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Early on, it occurred to me that the relationship of the Nevèrÿon series to semiotics/semiology might be, for better or worse, much like that of Van Vogt's Null-A series to General Semantics. (Delany, "Appendix B: Closures and Openings")

In Appendix B of Flight from Nevèrÿon, Delany calls the Nevèrÿon tales "a Child's Garden of Semiotics." This is ( Read more... )

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The past week has been quite a dose of culture. Last Tuesday Samuel R. Delany gave a reading at the downtown Seattle Public Library as part of this summer's Clarion West festivities. Delany is a terrific reader, and he was in fine form for this. He read from his latest novel, Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders, and he also read from Phallos ( Read more... )

The Fantasy of Origins and Identities

Tales of Nevèrÿon was first released in September 1979, which probably makes it the first book of Delany's that I read when it was new. (I became a Delany fan sometime after my first encounter with Seattle science fiction fandom in March 1979. Seattle was rife with Delanyites in those legendary days.) Over the ( Read more... )

'And so, as she came into Kolhari port, numbed by an experience of rejection and death, she kept telling herself that whomever she might now become, it was this experience that would be responsible for anything bad or good that ever befell her again; yet while she was trying to rehearse all the awfulness of the past months, sort it all out in ( Read more... )

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Yesterday ron_drummond and I were talking about Joanna Russ, and he told me the story of how he first heard of her and of the series of important connections that followed from that. It's a great story, and I hope he writes it up. It involves Chip "Samuel R." Delany, and it got me thinking about the likelihood that Chip was also the one who, less directly, ( Read more... )