Samuel R. Delany Books In Order

The Fall of the Towers Books In Publication Order

  1. Captives of the Flame / Out of the Dead City (1963)
  2. The Towers of Toron (1964)
  3. City of a Thousand Suns (1965)

Return to Nevèrÿon Books In Publication Order

  1. Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979)
  2. Neveryóna (1983)
  3. Flight from Nevèrÿon (1985)
  4. The Bridge of Lost Desire / Return to Neveryon (1987)

Standalone Novels In Publication Order

  1. The Ballad of Beta-2 (1965)
  2. Babel-17 (1966)
  3. The Einstein Intersection (1967)
  4. Nova (1968)
  5. The Tides of Lust (1973)
  6. Dhalgren (1975)
  7. Tritón aka Trouble on Triton (1976)
  8. Empire (1978)
  9. Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (1984)
  10. They Fly At Çiron (1993)
  11. Hogg (1994)
  12. The Mad Man (1994)
  13. Dark Reflections (2007)
  14. Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders (2011)
  15. Voyage, Orestes! (2019)

Short Stories/Novellas In Publication Order

  1. The Jewels of Aptor (1962)
  2. Empire Star (1966)
  3. Home Is the Hangman/We, in Some Strange Power’s Employ, Move on a Rigorous Line (1990)
  4. Bread and Wine (1999)
  5. Phallos (2004)

Collections In Publication Order

  1. Aye, and Gomorrah (1967)
  2. Driftglass (1971)
  3. Distant Stars (1981)
  4. The Complete Nebula Award-Winning Fiction (1986)
  5. Driftglass/Starshards (1991)
  6. Atlantis (1995)
  7. A, B, C (2015)
  8. The Novels of Samuel R. Delany Volume One (2017)

Non-Fiction Books In Publication Order

  1. The Jewel-Hinged Jaw (1977)
  2. The American Shore (1978)
  3. Heavenly Breakfast (1979)
  4. Starboard Wine (1984)
  5. The Motion Of Light In Water (1988)
  6. Wagner Artaud (1988)
  7. The Straits of Messina (1989)
  8. Silent Interviews (1994)
  9. Longer Views (1996)
  10. Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999)
  11. 1984 (2000)
  12. Shorter Views (2000)
  13. Black Gay Man (2001)
  14. About Writing (2006)
  15. Conversations with Samuel R. Delany (2009)
  16. The Atheist in the Attic (2018)
  17. Letters from Amherst (2019)

Quark Books In Publication Order

  1. Quark/3 (By:) (1971)

The WisCon Chronicles Books In Publication Order

  1. The WisCon Chronicles, Volume 1 (2007)
  2. The WisCon Chronicles, Vol. 2: Provocative essays on feminism, race, revolution, and the future (2008)
  3. The Wiscon Chronicles, Vol.3: Carnival of Feminist SF (2009)
  4. The WisCon Chronicles, Volume 4 (2010)
  5. The Wiscon Chronicles Volume 5 (2011)
  6. The WisCon Chronicles Vol. 6: Futures of Feminism and Fandom (2012)
  7. The Wiscon Chronicles Vol 7: Shattering Ableist Narratives (2013)
  8. The WisCon Chronicles Vol. 8: Re-Generating WisCon (2014)
  9. The WisCon Chronicles, Vol.9 (2015)
  10. Trials by Whiteness (2017)

Anthologies In Publication Order

  1. Dangerous Visions (1967)
  2. Quark 1 (1970)
  3. Quark/ 4 (1971)
  4. Those Who Can: A Science Fiction Reader (1973)
  5. Wondermakers 2 (1974)
  6. Nebula Awards 13 (1980)
  7. Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk & Postmodern Science Fiction (1991)
  8. Avant-Pop: Fiction for a Daydream Nation (1993)
  9. The Space Opera Renaissance (2006)
  10. The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction (2010)
  11. Telling Tales: The Clarion West 30th Anniversary Anthology (2013)
  12. Mermaids and Other Mysteries of the Deep (2015)
  13. The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction September/October 2017 (2017)

