A year after Dhalgren, Delany’s highly acclaimed Trouble on Triton was published. From 1979 to 1987, Delany wrote a connected set of eleven fantasy tales: two novels, three novellas, and six short stories. They include The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals (1987)—the first novel about AIDS released by a major American publisher—and the Return to Nevèrÿon series. In 1984 Delany’s last purely SF novel for twenty-five years would appear, Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand—a book in which he predicted the Internet a decade before the fact.
Since then, Delany has written highly praised works, both fictitious and autobiographical. His 1988 publication, The Motion of Light in Water, is a staple of gender studies and African American studies classes and received a Hugo Award for nonfiction. In 1995, he published three long stories, about black life in the Jazz Age, the fifties in New York, and the sixties in Europe, collected in Atlantis: Three Tales and, partly, in The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. This was followed by collections of interviews and nonfiction essays, including Silent Interviews (1994), Longer Views (1996), and Shorter Views (1999), all published by Wesleyan University Press.
Among his highly acclaimed academic releases are Times Square Red, Times Square Blue—the first part of which began as the Distinguished Faculty Lecture at the University of Massachusetts in March 1998, and the second of which is an expansion of an article written for Out magazine—and About Writing. Other novels, long and short, from this time include The Mad Man, Hogg (“the most shocking novel of the 20th century,” wrote Larry McCaffery), and Phallos. His novel about a black gay poet living in the East Village over the turn of the most recent century, Dark Reflections, won the 2008 Stonewall Book Award. His most recent novel, Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders (2012), is over eight hundred pages—an amalgam of gay erotic writing, rural realism, and science fiction. Discussions over it seem to be progressing in a manner similar to that of the controversy almost forty years ago over Dhalgren.
Altogether, Delany has won four Nebula Awards and two Hugo Awards, as well as the Bill Whitehead Award for a lifetime contribution to gay and lesbian writing. In 2002, Delany was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame. He received the Pilgrim Award for SF scholarship in 1985 and the J. Lloyd Eaton Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010. That same year he was among the judges for the National Book Award in Fiction. In 2007 he was the subject of Fred Barney Taylor’s documentary The Polymath, or, The Life and Opinions of Samuel R. Delany, Gentleman, which includes an experimental color film, The Orchid, which Delany himself wrote, directed, and edited in 1972.
Delany, age twenty-four, at the 1966 World Science Fiction Convention. At right are science fiction editor Terry Carr and his wife, Carol. Photo courtesy of Andrew Porter.
The Ace Books first printing of Babel-17, which won the 1966 Nebula Award for Best Novel.
Delany in 1966 with author and editor Lin Carter. Photo courtesy of Andrew Porter.
Delany at the 1980 World Science Fiction Convention in Boston. Photo courtesy of Andrew Porter.
Delany giving a lecture at the New York Public Library in 1991. Photo courtesy of Andrew Porter.
The cover of the 2007 documentary The Polymath, or, The Life and Opinions of Samuel R. Delany, Gentleman. More information on this film may be found at maestromedia.net.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
“The Tale of Rumor and Desire” first appeared in Callaloo, a Tri-Annual Journal of Black South Arts and Letters, Spring-Summer 1987, Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted by permission of the author and his agent, Henry Morrison, Inc.
“The Tale of Gorgik” first appeared, in a somewhat shorter form, in Asimov’s SF Adventure Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 3, Summer 1979, and is reprinted by permission of the author and his agent, Henry Morrisson, Inc.
Originally published as The Bridge of Lost Desire
Copyright © 1987, 1989, 1994 by Samuel R. Delany
Cover design by Michel Vrana
978-1-4804-6168-0
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