Aye, and Gomorrah: And Other Stories

An avid science fiction buff, I fell in love with Delany's short stories many years ago. He is an incredibly cerebral and visceral writer both, with challenging prose of haunting beauty. He upsets notions of social norms in a way that was revelatory to me as a teenager, and continues to underpin my beliefs of what is natural and possible in human beings and their relations. He is also one of the few writers of science fiction (though his work extends well beyond the genre) that counts as true literature in the high-falutin' sense of the word. I can't recommend this book - and any of his other works - highly enough.

Samuel Delany is often cited by other SF authors as an inspriation or a great practitioner of the craft of writing. His novels, such as Dhalgren and Triton, are well-regarded. They are also frequently unapproachable: big, gnarly books with big, gnarly subjects. They certainly are not much like the rafts of semi-literate junk that passes for much of SF these days. But you won't sit down and toss of a Delany novel... This book, though, is hugely approachable. As a short story collection, it covers a wide span of the author's career and gives us very classic, deep, meaningful, soulful stories. From "Star Pit" as the start to the author's afterword we get a range of great and near-great stories. If you love Delany's longer work, here is a chance to collect a beautiful volume of short fiction. If you want to get into Delany, here's your best opportunity. Highly recommended.

Delany has always been one of SF most thoughtful writers and one of the least likely to simply settle for the genre's conventions. He's an author who deserves to be considered with some of the finest literary minds working today, with the only difference being that he chooses to work within the confines of SF or fantasy, somehow always tweaking it until it becomes distinctly his, while remaining recognizable as SF. This is a collection of his short stories and contains most of the major ones as far as I know, certainly both Nebula award winning stories and other stuff, most of it published in the sixties and seventies. The titles alone should tell you that this isn't your typical series of SF stories, containing such evocative titles as "Driftglass" or "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones" or my personal favorite, "We, in Some Strange Power's Employ, Move in a Rigorous Line". The stories run the gamut from well told SF tales to more experimental stuff. The best stories are the more famous ones, both "Driftglass" (about a future society where people are given gills to adapt to living under the sea) and "Time Considered . . ." (a future gangster type story) are stunningly evocative of their fictional future times, set apart by the depth of Delany's ideas and his stunning prose, his descriptions more often than not achieve a sort of magical realism and sometimes come closer to the more lyrical nature of poetry than anything else. Generally most of the stories hit their targets in a bulleyes, you have the occassional tale (like the one with "Blob" in the title) that are just a bit too much on the experimental side to have much of an impact. And yet there are others such as "Dog in a Fisherman's Net" that are basically timeless and work as pure story and take you to a place that may or may not have ever existed. Even the stories such as "The Star Pit" that seem to be just pure SF at first eventually reveal themselves to be about something more. Delany is not just interested in talking about spaceships and time travel and he merely uses SF or fantasy as a background to explore aspects of human nature that the tales lend themselves to. Just about anything the man has ever written is worth reading and I think his novels are the best place to discover and fully explore his talents, this collection is a great way to get acquainted with some of his best work (and a few of these stories do rank up with his best) and enjoy SF/fantasy with a more thoughtful bent than usual, something more than just swords and spaceships and aliens and evil gods. The writers of today aren't restricted to the cliches of their genres, even if they choose to stay within those confines. Delany shows us what it's like to have no restrictions at all.

"Aye, and Gomorrah and Other Stories," by Samuel R. Delany, brings together 15 tales along with an afterword by the author. The copyright page gives the publication histories of the pieces in this book. The stories in this volume vary greatly in length: 2 fall into the 60-70 page range (and could, I suppose, be considered novellas), 2 fall into the less than 10 page range, and the rest are of various lengths in between; this nicely adds to the overall variety of the collection.Most of the pieces in this book fall firmly in the science fiction genre, although I consider a couple to be fantasy. Delany's locales range from cities on Earth (Venice, New York) to worlds beyond our solar system.Delany's stories are both triumphs of science fiction inventiveness and exquisite works of literary art--as well as being compassionate yet unflinching explorations of the human condition. His vision is richly ironic, and often tragic. His prose can be hauntingly beautiful to read--he is a particular master of visual description.Delany's explorations of emergent subcultures and institutions in many of these tales give the book an intriguing sociological aspect. His topics include crime, punishment, sexuality, loss, suffering, culture clash, space travel, and the fabric of consciousness and reality. The remarkable title story is a look at the emergence of a new sexual orientation and its related subculture in the context of expanding technology. "Driftglass" looks at a class of physiologically altered humans. "Omegahelm" is a shocking, fascinating story about motherhood and art. These are just a few examples of Delany's fertile mind. I consider Delany to be a unique and essential voice in the science fiction canon; this collection of his short fiction is a volume to be savored and shared.