The Fall of the Towers Book Covers

Return to Nevèrÿon Book Covers

Standalone Novels Book Covers

Short Stories/Novellas Book Covers

Collections Book Covers

Non-Fiction Book Covers

Quark Book Covers

The WisCon Chronicles Book Covers

Anthologies Book Covers

Samuel R. Delany Books Overview

Tales of Nevèrÿon

A novel of myth and literacy about a long ago land on the brink of civilization. Vol 1

Neveryóna

In his four volume series Return to Neveryeon, Hugo and Nebula award winner Samuel R. Delany appropriated the conceits of sword and sorcery fantasy to explore his characteristic themes of language, power, gender, and the nature of civilization. Wesleyan University Press has reissued the long unavailable Neveryeonvolumes in trade paperback. The eleven stories, novellas, and novels in Return to Neveryeon’s four volumes chronicle a long ago land on civilization’s brink, perhaps in Asia or Africa, or even on the Mediterranean. Taken slave in childhood, Gorgik gains his freedom, leads a slave revolt, and becomes a minister of state, finally abolishing slavery. Ironically, however, he is sexually aroused by the iron slave collars of servitude. Does this contaminate his mission or intensify it? Presumably elaborated from an ancient text of unknown geographical origin, the stories are sunk in translators’ and commentators’ introductions and appendices, forming a richly comic frame.

Flight from Nevèrÿon

In his four volume series Return to Neveryeon, Hugo and Nebula award winner Samuel R. Delany appropriated the conceits of sword and sorcery fantasy to explore his characteristic themes of language, power, gender, and the nature of civilization. Wesleyan University Press has reissued the long unavailable Neveryeonvolumes in trade paperback. The eleven stories, novellas, and novels in Return to Neveryeon’s four volumes chronicle a long ago land on civilization’s brink, perhaps in Asia or Africa, or even on the Mediterranean. Taken slave in childhood, Gorgik gains his freedom, leads a slave revolt, and becomes a minister of state, finally abolishing slavery. Ironically, however, he is sexually aroused by the iron slave collars of servitude. Does this contaminate his mission or intensify it? Presumably elaborated from an ancient text of unknown geographical origin, the stories are sunk in translators’ and commentators’ introductions and appendices, forming a richly comic frame.

The Bridge of Lost Desire / Return to Neveryon

In his four volume series Return to Neveryeon, Hugo and Nebula award winner Samuel R. Delany appropriated the conceits of sword and sorcery fantasy to explore his characteristic themes of language, power, gender, and the nature of civilization. Wesleyan University Press has reissued the long unavailable Neveryeonvolumes in trade paperback. The eleven stories, novellas, and novels in Return to Neveryeon’s four volumes chronicle a long ago land on civilization’s brink, perhaps in Asia or Africa, or even on the Mediterranean. Taken slave in childhood, Gorgik gains his freedom, leads a slave revolt, and becomes a minister of state, finally abolishing slavery. Ironically, however, he is sexually aroused by the iron slave collars of servitude. Does this contaminate his mission or intensify it? Presumably elaborated from an ancient text of unknown geographical origin, the stories are sunk in translators’ and commentators’ introductions and appendices, forming a richly comic frame.

Babel-17

In the far future, after human civilization has spread through the galaxy, communications begin to arrive in an apparently alien language. They appear to threaten invasion, but in order to counter the threat, the messages must first be understood.

The Einstein Intersection

The Einstein Intersection won the Nebula Award for best science fiction novel of 1967. The surface story tells of the problems a member of an alien race, Lo Lobey, has assimilating the mythology of earth, where his kind have settled among the leftover artifacts of humanity. The deeper tale concerns, however, the way those who are ‘different’ must deal with the dominant cultural ideology. The tale follows Lobey’s mythic quest for his lost love, Friza. In luminous and hallucinated language, it explores what new myths might emerge from the detritus of the human world as those who are ‘different’ try to seize history and the day.

