Finished My Second Delany

 

 

Finished my second Samuel R. Delany book in as many days: The Einstein Intersection. Something of a Western/science fiction adventure story. Delany includes quotes from the Ancient Greeks, Marquis De Sade, assumes the reader understands haploids and diploids, and discusses Kurt Godel and his completeness theorem. These are not the typical elements found in an adventure story, in my experience. Delany is a difficult writer to put into a box as this article by Peter Berbegal points out:

Delany’s novels and stories have taken place in outer space and the future and other alien worlds. His plots are speculative: the race to harvest an energy source from the sun, the struggles of a libertarian society on one of Neptune’s moons, the plight of slaves in a pre-industrial world of magic and barbarism. But he does not believe that science fiction is the right genre for his concerns any more or less than another genre would be. “Nothing about the sonnet is perfect for the love poem, either,” he said. “Genre simply provides a way for the reader to look for things that have been done. A form is a useful thing to use. It has history and resonance. It informs you as to the way things have been done in the past.” In the preface to “A, B, C,” Delany writes that, “though the genre can suggest what you might need, it can never do the work for you.”

The book was published in 1966, I think, just before postmodernism swept through fiction so the narrative structure is fairly traditional which is not the case for some of the author's later work.