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Samuel R. Delany

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Samuel Ray Delany, Jr. (born April 1, 1942, New York City) is an award-winning American science fiction author. He has written works that have garnered substantial critical acclaim, including the novels The Einstein Intersection, Nova, Hogg, Dhalgren, and the Return to Nevèrÿon series. Since January 2001 he has been a professor of English and Creative Writing at Temple University in Philadelphia. He is widely known in the academic world as a literary critic.

Biography

Delany was born and raised in Harlem and attended the Dalton School and the Bronx High School of Science. His mother, Margaret Delany, was a library clerk in the New York Public Library system. His father ran a successful undertaking establishment, Levy and Delany Funeral Home, on 7th Avenue in Harlem, between 1938 and his death in 1960. Delany and the poet Marilyn Hacker, who met in high school, were married in 1961 for nineteen years and have a daughter.

Delany was a published science fiction author by the age of 20. He published nine well-regarded science fiction novels between 1962 and 1968, as well as several prize-winning short stories (collected in Driftglass [1971] and more recently in Aye, and Gomorrah, and other stories [2002]). His tenth and most popular novel, Dhalgren, was published in 1974. His main literary project through the late 1970s and 1980s was the Return to Nevèrÿon series, the overall title of the four volumes and also the title of the fourth and final book.

Delany has published several autobiographical/semi-autobiographical accounts of his life as a black and gay writer, including his Hugo award winning autobiography, The Motion of Light in Water.

Since 1988, Delany has been a professor at several universities. He spent 11 years as a professor of comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, a year and a half as an English professor at the University at Buffalo, then moved to the English Department of Temple University in 2001, where he has been teaching since. He has had several visiting guest professorships before and during these same years. He has also published several books of criticism, interviews, and essays, and a best-selling book (Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, 1999) about the effort to redevelop Time Square and what it means for working class gay men in New York City.

Themes

The vast majority of Delany's work contains major recurring themes. Mythology, memory, language, and perception are explored throughout the body of Delany's work. Most, if not all, of his novels deal with at least one of those themes on one level or another. Class, position in society, and the ability to move from one social strata to another are motifs that, while touched on in some of his earlier work, became more significant themes in his later fiction and non-fiction. Delany also makes use of repeated imagery: several characters are known for wearing only one shoe, and nail biting along with rough, calloused (and sometimes veiny) hands are characteristics given to individuals in a number of his works of fiction. Names are sometimes reused: "Bellona" is the name of a city in both Dhalgren and Trouble on Triton, and "Denny" is a character in both Dhalgren and Hogg (which were written almost concurrently despite being published two decades apart).

Following the 1968 publication of Nova, there is not only a large gap in Delany's published work (after releasing eight novels and a novella between 1962 and 1968, Delany's published output virtually stops until 1973), there is also a notable addition to the themes found in the stories published after that time. It is at this point that Delany begins dealing with sexual themes to an extent rarely equalled in serious writing. Dhalgren and Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand include several sexually explicit passages, and several of his books such as Equinox (alternate title, The Tides of Lust), The Mad Man, Hogg and Phallos can be considered pornography, a term Delany himself endorses. Novels such as Trouble on Triton and the thousand-plus pages making up his four-volume Return to Neveryon series explore in detail how sexuality and sexual attitudes relate to the socioeconomic underpinnings of a primitive--or, in Trouble on Triton's case, futuristic--society. Even in works with no science fiction or fantasy content to speak of, such as Atlantis: Three Tales, The Mad Man, and Hogg, Delany pursues these questions by creating vivid pictures of New York City, now in the Jazz-Age, now in the first decade of the AIDS epidemic, private schools in the 1950s, Greece and Europe in the 1960s, and--in Hogg--generalized small-town America. Delany's most recent fiction, Phallos, details the quest for happiness and security by a gay man from the island of Syracuse in the second-century reign of the Emperor Hadrian.

Delany has also published several books of literary criticism, with an emphasis on issues in science fiction and other paraliterary genres, comparative literature, and queer studies.

Selected bibliography

Fiction

Novels

Return to Nevèrÿon series

Short story collections

  • Aye, and Gomorrah, and other stories (1967), ISBN 0-375-70671-2
  • Driftglass (1971)
  • Distant Stars (1981, illustrated), ISBN 0-553-01336-X
  • Atlantis: Three Tales (1995, linked stories), ISBN 0-8195-5283-6

(Driftglass and Distant Stars include the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones." Aye, and Gomorrah, and other stories is a compilation of all of Delany's short fiction, excepting the Nevèrÿon tales and the tales from Atlantis.)

Nonfiction

Critical works

Memoirs and letters

Other facts

  • Delany's name is one of the most misspelled in science fiction, with over 60 different spellings in reviews. His publisher Doubleday even misspelled his name on the title page of his book Driftglass as did the organizers of the 16th Balticon where Delany was guest of honour.
  • Delany is dyslexic.
  • The Library of Congress incorrectly recorded his nationality as English.
  • Delany's aunts were Sadie and Bessie Delany, known as the Delany sisters. They both lived to be over 100 years old, and published Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters' First 100 Years. Delany retells some of their adventures in his book Atlantis: Three Tales.
  • Among Delany's more unusual credits is that he wrote two issues of the comic book Wonder Woman in 1972, during a controversial period in the publication's history when the lead character abandoned her superpowers and became a secret agent. Delany scripted issues #202 and #203 of the series.
  • Delany's story Aye, and Gomorrah was included in Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions. Ellison gave a short introduction that ironically pointed out how Delany was one of the last straight science fiction authors.
  • Since he was ten years old, most of his friends and acquaintances have called him by the nickname Chip
  • A character based on Delany, wearing an Engineering antiradiation suit, has a cameo in Chris Claremont's and Adam Hughes's Star Trek graphic novel, Debt of Honor (1992).

See also

Wikiquote has quotations related to Samuel R. Delany.

References

  • Robert S. Bravard; Michael W. Peplow, Through a Glass Darkly: Bibliographing Samuel R. Delany in Black American Literature Forum, Vol. 18, No. 2.
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