Nova

Given that the suns of Draco stretch almost sixteen light years from end to end, it stands to reason that the cost of transportation is the most important factor of the 32nd century. And since Illyrion is the element most needed for space travel, Lorq von Ray is plenty willing to fly through the core of a recently imploded sun in order to obtain seven tons of it. The potential for profit is so great that Lorq has little difficulty cobbling together an alluring crew that includes a gypsy musician and a moon obsessed scholar interested in the ancient art of writing a novel. What the crew doesn t know, though, is that Lorq’s quest is actually fueled by a private revenge so consuming that he ll stop at nothing to achieve it. In the grandest manner of speculative fiction, Nova is a wise and witty classic that casts a fascinating new light on some of humanity s oldest truths and enduring myths.

Dhalgren

In Dhalgren, perhaps one of the most profound and bestselling science fiction novels of all time, Samuel R. Delany has produced a novel ‘to stand with the best American fiction of the 1970s’ Jonathan Lethem.

Bellona is a city at the dead center of the United States. Something has happened there . The population has fled. Madmen and criminals wander the streets. Strange portents appear in the cloud covered sky. And into this disaster zone comes a young man poet, lover, and adventurer known only as the Kid. Tackling questions of race, gender, and sexuality, Dhalgren is a literary marvel and groundbreaking work of American magical realism.

Empire

Large science fiction graphic novel.

Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand

Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand is a science fiction masterpiece, an essay on the inexplicability of sexual attractiveness, and an examination of interstellar politics among far flung worlds. First published in 1984, the novel’s central issues technology, globalization, gender, sexuality, and multiculturalism have only become more pressing with the passage of time. The novel’s topic is information itself: What are the repercussions, once it has been made public, that two individuals have been found to be each other’s perfect erotic object out to ‘point nine nine nine and several nines percent more’? What will it do to the individuals involved, to the city they inhabit, to their geosector, to their entire world society, especially when one is an illiterate worker, the sole survivor of a world destroyed by ‘cultural fugue,’ and the other is you!

They Fly At Çiron

As this novel begins, the peaceful village of iron faces conquest and domination by the army of Myetra, as led by a cruel prince. The Myetrans subdue iron, killing many and enslaving the rest. But Rahm escapes and then befriends one of the fearsome Winged Ones, humanoids with batlike wings. Meanwhile, led by the young village garbage collector and an itinerant singer, the ironians resist where they can, as the Myetran lieutenant Kire struggles with his conscience and tries to ease the ironians’ burden. They Fly at iron appearing here in its first paperback publication offers ‘vintage Delany in his finest fantasy mode’ Ursula K. Le Guin.

Hogg

Acclaimed winner of the William Whitehead Memorial Award for a lifetime’s contribution to gay and lesbian literature, Samuel R. Delany wrote Hogg three decades ago. Since then it has been one of America’s most famous ‘unpublishable’ novels. The subject matter of Hogg is our culture of sexual violence and degeneration. Delany explores his disturbing protagonist Hogg on his own turf rape, pederasty, sexual excess exposing an area of violence and sexual abuse from the inside. As such, it is a brave book.

The Mad Man

For his thesis, graduate student John Marr researches the life and work of the brilliant Timothy Hasler a philosopher whose career was cut tragically short over a decade earlier. Marr encounters numerous obstacles as other researchers turn up evidence of Hasler’s personal life that is deemed simply too unpleasant and disillusioning for the rarified air of academe. On another front, Marr finds himself increasingly drawn toward more shocking, depraved sexual entanglements with the homeless men of his neighborhood, until it begins to seem that Hasler’s death might hold some key to his own life as a gay man in the age of AIDS. As John Marr learns more about the enigma that was Timothy Hasler, his own increasing sexual debaseme*nt leads him to a point where his and the philosopher’s lives collide violently…

Dark Reflections

Arnold Hawley, a gay, African American poet, has lived in NYC for most of his life. Dark Reflections traces Hawley’s life in three sections in reverse order. Part one: Hawley, at 50 years old, wins the an award for his sixth book of poems. Part two explores Hawley’s unhappy marriage, while the final section recalls his college days. Dark Reflections, moving back and forth in time, creates an extraordinary meditation on social attitudes, loneliness, and life’s triumphs.

