I've had a bunch of people tell me that I should read some of Samuel R. Delaney's work but frustratingly none of them gave me any specific suggestions. They just kinda pointed in the general direction of his work and said "go for it." Does anyone here have a particular favorite work by him? Or a work you think is his overall best, or just best for a new reader?
by Really_Big_Turtle
6 Comments
Dhalgren is good and generally considered his best but maybe not for a new reader depending on your reading background. It’s kind of experimental and meandering. The only other one I’ve read is They Fly at Ciron and it may be better to start. It’s short and more straightforward than Dhalgren.
Try Nova
I read Babel-17 for a Linguistics class in college and thought it was pretty good at the time.
Depends what your usual reading style is. Delaney’s earliest stuff is good but misses some of his real strengths. His later stuff is just porn. There’s an in between period where his best work sits. A good entry point would be Babel-17 or Nova. Babel-17 plays with Sapir-Worf ideas that are now kind of cliche but which were revolutionary when it was first written. Sort of a first draft of some of the linguistic ideas in Story of Your Life (Arrival). Nova is more ambitious and feels a lot like the artbooks for Jodorowsky’s aborted adaptation of Dune, and plays with some ideas, especially the monomyth, that were a foundation for Star Wars.
My favorite of his is Dhalgren, which is sort of a novel about white flight in the 60s, but it is more ergodic and in addition, starts getting into Delaney’s more pornographic themes. Which is fine and doesn’t really distract from the story but if very explicit bisexual encounters including more problematic encounters are a deal killer for you, don’t read it.
“Trouble on Triton” is an excellent novel that’s less bizarre than most of Delaney’s work. Warning, deliberately unlikable main character!
One of my favorite books is Nova. Lively little pocket space opera. The rest of his work I couldn’t get into.