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Longer Views: Extended Essays
By Samuel R. Delany, Ken James. 1996
"Reading is a many-layered process -- like writing," observes Samuel R. Delany, a Nebula and Hugo award-winning author and a…
major commentator on American literature and culture. In this collection of six extended essays, Delany challenges what he calls "the hard-edged boundaries of meaning" by going beyond the customary limits of the genre in which he's writing. By radically reworking the essay form, Delany can explore and express the many layers of his thinking about the nature of art, the workings of language, and the injustices and ironies of social, political, and sexual marginalization. Thus Delany connects, in sometimes unexpected ways, topics as diverse as the origins of modern theater, the context of lesbian and gay scholarship, the theories of cyborgs, how metaphors mean, and the narrative structures in the Star Wars trilogy."Over the course of his career," Kenneth James writes in his extensive introduction, "Delany has again and again thrown into question the world-models that all too many of us unknowingly live by." Indeed, Delany challenges an impressive list of world-models here, including High and Low Art, sanity and madness, mathematical logic and the mechanics of mythmaking, the distribution of wealth in our society, and the limitations of our sexual vocabulary. Also included are two essays that illustrate Delany's unique chrestomathic technique, the grouping of textual fragments whose associative interrelationships a reader must actively trace to read them as a resonant argument. Whether writing about Wagner or Hart Crane, Foucault or Robert Mapplethorpe, Delany combines a fierce and often piercing vision with a powerful honesty that beckons us to share in the perspective of these Longer Views.Atlantis: Three Tales
By Samuel R. Delany. 1995
Wesleyan University Press has made a significant commitment to the publication of the work of Samuel R. Delany, including this…
recent fiction, now available in paperback. The three long stories collected in Atlantis: three tales -- "Atlantis: Model 1924," "Erik, Gwen, and D. H. Lawrence's Aesthetic of Unrectified Feeling," and "Citre et Trans" -- explore problems of memory, history, and transgression.Winner of both the Hugo and Nebula awards, and Guest of Honor at the 1995 World Science Fiction Convention in Glasgow, Delany was won a broad audience among fans of postmodern fiction with his theoretically sophisticated science fiction and fantasy. The stories of Atlantis: three tales are not SF, yet Locus, the trade publication of the science fiction field, notes that the title story "has an odd, unsettling power not usually associated with mainstream fiction."A writer whose audience extends across and beyond science fiction, black, gay, postmodern, and academic constituencies, Delany is finally beginning to achieve the broader recognition he deserves.Einstein Intersection
By Neil Gaiman, Samuel R. Delany. 1967
The Einstein Intersection won the Nebula Award for best science fiction novel of 1967 -- now with a foreword by…
Neil Gaiman. 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.Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia
By Samuel R. Delany, Kathy Acker. 1976
In a story as exciting as any science fiction adventure written, Samuel R. Delany's 1976 SF novel, originally published as…
Triton, takes us on a tour of a utopian society at war with . . . our own Earth! High wit in this future comedy of manners allows Delany to question gender roles and sexual expectations at a level that, 20 years after it was written, still make it a coruscating portrait of "the happily reasonable man," Bron Helstrom -- an immigrant to the embattled world of Triton, whose troubles become more and more complex, till there is nothing left for him to do but become a woman. Against a background of high adventure, this minuet of a novel dances from the farthest limits of the solar system to Earth's own Outer Mongolia. Alternately funny and moving, it is a wide-ranging tale in which character after character turns out not to be what he -- or she -- seems.Elixir
By James O. Sy. 2018
Elixir is a thrilling, highly entertaining science fiction novel. It is the first installment of a six-part sci-fi series. Book…
1 slowly unfolds the events that lead a college sophomore to discover the powers he possesses, powers that are not of this Earth. This first installment is replete with religious themes and teachings. It also narrates the protagonist’s first encounter with an extraterrestrial being, and how he stumbles upon a miracle cure—an elixir. The protagonist’s father and missionary grandparents are used by the author to express his personal religious beliefs and convictions.This first installment of the Elixir series revealed the extreme potency and efficacy of the all-curing magical elixir when used by the mortally wounded extra-terrestrial. But there are very important differences when this alien-manufactured medicine is used by humans. Even the alien scientists working on this miracle drug were amazed and impressed by their findings. They found out about the incredible effects when it was used on some of their human guinea pigs. Much of Book Two of the six-part series will focus on the stupefying results of this wonder drug on humans—and all the good and bad things that might result as a consequence of the relative availability of the elixir. The magical elixir became a much in-demand, much sought-after, ultra-precious and valuable wonder drug. Not wanting to waste a grand opportunity to use these vials of magical elixir to benefit a swath of humanity, Jerry and his young son JT came out with this bold and brilliant move: they would auction off, to the highest bidders, a couple vials of miracle elixir. The brilliance of the plan is in the singularity of its purpose. Its sole purpose is to use the fund generated from the auction to benefit a wide swath of humanity. This is just a prototype, a scaled-down version of a grand vision. Because of the limitations presented by the availability of just a few vials of the miracle drug, a much grander and more magnificent version of the plan would have to wait. Book Two will solve the limited-availability problem of the magical elixir and will unfold the execution of the gloriously magnificent blueprint that the Almighty has planned to serve the poverty-stricken, hopeless, forsaken, and shunned segment of society.