Phallos

Phallos is the tale of a tale. Neoptolomus pursues mystic knowledge through the Mediterranean world in the time of Emperor Hadrian. From Egypt to Syracuse, from Athens to Byzantium and further, filled with wit and eruditon and deeply homoerotic this is a Lacanian riddle to delight and intrigue fans of Delany’s more recent fiction, The Mad Man, and his Return to Neveryon series.

Aye, and Gomorrah

A father must come to terms with his son’s death in the war. In Venice an architecture student commits a crime of passion. A white southern airport loader tries to do a favor for a black northern child. The ordinary stuff of ordinary fiction but with a difference! These tales take place twenty five, fifty, a hundred fifty years from now, when men and women have been given gills to labor under the sea. Huge repair stations patrol the cables carrying power to the ends of the earth. Telepathic and precocious children so passionately yearn to visit distant galaxies that they’ll kill to go. Brilliantly crafted, beautifully written, these are Samuel Delany’s award winning stories, like no others before or since.

Distant Stars

A collection of classic fiction, a short novel, and a fascinating essay, with over sixty pages of illustrations. Includes: Omegahelm On a lonely planet, the dictator of half a universe reveals her dark secret. Set in the universe of Delany’s novel Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand; Empire Star The adventures of Comet Jo as he travels through time and space with his cybernetic companion Lump; Prismatica An enchanting fantasy about a prince, a grey man and his black trunk, and a beautiful lady from a rainbow world; plus the Nebula and Hugo Award winning novella Time Considered as a Helix of Semi Precious Stones, and more.

The Complete Nebula Award-Winning Fiction

Combined edition of two novels and two short stories which won the Nebula Award. Babel 17 winner, 1966 Nebula, 1995 James Tiptree, Jr. Award, Classics; nominated, 1967 Hugo Award; 1975 Locus Poll Award, All Time Best Novel Place: 36; A Fabulous, Formless Darkness original title The Einstein Intersection winner, 1967 Nebula Award; nominated, 1968 Hugo Award; Time Considered as a Helix of Semi Precious Stones winner, 1969 Nebula Award, 1970 Hugo Award; Aye, and Gomorrah winner, 1967 Nebula Award; nominated, 1968 Hugo Award.

Atlantis

Wesleyan University Press has made a significant commitment to the publication of the work of Samuel R. Delany, including this recent fiction, now available in paperback. The three long stories collected in Atlantis: three tales ‘Atlantis: Model 1924,’ ‘Erik, Gwen, and D. H. Lawrence’s Aesthetic of Unrectified Feeling,’ and ‘Citre et Trans’ explore problems of memory, history, and transgression. Winner of both the Hugo and Nebula awards, and Guest of Honor at the 1995 World Science Fiction Convention in Glasgow, Delany was won a broad audience among fans of postmodern fiction with his theoretically sophisticated science fiction and fantasy. The stories of Atlantis: three tales are not SF, yet Locus, the trade publication of the science fiction field, notes that the title story ‘has an odd, unsettling power not usually associated with mainstream fiction.’A writer whose audience extends across and beyond science fiction, black, gay, postmodern, and academic constituencies, Delany is finally beginning to achieve the broader recognition he deserves.

The Jewel-Hinged Jaw

Samuel R. Delany’s The Jewel Hinged Jaw appeared originally in 1977, and is now long out of print and hard to find. The impact of its demonstration that science fiction was a special language, rather than just gadgets and green skinned aliens, began reverberations still felt in science fiction criticism. This edition includes two new essays, one written at the time and one written about those times, as well as an introduction by writer and teacher Matthew Cheney, placing Delany’s work in historical context. Close textual analyses of Thomas M. Disch, Ursula K. Le Guin, Roger Zelazny, and Joanna Russ read as brilliantly today as when they first appeared. Essays such as ‘About 5,750 Words’ and ‘To Read The Dispossessed’ first made the book a classic; they assure it will remain one.

Heavenly Breakfast

Cultural Writing. Memoir. Heavenly Breakfast is Samuel R. Delaney’s wise and vivid essay on urban communes and cooperatives in the winter of ‘Sixty seven/’Sixty eight. It examines their function, structure, permanence, and impermanence as precisely as a sociological study. Because its method is narrative and anecdotal, however, it reads like a passionate memoir a marvelous document from an extraordinary time. Based on journals he kept at the time, these pages recount his encounters with other communes and experimental living arrangements some gentle, some brutal; of encounters between those inside and those outside the countercultural life; of idealism and hopes pushing against a resistant reality.

