Atlantis

Atlantis

Samuel R. Delany

Science Fiction & Fantasy / Gay & Lesbian

From the Hugo and Nebula–winning author, three literary tales trace the intricate interdependencies of memory, experience, and the self. 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. Lawrences 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 science fiction, yet Locus, the trade publication of the science fiction field, notes that the title story...
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Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders

Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders

Samuel R. Delany

Science Fiction & Fantasy / Gay & Lesbian

"Samuel R. Delany is not only one of the most profound and courageous writers at work today, he is a writer of seemingly limitless range."—Michael Cunningham A vast river of a novel alive with explicit sexuality and the the richness of life itself, Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders concerns a gay, working-class, interracial relationship. In 2007, just before Eric's seventeenth birthday, his father brings him to Diamond Harbor, a failing tourist town on the Georgia coast, to live with his mother. There Eric meets nineteen-year-old Morgan Haskell, who works with his father, Dynamite Haskell, and the two boys soon join their lives—and their bodies—together on the coast as a couple over the next seventy-five years. The author of more than forty books, Samuel R. Delany is a novelist and critic whose novel Dhalgren has sold over a million copies. He is a recipient of the William Whitehead Memorial Award for a Lifetime Contribution to Gay and Lesbian Writing and the Lambda Literary Pioneer Award. He is a professor of English and creative writing at Temple University in Philadelphia.
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Letters from Amherst

Letters from Amherst

Samuel R. Delany

Science Fiction & Fantasy / Gay & Lesbian

Entertaining and informative letters written from 1984 to 1991 by the award-winning author and critic. Five substantial letters written from 1989 to 1991 bring readers into conversation with Hugo and Nebula Award–winning author Samuel Delany. With engaging prose, Delany shares details about his work, his relationships, and the thoughts he had while living in Amherst and teaching as a professor at the UMASS campus just outside of town, in contrast to the more chaotic life of New York City. Along with commentary on his own work and the work of other writers, he ponders the state of America, discusses friends who are facing AIDS and other ailments, and comments on the politics of working in academia. Two of the letters, which tell the story of his meeting his life partner Dennis, became the basis of his 1995 graphic novel, Bread & Wine. Another letter describes the funeral of his uncle Hubert T. Delany, former judge and well-known civil rights activist,...
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The Novels of Samuel R. Delany Volume One

The Novels of Samuel R. Delany Volume One

Samuel R. Delany

Science Fiction & Fantasy / Gay & Lesbian

Three groundbreaking novels from the multiple Hugo and Nebula Award–winning Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Famer and SFWA Grand Master. Babel-17: Rydra Wong is the most popular poet in the five settled galaxies, capturing the mood of mankind after two decades of war. Now, a new weapon has been unleashed against humanity. Random attacks strike without warning, tied together by broadcast strings of sound. In that gibberish, Rydra recognizes a coherent language. To save her people, she must master this strange tongue, but the more she learns, the more she is tempted to join the other side, in this Nebula Award–winning novel. Nova: The year is 3172. Two political families—the Earth-based galactic conglomerate Draco and the Pleiades Federation of the Von Ray Clan—vie for ultimate power. Both want to control the market for Illyrion, the element that makes interstellar travel possible. When a star implodes, tons of the priceless fuel is discovered floating in the wreckage. Now, in a race to claim it, Lorq Von Ray leads a crew of ragtag misfits into the heart of a dangerous nova . . . Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand: Subjected to the Radical Anxiety Termination procedure, Korga is transformed into a dim-witted slave. Now known as Rat, Korga serves many masters—until the Cultural Fugue, a critical mass of shared knowledge, destroys his homeworld. Marq Dyeth is an “industrial diplomat,” who travels between worlds solving problems that come with the spread of “General Information.” Brought together by the organization known as the Web, Rat and Marq find themselves manipulated by an entity determined to control the flow of information.
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Neveryóna: Or, the Tale of Signs and Cities

Neveryóna: Or, the Tale of Signs and Cities

Samuel R. Delany

Science Fiction & Fantasy / Gay & Lesbian

In this novel of Nevèrÿon, a girl takes off on a dragon’s back for an adventure of amazement and wonder One of the few in Nevèrÿon who can read and write, pryn has saddled a wild dragon and taken off from a mountain ledge. Self-described as an adventurer, warrior, and thief, in her journey pryn will meet plotting merchants, sinister aristocrats, half-mad villagers, and a storyteller who claims to have invented writing itself. The land of Nevèrÿon is mired in a civil war over slavery, and pryn will also find herself—for a while—fighting alongside Gorgik the Liberator, from whom she will learn the cunning she needs as she journeys further and further south in search of a sunken city; for at history’s dawn, some dangers even dragons cannot protect you from. The second volume in Samuel R. Delany’s Return to Nevèrÿon cycle, Neveryóna is the longer of its two full-length novels. (The other is The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals.) An intriguing meditation on the power of language, the rise of cities, and the dawn of myth, markets, and money, it is a truly wonder-filled adventure. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Samuel R. Delany including rare images from his early career.
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City of a Thousand Suns

City of a Thousand Suns

Samuel R. Delany

Science Fiction & Fantasy / Gay & Lesbian

Beachhead for a Galactic Assault   The war was over. The great computer which had arranged and directed the complex military operations of that future nation was to be dismantled. But the computer had become expert in the science of self-defense . . . and it resisted! The government buildings were blasted! Rockets rained on the great city, and the Empire of Toromon, the first great hope of humanity after the millenia of radiation wreckage, faced disaster at the hands of a super-scientific monster of its own creation. But, unknown even to Toromon’s desperate leaders, was the fact that behind the berserk computer lurked the un­earthly mind, of a real enemy — a foe from the most distant realm of space, intent on making the Earth the first victim of galactic conquest.
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Atlantis: Three Tales

Atlantis: Three Tales

Samuel R. Delany

Science Fiction & Fantasy / Gay & Lesbian

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.
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The Jewels of Aptor

The Jewels of Aptor

Samuel R. Delany

Science Fiction & Fantasy / Gay & Lesbian

It is a post-atomic future and civilization has regressed to a Middle Age like world. Geo a young student and poet, takes a job on a boat with a strange passenger, a priestess of the goddess Argo. They are heading toward a land of mutants and high radiation, Aptor, to recapture her daughter who has been kidnapped by the forces of the dark god Hama.
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Longer Views

Longer Views

Samuel R. Delany

Science Fiction & Fantasy / Gay & Lesbian

"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.
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Einstein Intersection

Einstein Intersection

Samuel R. Delany

Science Fiction & Fantasy / Gay & Lesbian

The Einstein Intersection won the Nebula Award for best science fiction novel of 1967. 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.
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Trouble on Triton

Trouble on Triton

Samuel R. Delany

Science Fiction & Fantasy / Gay & Lesbian

In this novel by a Nebula Award–winning author, a man looks for love in a society where you can be anyone you want, on a moon at war with Earth. 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, twenty 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...
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