Maxima Library

A, B, C: Three Short Novels contains the first three novels of Samuel R. Delany's long and illustrious career.

The Jewels of Aptor is a science-fantasy story about a seafaring quest that sets out to find powerful magic jewels on a mystical, forbidden island where unimaginable danger lies.

The Ballad of Beta-2 is about a future academic searching for the true story behind an interstellar voyage, a journey over multiple generations that ended in tragedy.

They Fly at Çiron is a fantasy about the clash between a marauding army and a peaceful village at the foot of a mountain from which a race of winged people oversees both sides.

Presenting these three novels in this omnibus volume for the first time, along with a new foreword and afterword by the author, A, B, C showcases Delany's masterful storytelling ability and deep devotion to his craft.

Samuel R. Delany’s stories are available in Aye, and Gomorrah and Other Stories (science fiction and fantasy) and Atlantic: Three Tales (experimental fiction). He has won multiple Hugo and Nebula awards. His novel Dark Reflections won the Stonewall Book Award in 2008. He has been inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame and received the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master of Science Fiction Award. His novels include science-fiction works such as Nova, Dhalgren, The Fall of the Towers, Babel-17, The Einstein Intersection; also the four-volume fantasy series Return to Nevèrÿon. Delany is the author of several other novels and works of nonfiction. He lives in New York City and has recently retired after sixteen years of teaching creative writing at Temple University.

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.

Nagrodzona Nebulą opowieść SF, jeden z kamieni milowych fantastyki naukowej. Kosmiczna wojna, kontakt z obcą cywilizacją i związane z tym problemy lingwistyczne. Lektura obowiązkowa.

Trwa kosmiczna wojna Sojuszu z Najeźdźcami — w ważnych strategicznie miejscach dochodzi do aktów sabotażu, którym towarzyszą transmisje w tajemniczym języku, Babel-17. Rydra Wong, piękna i słynna poetka i lingwistka otrzymuje od wojska zadanie: rozszyfrować ten język i odkryć, kto się nim posługuje oraz w jaki sposób jest on związany z terroryzmem. Rydra kompletuje więc załogę statku, złożoną z żywych i umarłych, i wyrusza w niebezpieczną podróż — od spelunek, w których walczą chirurgicznie zmodyfikowani zapaśnicy, przez Kostnicę, w której zmarli czekają na wskrzeszenie, Stocznię Wojenną i salony międzygwiezdnej arystokracji, po piracki statek-cień — a przede wszystkim w podróż przez niezwykły język, zmieniający ludzki umysł.

La guerra galattica fra l’Alleanza terrestre e gli Invasori dura ormai da molti anni, e nessuno sta vincendo. Quando però l’Alleanza si trova a dover fronteggiare un’arma temibile e sconosciuta, una lingua capace di provocare attentati e sabotaggi, l’unica via di salvezza può consistere in una contromossa inaspettata: affidare a una poetessa, Rydra Wong, il compito di risolvere l’enigma di Babel-17 e di porre fine ai suoi effetti micidiali. Sarà solo l’inizio di una incredibile avventura fra le stelle, sotto la minaccia di una lingua che può uccidere e fra i pericoli di un universo forse troppo vasto per l’uomo, in un romanzo magistrale che è valso al suo autore un prestigioso premio Nebula.

Vincitore del premio Nebula per il miglior romanzo in 1966.

Nominato per il premio Hugo per il miglior romanzo in 1967.

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. 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.

Text is full. The unclosed ending sentence can be read as leading into the unopened opening sentence, turning the novel into an enigmatic circle.

Premios Nebula 1969 y Hugo 1970 al mejor relato.

“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.

Opuszczoną przez ludzi Ziemię zasiedliła humanoidalna rasa, usiłująca upodobnić się do swych poprzedników i przeżyć ich historię na nowo. Przybysze ze czcią traktują pozostawione przez ludzi ślady kultury i cywilizacji. W ich świecie postaciami mitycznymi są nie tylko Orfeusz i Chrystus, ale także bohater Dzikiego Zachodu — Billy Kid oraz Beatlesi. Nagła śmierć ukochanej sprawia, że bohater powieści, Lobey, porzuca swą idylliczną, zagubioną w lasach wioskę i wyrusza na wędrówkę, aby odnaleźć i odzyskać utraconą miłość.