Starboard Wine

In Starboard Wine, Samuel R. Delany explores the implications of his now famous assertion that science fiction is not about the future. Rather, it uses the future as a means of talking about the present and its potentiality. By recognizing a text’s specific ‘difference,’ we begin to see the quality of its particulars. Through riveting analyses of works by Joanna Russ, Robert Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon, and Thomas M. Disch, Delany reveals critical strategies for reading that move beyond overwrought theorizing and formulaic thinking. Throughout, the author performs the kinds of careful inquiry and urgent speculation that he calls others to engage in.

The Motion Of Light In Water

‘A very moving, intensely fascinating literary biography from an extraordinary writer. Thoroughly admirable candor and luminous stylistic precision; the artist as a young man and a memorable picture of an age.’ William Gibson ‘Absolutely central to any consideration of black manhood…
. Delany’s vision of the necessity for total social and political transformation is revolutionary.’ Hazel Carby ‘The prose of The Motion Of Light In Water often has the shimmering beauty of the title itself…
. This book is invaluable gay history.’ Inches Magazine Born in New York City s black ghetto Harlem at the start of World War II, Samuel R. Delany married white poet Marilyn Hacker right out of high school. The interracial couple moved into the city s new bohemian quarter, the Lower East Side, in summer 1961. Through the decade s opening years, new art, new sexual practices, new music, and new political awareness burgeoned among the crowded streets and cheap railroad apartments. Beautifully, vividly, insightfully, Delany calls up this era of exploration and adventure as he details his development as a black gay writer in an open marriage, with tertiary walk ons by Bob Dylan, Stokely Carmichael, W. H. Auden, and James Baldwin, and a panoply of brilliantly drawn secondary characters. Winner of the 1989 Hugo Award for Non fiction

Silent Interviews

Samuel R. Delany, whose theoretically sophisticated science fiction and fantasy has won him a broad audience among academics and fans of postmodernist fiction, offers insights into and explorations of his own experience as writer, critic, theorist, and gay black man in his new collection of written interviews, a form he describes as a type of ‘guided essay.’ Gathered from sources as diverse as Diacritics and Comics Journal, these interviews reveal the broad range of his thought and interests.

Longer Views

‘Reading is a many layered process like writing,’ observes Samuel R. Delany, a Nebula and Hugo award winning author and a major commentator on American literature and culture. In this collection of six extended essays, Delany challenges what he calls ‘the hard edged boundaries of meaning’ by going beyond the customary limits of the genre in which he’s writing. By radically reworking the essay form, Delany can explore and express the many layers of his thinking about the nature of art, the workings of language, and the injustices and ironies of social, political, and sexual marginalization. Thus Delany connects, in sometimes unexpected ways, topics as diverse as the origins of modern theater, the context of lesbian and gay scholarship, the theories of cyborgs, how metaphors mean, and the narrative structures in the Star Wars trilogy.’Over the course of his career,’ Kenneth James writes in his extensive introduction, ‘Delany has again and again thrown into question the world models that all too many of us unknowingly live by.’ Indeed, Delany challenges an impressive list of world models here, including High and Low Art, sanity and madness, mathematical logic and the mechanics of mythmaking, the distribution of wealth in our society, and the limitations of our sexual vocabulary. Also included are two essays that illustrate Delany’s unique chrestomathic technique, the grouping of textual fragments whose associative interrelationships a reader must actively trace to read them as a resonant argument. Whether writing about Wagner or Hart Crane, Foucault or Robert Mapplethorpe, Delany combines a fierce and often piercing vision with a powerful honesty that beckons us to share in the perspective of these Longer Views.

