiction, with over 60 different spellings in reviews. His publisher Doubleday even misspelled his name on the title page of his book ''Driftglass'', as did the organizers of the 16th Balticon where Delany was guest of honor.

★ Delany is dyslexic.

★ The Library of Congress incorrectly recorded his nationality as English.

★ It has been erroneously rumored that Delany was the illegitimate son of Philip K. Dick.^[4]

★ Among Delany's more unusual credits is that he wrote two issues of the comic book ''Wonder Woman'' in 1972, during a controversial period in the publication's history when the lead character abandoned her superpowers and became a secret agent. Delany scripted issues #202 and #203 of the series.

★ A character based on Delany, wearing an Engineering anti-radiation suit, has a cameo in Chris Claremont's and Adam Hughes's ''Star Trek'' graphic novel, ''Debt of Honor'' (1992).

★ Currently Delany is the April "calendar boy" in the 2007 ''Legends of the Village'' calendar put out by Village Care of New York.

See also

★ Sex in science fiction

★ African American literature

★ List of thinkers influenced by deconstruction

Notes

References

★ Robert S. Bravard; Michael W. Peplow, 'Through a Glass Darkly: Bibliographing Samuel R. Delany' in Black American Literature Forum, Vol. 18, No. 2.

External links

★ Delany biography written by Delany under his nom de plume K. Leslie Steiner

★ http://www.pcc.com/~jay/delany/

★ Delany bibliography

★ SF Site review of ''Dhalgren''

★ Yet Another Book Review review of ''Dhalgren''

★ An interpretation of ''Dhalgren''

★ Classic Sci-Fi's review of ''Dhalgren''

★ Samuel Delany dévaste son lecteur, par Tibo Bérard, à propos de ''Hogg'' (topolivres.com)

★

★ About Babel 17 (in French)

★ Errata for all of Delany's novels, approved by the author.