“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.”

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

Samuel R. Delany is the author of numerous science fiction books including, Dhalgren and The Mad Man, as well as the best-selling nonfiction study Times Square Red, Times Square Blue. He lives in New York City and teaches at Temple University. The Lambda Book Report chose Delany as one of the fifty most significant men and women of the past hundred years tochange our concept of gayness, and he is a recipient of the William Whitehead Memorial Award for a lifetime’s contribution to lesbian and gay literature.

As this novel begins, the peaceful village of Çiron faces conquest and domination by the army of Myetra, as led by a cruel prince. The Myetrans subdue Çiron, 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 Çironians resist where they can, as the Myetran lieutenant Kire struggles with his conscience and tries to ease the Çironians’ burden.

They Fly at Çiron — appearing here in its first paperback publication — offers “vintage Delany in his finest fantasy mode” (Ursula K. Le Guin).

Like his legendary Hogg, The Mad Man, and the million-seller Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany’s major new novel Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders — explicit, poetic, philosophical, and, yes, shocking — propels readers into a gay sexual culture unknown to most urban gay men and women, a network of rural gay relations — with the twist that this one is supported by the homophile Kyle Foundation, started in the early 1980s by a black multi-millionaire, Robert Kyle III, to improve the lives of black gay men.

In 2007, days before his seventeenth birthday, Eric Jeffers’ stepfather brings him to live with his mother, who works as a waitress in the foundering tourist town of Diamond Harbor on the Georgia coast. In the local truck stop restroom, on his first day, Eric meets nineteen-year-old Morgan Haskell, as well as half a dozen other gay men who live and work in the area. The boys become a couple, and for the next twenty years labor as garbage men along the coast, sharing their lives and their lovers, learning to negotiate a committed open relationship. For a decade they manage a rural movie theater that shows pornographic films and encourages gay activity among the audience. Finally, they become handymen for a burgeoning lesbian art colony on nearby Gillead Island, as America moves twenty years, forty years, sixty years into a future fascinating, glorious, and — sometimes — terrifying.

Won the Hugo Award for Best Short Story and Nebula Award for best Novelette in 1970.

Triton, the outermost moon of Neptune, was a world of absolute freedom, where every wish could be fulfilled. But for Bron Helstrom, one of Triton’s elite, life had lost its meaning. There, in a world of endless possibilities, Bron began a searing odyssey to find the elusive object of his desires ...

The door opened; she slipped out,

She wore white gloves.

She wore white boots.

Her long skirt and high-necked bodice were white. Full white sleeves draped her wrists. She reached up and pulled the white cloak around her shoulders. Its paler-than-ivory folds swept around.

Over her head was a full-head mask: white veils hung below the eyes; the icy globe was a-glitter with white sequins. White plumes rose above it, as from some albino peacock ....

The white mask turned to him .... Her gloved fingers fell from her white-scarved throat, came toward his.

He took them.

They walked along the corridor that, once more, became high, roofless street.

“Now. What do you want to know about me?”

After moments, she said: “Go on. Any way you can.”

Moments later, he said: “I’m ... not happy in the world I live in ....”

In a story as exciting as any science fiction adventure written, Samuel R. Delany’s 1976 SF novel, originally published as Triton, takes us on a tour of a utopian society at war with our own Earth. High wit in this future comedy of manners allows Delany to question gender roles and sexual expectations at a level that, 20 years after it was written, still make it a coruscating portrait of “the happily reasonable man,” Bron Helstrom—an immigrant to the embattled world of Triton, whose troubles become more and more complex, till there is nothing left for him to do but become a woman. Against a background of high adventure, this minuet of a novel dances from the farthest limits of the solar system to Earth's own Outer Mongolia. Alternately funny and moving, it is a wide-ranging tale in which character after character turns out not to be what he— or she—seems.

CRITICAL ACCLAIM FOR SAMUEL R. DELANY:

“A writer of consistently high ambition and achievement ... Delany’s fiction demands—and rewards—the kind of close reading that one ungrudgingly brings to serious novelists ... Sentence by sentence, phrase by phrase, [he] invites the reader to collaborate in the process of creation. The reader who accepts this invitation has an extraordinarily satisfying experience in store for him/her.”

—Gerald Jonas, The New York Times Book Review