Times Square Red, Times Square Blue

If one street in America can claim to be the most infamous, it is surely 42nd Street. Between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, 42nd Street was once known for its peep shows, street corner hustlers and movie houses. Over the last two decades the notion of safety from safe sex and safe neighborhoods, to safe cities and safe relationships has overcome 42nd Street, giving rise to a Disney store, a children’s theater, and large, neon lit cafes. 42nd Street has, in effect, become a family tourist attraction for visitors from Berlin, Tokyo, Westchester, and New Jersey’s suburbs. Samuel R. Delany sees a disappearance not only of the old Times Square, but of the complex social relationships that developed there: the points of contact between people of different clas*ses and races in a public space. In Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, Delany tackles the question of why public restrooms, peepshows, and tree filled parks are necessary to a city’s physical and psychological landscape. He argues that starting in 1985, New York City criminalized peep shows and sex movie houses to clear the way for the rebuilding of Times Square. Delany’s critique reveals how Times Square is being ‘renovated’ behind the scrim of public safety while the stage is occupied by gentrification. Times Square Red, Times Square Blue paints a portrait of a society dismantling the institutions that promote communication between clas*ses, and disguising its fears of cross class contact as ‘family values.’ Unless we overcome our fears and claim our ‘community of contact,’ it is a picture that will be replayed in cities across America.

1984

The contents of 1984 are easy enough to describe: 57 letters and documents written in the mid 80s by novelist and critic Samuel R. Delany. Addressed to various friends, relatives, and colleagues, they present a vivid and exuberant mid career portrait of a writer and thinker whose work has had an enormous influence across a startling range of literary and paraliterary genres, including science fiction, autobiography, po*rnography, historical fiction, comic books, literary criticism, queer theory, and more. All the trademark Delany touches can be found here rich descriptions of urban life, incisive social observation, sensuous and sophisticated tales of a life lived on the intersections of multiple social margins Delany is gay and black, and, especially, passionate meditations on the intersection of aesthetics, politics, and philosophy that have made Delany a figure of paramount importance both for millions of readers, and, more specifically, for a collection of writers and thinkers a mere partial list of which reads like a Whos Who of contemporary intellectual culture: Fredric Jameson, Eve Sedgwick, Um berto Eco a key secondary character in the pages to follow, Donna Haraway, Henry Louis Gates, Charles Johnson, William Gibson, and, we learn here most intriguingly but perhaps least surprisingly Thomas Pynchon. from the introduction, by Kenneth R. James

Shorter Views

In Shorter Views, Hugo and Nebula award winning author Samuel R. Delany brings his remarkable intellectual powers to bear on a wide range of topics. Whether he is exploring the deeply felt issues of identity, race, and sexuality, untangling the intricacies of literary theory, or the writing process itself, Delany is one of the most lucid and insightful writers of our time. These essays cluster around topics related to queer theory on the one hand, and on the other, questions concerning the paraliterary genres: science fiction, po*rnography, comics, and more. Readers new to Delany’s work will find this collection of shorter pieces an especially good introduction, while those already familiar with his writing will appreciate having these essays between two covers for the first time.

Black Gay Man

‘Startling and provocative…
. Reid Pharr presents a cogent analysis that combines the personal with the political, the intellectual with the emotional and the erotic…
. Reid Pharr’s ability to move these works and their themes from the limited analysis of the academy into a broader realm of lived experience and social context that makes them, as well as Reid Pharr’s own thoughts, vital and genuinely consequential.’ Publisher’s Weekly

At turns autobiographical, political, literary, erotic, and humorous, Black Gay Man will spoil our preconceived notions of not only what it means to be black, gay and male but also what it means to be a contemporary intellectual. Both a celebration of black gay male identity as well as a powerful critique of the structures that allow for the production of that identity, Black Gay Man introduces the eloquent new voice of Robert Reid Pharr in cultural criticism.

At once erudite and readable, the range of topics and positions taken up in Black Gay Man reflect the complexity of American life itself. Treating subjects as diverse as the Million Man March, interracial sex, anti Semitism, turn of the century American intellectualism as well as literary and cultural figures ranging from Essex Hemphill and Audre Lorde to W.E.B. DuBois, Frantz Fanon and James Baldwin, Black Gay Man is a bold and nuanced attempt to question prevailing ideas about community, desire, politics and culture. Moving beyond critique, Reid Pharr also pronounces upon the promises of a new America. With the publication of Black Gay Man, Robert Reid Pharr is sure to take his place as one of this country’s most exciting and challenging left intellectuals.

