2) The Bridge of Lost Desire
Samuel Delany's The Bridge of Lost Desire, which I gather has been reprinted as Return to Neveryon lately (maybe with an extra story added?), is the first collection of Neveryon stories I've read. I'm going back for more, as soon as I can.
It provides a parallax view of the career of Gorgik the Liberator, in a land where the mostly black ruling class is fighting an internal moral and political struggle to liberate the mostly white slaves it is growing more and more embarrassed to have. This inversion is key to understanding the story, but it is almost never alluded to. To the storytellers, this is just the way of things.
The three stories in the collection are presented in reverse chronological order and they feature much daring literary technique, kicking off with "The Game of Time and Pain"'s stunning story within a story within a story within a story frame. It's almost dizzying. There is so much care taken to make sure the reader knows not to believe a thing he reads at first, until weighing it against other versions of the same story. Nobody has a reliable point of view.
Delany has always shocked me with his presentations of sexual politics, starting with my first encounter with the androgynous spacemen of "Aye, and Gomorrah." Here, he develops the uncomfortable sexual side of slavery, exploring carefully the lines between consensual BDSM play and the master-slave dynamic of actual slavery. For a nice Jewish boy from Jersey who blushes at Philip Roth, this is a bit out of my comfort zone. But if Delany is a great writer, it might be the mark of his greatness that he challenges me gently, so that it's not until a shocking thing has passed that I realize exactly what he has subjected me to.
It provides a parallax view of the career of Gorgik the Liberator, in a land where the mostly black ruling class is fighting an internal moral and political struggle to liberate the mostly white slaves it is growing more and more embarrassed to have. This inversion is key to understanding the story, but it is almost never alluded to. To the storytellers, this is just the way of things.
The three stories in the collection are presented in reverse chronological order and they feature much daring literary technique, kicking off with "The Game of Time and Pain"'s stunning story within a story within a story within a story frame. It's almost dizzying. There is so much care taken to make sure the reader knows not to believe a thing he reads at first, until weighing it against other versions of the same story. Nobody has a reliable point of view.
Delany has always shocked me with his presentations of sexual politics, starting with my first encounter with the androgynous spacemen of "Aye, and Gomorrah." Here, he develops the uncomfortable sexual side of slavery, exploring carefully the lines between consensual BDSM play and the master-slave dynamic of actual slavery. For a nice Jewish boy from Jersey who blushes at Philip Roth, this is a bit out of my comfort zone. But if Delany is a great writer, it might be the mark of his greatness that he challenges me gently, so that it's not until a shocking thing has passed that I realize exactly what he has subjected me to.