Atlantis: Three Tales

Delany once again has delivered something new and different with these three tales of different Sams. The first story, Atlantis: Model 1924 deals with a teenage Sam coming to New York for the first time in 1924 and details his early experiences and impressions of this modern stand-in for Atlantis (note that Delany was born in 1942). Rife with metaphor and allegory, and told using some post-modern literary techniques including multiple story lines on the same page and marginalized notes, the defining point of this story is Sam's first trip across the Brooklyn Bridge, and the poet/writer he meets there (who is possibly an older version of Sam himself?). While not an easy story to read due to its structure, by the end of the story all the various story threads, notes, observations, and characters come together in a defining moment of epiphany. The second story time shifts us to the early fifties, where a middle-school age Sam is introduced to the world of music and art in what was, for that time, a very progressive school. His portrait of what art really is, how its definition has changed, and its importance to himself and to the world is neatly balanced by this Sam's early introduction into the vagaries of sex. Some fine, if brief, character portraits round out this quiet story.The last story deals with a Sam in his early twenties in Greece, and is probably the most factually based of the three stories, given that he has mentioned some of the incidents of this story in several of his other works. It is a very dark and depressing story, and details a homosexual rape and the necessity for one of Sam's lady friends to kill her dog. Some very rough material here that may not be to everyone's taste, but delivered with Delany's typical fine sense of language, pacing, and character.All three tales have much to offer, each in completely different ways, and each presents a different 'side' of Sam. How much is autobiographical, how much is pure fiction is almost impossible to define, but the reader will finish this book with a better understanding of not just Delany but also the entire world and the social interactions that help define what it is to be human.

I read this book on the recommendation of Michael Cunningham (The Hours), who said, "If Samual Delany were writing in the same innovative, intelligent way and his books were not science fiction, he'd be know to every serious reader and not just a relatively small band of us."Need I say, "I agree?"