About Writing

Award winning novelist Samuel R. Delany has written a book for creative writers to place alongside E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel and Lajos Egri’s Art of Dramatic Writing. Taking up specifics When do flashbacks work, and when should you avoid them? How do you make characters both vivid and sympathetic? and generalities How are novels structured? How do writers establish serious literary reputations today?, Delany also examines the condition of the contemporary creative writer and how it differs from that of the writer in the years of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and the high Modernists. Like a private writing tutorial, About Writing treats each topic with clarity and insight. Here is an indispensable companion for serious writers everywhere.

Conversations with Samuel R. Delany

A key figure in modern science fiction and fantasy, Samuel R. Delany b. 1942 is also one of the most acclaimed figures in contemporary literary theory and gay/lesbian literature. As a gay African American writer, Delany’s cerebral, experimental prose crosses lines of genre, gender, sexuality, and class. Several of his works Dhalgren, The Einstein Intersection, Babel 17, Stars in My Pocket like Grains of Sand, and the Nev ryon quartet are considered landmarks of ‘new wave’ science fiction. His essays and critical works approach a wide variety of subjects from a perspective that is both resolutely philosophical and deeply provocative. Conversations with Samuel R. Delany collects interviews with the writer from 1980 to 2007. Delany considers the interview an especially fruitful form for the generation of ideas, and he has made it an integral part of his own work. In fact, two of his critical works are collections of interviews and correspondence. He insists that all interviews with him be written correspondence so that he is allowed the time and space to deliberate on each response. As a result, the conversations presented here are as rigorously constructed, elusive, and intellectually stimulating as his essays.

The WisCon Chronicles, Vol. 2: Provocative essays on feminism, race, revolution, and the future

WisCon, a literary festival for feminists interested in science fiction and fantasy, has for over three decades attracted people with diverse and stronlgy held opinions. It hasn’t always suffered them gladly, and it doesn’t necessarily mediate the arguments that ensue, but WisCon does not homogenize their points of view, and it provides an ongoing opportunity for feminists of all stripes to get together and laugh, talk, and enrich one another. This volume explores some of the issue of interest at WisCon 2007: gender, race, culture, revolution, and the future of thinking about those matters, and it also includes a forum on how to deal with racist and sexist material in writing workshops as well as the epistolary performance that constituted Kelly Link and Laurie J. Marks’ jointly delivered Guest of Honor speeches.

The Wiscon Chronicles, Vol.3: Carnival of Feminist SF

The word’s been out for some time now that we’re living in ”post feminist” times. And yet the world’s largest feminist science fiction convention, held annually in Madison, Wisconsin, which many of the genre’s luminaries attend, has become so popular that the ceiling limiting attendance to 1000 participants often tops out months in advance. People attend to meet up with friends from other parts of the country or the world whom they’ve come to know online; they attend because the programming goes far beyond the ”feminism 101” that is the most they can hope for from most other science fiction conventions. But above all they come to experience the kind of community they can’t get elsewhere. Some participants even characterize it as ”four days of feminist utopia” a reference to the communities created in the most famous feminist novels of the 1970s. This volume explores some of the issues of interest at WisCon 2008: the politics of the intelligibility of stories, internet drama, and feminist fandom. It offers a selection of thoughtful essays and analyses, dialogues, comments, arguments, meditations, and appeals to reason, collected from participants writers, bloggers, activists, and fans, some of them WisCon veterans and some attending for the first time including L. Timmel Duchamp, K. Tempest Bradford, Nancy Jane Moore, Alexis Lothian, Sue Lange, Victoria Janssen, and many others.

Dangerous Visions

Anthologies seldom make history, but Dangerous Visions is a grand exception. Harlan Ellison’s 1967 collection of science fiction stories set an almost impossibly high standard, as more than a half dozen of its stories won major awards not surpising with a contributors list that reads like a who’s who of 20th century SF: Samuel D. Delany, Philip K. Dick, Brian Aldiss, Roger Zelazny, Philip Jose Farmer, Fritz Leiber, Larry Niven and Robert Silverberg. Unavailable for 15 years, this huge anthology now returns to print, as relevant now as when it was first published.

Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk & Postmodern Science Fiction

The term cyberpunk entered the literary landscape in 1984 to describe William Gibson’s pathbreaking novel Neuromancer. Cyberpunks are now among the shock troops of postmodernism, Larry McCaffery argues in Storming the Reality Studio, marshalling the resources of a fragmentary culture to create a startling new form. Artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, multinational machinations, frenetic bursts of prose, collisions of style, celebrations of texture: although emerging largely from science fiction, these features of cyberpunk writing are, as this volume makes clear, integrally related to the aims and innovations of the literary avant garde. By bringing together original fiction by well known contemporary writers William Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Kathy Acker, J. G. Ballard, Samuel R. Delany, critical commentary by some of the major theorists of postmodern art and culture Jacques Derrida, Fredric Jameson, Timothy Leary, Jean Fran ois Lyotard, and work by major practitioners of cyberpunk William Gibson, Rudy Rucker, John Shirley, Pat Cadigan, Bruce Sterling, Storming the Reality Studio reveals a fascinating ongoing dialog in contemporary culture. What emerges most strikingly from the colloquy is a shared preoccupation with the force of technology in shaping modern life. It is precisely this concern, according to McCaffery, that has put science fiction, typically the province of technological art, at the forefront of creative explorations of our unique age. A rich opporunity for reading across genres, this anthology offers a new perspective on the evolution of postmodern culture and ultimately shows how deeply technological developments have influenced our vision and our art. Selected Fiction contributors: Kathy Acker, J. G. Ballard, William S. Burroughs, Pat Cadigan, Samuel R. Delany, Don DeLillo, William Gibson, Harold Jaffe, Richard Kadrey, Marc Laidlaw, Mark Leyner, Joseph McElroy, Misha, Ted Mooney, Thomas Pynchon, Rudy Rucker, Lucius Shepard, Lewis Shiner, John Shirley, Bruce Sterling, William VollmanSelected Non Fiction contributors: Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Joan Gordon, Veronica Hollinger, Fredric Jameson, Arthur Kroker and David Cook, Timothy Leary, Jean Fran ois Lyotard, Larry McCaffery, Brian McHale, Dave Porush, Bruce Sterling, Darko Suvin, Takayuki Tatsumi

Avant-Pop: Fiction for a Daydream Nation

A collection of innovative fiction, comic book art, illustrations and other text by the most radical of the postmodern new wave.

The Space Opera Renaissance

‘Space opera’, once a derisive term for cheap pulp adventure, has come to mean something more in modern SF: compelling adventure stories told against a broad canvas, and written to the highest level of skill. Indeed, it can be argued that the ‘new space opera’ is one of the defining streams of modern SF. Now, World Fantasy Award winning anthologists David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer have compiled a definitive overview of this subgenre, both as it was in the days of the pulp magazines, and as it has become in 2005. Included are major works from genre progenitors like Jack Williamson and Leigh Brackett, stylish midcentury voices like Cordwainer Smith and Samuel R. Delany, popular favorites like David Drake, Lois McMaster Bujold, and Ursula K. Le Guin, and modern day pioneers such as Iain M. Banks, Steven Baxter, Scott Westerfeld, and Charles Stross.

The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction

The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction features over a 150 years’ worth of the best science fiction ever collected in a single volume. The fifty two stories and critical introductions are organized chronologically as well as thematically for classroom use. Filled with luminous ideas, otherworldly adventures, and startling futuristic speculations, these stories will appeal to all readers as they chart the emergence and evolution of science fiction as a modern literary genre. They also provide a fascinating look at how our Western technoculture has imaginatively expressed its hopes and fears from the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century to the digital age of today. A free online teacher’s guide at www. wesleyan. edu/wespress/sfanthologyguide accompanies the anthology and offers access to a host of pedagogical aids for using this book in an academic setting. The stories in this anthology have been selected and introduced by the editors of Science Fiction Studies, the world’s most respected journal for the critical study of science fiction.

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