Neveryóna
Or: The Tale of Signs and Cities
by
Samuel R. Delany
For Frank Romeo
This nostalgia for a past often so eclectic as to be unlocatable historically is a facet of the modernist sensibility which has seemed increasingly suspect in recent decades. It is an ultimate refinement of the colonialist outlook: an imaginative exploitation of nonwhite cultures, whose moral life it drastically oversimplifies, whose wisdom it plunders and parodies. To that criticism there is no convincing reply. But to the criticism that the quest for ‘another form of civilization’ refuses to submit to the disillusionment of accurate historical knowledge, one can make an answer. It never sought such knowledge. The other civilizations are being used as models because they are available as stimulants to the imagination precisely because they are not accessible. They are both models and mysteries. Nor can this quest be dismissed as fraudulent on the grounds that it is insensitive to the political forces that cause human suffering…
PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF SAMUEL R. DELANY
“I consider Delany not only one of the most important SF writers of the present generation, but a fascinating writer in general who has invented a new style.”
“Samuel R. Delany is the most interesting author of science fiction writing in English today.”
“Dhalgren’s the secret masterpiece, the city-book-labyrinth that has swallowed astonished readers alive for almost thirty years. Its beauty and force still seem to be growing.”
“A brilliant tour de force.”
“A Joyceian tour de force of a novel, Dhalgren … stake[s] a better claim than anything else published in this country in the last quarter-century (excepting only Gass’s Omensetter’s Luck and Nabokov’s Pale Fire) to a permanent place as one of the enduring monuments of our national literature.”
“Cultural criticism at its most imaginative and entertaining best.”
“The tales of Nevèrÿon are postmodern sword-and-sorcery … Delany subverts the formulaic elements of sword-and-sorcery and around their empty husks constructs self-conscious metafictions about social and sexual behavior, the play of language and power, and — above all — the possibilities and limitations of narrative. Immensely sophisticated as literature … eminently readable and gorgeously entertaining.”
“This is fantasy that challenges the intellect … semiotic sword and sorcery, a very high level of literary gamesmanship. It’s as if Umberto Eco had written about Conan the Barbarian.”
“The Nevèrÿon series is a major and unclassifiable achievement in contemporary American literature.”
“Instead of dishing out the usual, tired mix of improbable magic and bloody mayhem, Delany weaves an intricate meditation on the nature of freedom and slavery, on the beguiling differences between love and lust … the prose has been so polished by wit and intellect that it fairly gleams.”
“One of the most sustained meditations we have on the complex intersections of sexuality, race, and subjectivity in contemporary cultures.”
“Delany’s first true masterpiece.”
“What makes Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand especially challenging — and satisfying — is that the complex society in which the characters move is one … which contains more than 6,000 inhabited worlds and a marvelously rich blend of cultures. The inhabitants of these worlds — both human and alien — relate to one another in ways that, however bizarre they may seem at first, are eventually seen to turn on such recognizable emotional fulcrums as love, loss and longing.”
“Delany’s forte has always been the creation of complex, bizarre, yet highly believable future societies; this book may top anything he’s done in that line.”
“As of this book, [Samuel R. Delany] is the best science-fiction writer in the world.”
“A fast-action far-flung interstellar adventure; [an] archetypal mystical/mythical allegory … [a] modern myth told in the SF idiom … and lots more.”
“[Nova] reads like Moby-Dick at a strobe-light show!”
“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.”
“Absolutely central to any consideration of black manhood … Delany’s vision of the necessity for total social and political transformation is revolutionary.”
“The prose of The Motion of Light in Water often has the shimmering beauty of the title itself … This book is invaluable gay history.”
1. Of Dragons, Mountains, Transhumance, Sequence, and Sunken Cities, or: The Violence of the Letter
…The modality of novelistic enunciation is inferentiaclass="underline" it is a process within which the subject of the novelistic utterance affirms a sequence, as conclusion to the inference, based on other sequences (referential — hence narrative, or textual — hence citational), which are the premises of the inference and, as such, considered to be true.
SHE WAS FIFTEEN AND she flew.
Her name was pryn — because she knew something of writing but not of capital letters.
She shrieked at clouds, knees clutching scaly flanks, head flung forward. Another peak floated back under veined wings around whose flexing joints her knees bent.