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The Einstein Intersection

by Samuel R. Delany, Neil Gaiman (Goodreads Author) (Foreword)

3.68 of 5 stars 3.68 · rating details · 1,483 ratings · 98 reviews

The surface story tells of the problems a member of an alien race, Lo Lobey, has assimilating the mythology of earth, where his kind have settled among the leftover artifacts of humanity. The deeper tale concerns, however, the way those who are 'different' must deal with the dominant cultural ideology. The tale follows Lobey's mythic quest for his lost love, Friza. In lumi...more

Paperback, 136 pages

Published July 15th 1998 by Wesleyan University Press (first published 1967)

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May 02, 2012 mark monday rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: new-dimensions, after-the-fall, futuristik-classik

Samuel R. Delany: scifi master, queer black transgressor, critic and outsider, college professor, poet, genius.

i had a hard time with this one at first, and gave up about a third of the way in. i didn't understand what was happening and i resented the novel - it confused and frustrated me. but then i rallied, mainly due to a flash of shame at thinking that i needed my novels to be spoon-fed to me, with traditional narratives, easy answers and easily digested themes, familiar characters, obvious...more Samuel R. Delany: scifi master, queer black transgressor, critic and outsider, college professor, poet, genius.

i had a hard time with this one at first, and gave up about a third of the way in. i didn't understand what was happening and i resented the novel - it confused and frustrated me. but then i rallied, mainly due to a flash of shame at thinking that i needed my novels to be spoon-fed to me, with traditional narratives, easy answers and easily digested themes, familiar characters, obvious points to be made, the kind of simplicity that makes a novel a pleasant vacation. that's not me! i want those vacations, but i also want challenging (and ultimately exhilarating) experiences. so i swallowed my boring desire to have things carefully explained to me, and jumped back in. i'm glad i did. The Einstein Intersection is a wonderful and mind-expanding book, well worth the effort a reader puts into it.

there is fun and intrigue in figuring out what is happening, so i will spoilerize most of my synopsis:

far, far, far in the extremely far future, village herder & musician Lobey goes on an Orpheus-like quest for his slain lover...

(view spoiler)

...along the way he meets the very complicated bad-ass Spider, the sweet and nonchalant prince-in-exile Greeneye, the chameleonic object of everyone's desire Dove, and Lobey's terrible nemesis, architect of his quest: the vicious, scheming, mocking, murderous little red-haired child psychic Kid Death.

the novel is about identity and difference... music and pop culture... great potential and great change... death and un-death... love and hate... city vs. country... sex and procreation... the author's own story and his personal goals in writing... how myths can control history and how new myths can be made, old myths transformed... it is about a quest to conquer death and to understand the nature of life. Delany's writing takes the jazzy, loose-limbed, seemingly improvisational New Wave SciFi approach as a launching point... and so the language can take the form of flat and resolutely masculine commentary pitched straight down the middle, and then shift effortlessly into iridescent bubbles of delicate prose, blown from a child's toy. Lobey is an appealingly down-to-earth protagonist, a backwoods country hayseed abroad in both open spaces and treacherous city... and he is also a nearly unknowable being, clear in motive yet obscure and mysterious in his strange abilities and potential to change the world around him, the future itself. the novel manages to be so many things at different times, and sometimes all at once: sardonic, wise, nihilistic, hopeful, ambiguous, concrete... creepily inexplicable and perfectly rational. it is a marvelously unique experience.(less)

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Apr 23, 2013 Jon added it · review of another edition

Recommended to Jon by: Jim MacLachlan

Shelves: apocalyptic, fiction, science-fiction, read-in-my-40s, liked-it

3 stars

Due to the acquisition of GoodReads by Amazon on March 28, 2013 and my existing and continuing boycott of all things Amazon, the review I wrote after reading this book now resides, safe and secure, at my blog. You can read it by following this link: http://bit.ly/ZMWrtv

11 likes · like · see review

Oct 12, 2012 Megan Baxter rated it 4 of 5 stars

I had never read any Samuel R. Delany before, so I wasn't sure what to expect. And I don't think I was expecting this lyrical, mythical, entrancing science fiction. Delany weaves together new and old myths into a science fiction story about a race living in the ruins humans left behind, trying on their lives and living out their stories until they work through them and can finally move on to their own.

This is not hard science fiction. There is no explanation of exactly how all this happened - an...more

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Jul 15, 2009 Jim rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: science-fiction, apocalyptic

This is the only book by Delany that I've ever cared for & I love it. He blends SF & mythology, a post-apocalyptic world filled with wonders & monsters. Our hero journeys through this world, discovering more about it, himself & the human race. He shows mankind's greatest failures & achievements through the eyes of something else. A very interesting read & re-read.

I read it again & although the words are very familiar after all these years, still they move me in differ...more

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Feb 12, 2011 Ben Loory rated it 4 of 5 stars

if neil stephenson wrote this book, it'd be 157,000,000 pages long. delany does it as a novella and somehow it contains the whole world.

i wish they'd let him keep the original title, though: a fabulous, formless darkness was much better.

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Jun 21, 2007 Ian Farragher marked it as do-not-have

Dude. I was about 3 chapters into this book and some guy flat out stole this book from me.

Nastyguy: 'Do you mind if I read this?'
Me: 'Yes, I'm reading it.'
Nastyguy: 'Can I take a look at it at least.'
Me: 'Ummm, okay. But I'm in the middle of it, so don't leave with it.'
Nastyguy: 'Okay.'

-- About 2 hours later, after Nastyguy leaves ---

Me: (searching all over) Did anybody see the book I was reading?
Sister: I think I saw Nastyguy leaving with it. He said you let him borrow it.
Me: Awwwh, #@*%!

It mus...more

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Jan 11, 2012 Wealhtheow rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to Wealhtheow by: Think Galactic book group

Shelves: sci-fi

Lobey is a herder in a small village. Although they live a simple life, they live atop the ruins of a maze of tunnels filled with abandoned computers. Further, it seems that radiation and limited genetic diversity create so many mutations that the villagers hardly look human. Still, it's a quiet life. He and his childhood friend, Friza, are finally becoming romantic with each other when she apruptly, inexplicably, dies. Unwilling to accept her death, Lobey ventures outside his village and finds...more

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Oct 22, 2009 Jeremy Kohlman rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: scifi, easton-press-owned, own

I'm not sure what to say about this book. It's one of those stories that, having read it, I know has changed me. But changed me how? That I do not know. I am different from having read this story. (that's actually quite an ironic statement, you'll get, if you read it!)

This is a very short story. Just 143 very short pages. It doesn't take much time at all to finish. But again, I know there's far more than 143 short pages of meaning lying here. I might just start to understand what this book is sa...more

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Jan 09, 2012 Paul Darcy rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: science-fiction

Yup, an oldy - but a goodie? It did win the Nebula, but that was back in the drug crazed sixties, man . . .

This book by Samuel R. Delany is certainly different than your run-of-the-mill science fiction.

It reminded me of a cross between A Canticle for Leibowitz, Chronicles of Amber and Robert Graves Greek Myths Part 1.

It has the flavor of being written in the psychodelic sixties, and even though I haven’t read a lot of Dick, I have a feeling this novel shares the same odd perspectives and mind tw...more

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Mar 25, 2013 sologdin rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: blew-it-up-you-maniacs, geocentric-aliens, speculative

Almost surreal at times, this reworking of Orpheus and Theseus narratives is set on Earth after humans have moved along elsewhere (dead? gone? no idea) and some other wierdos have taken over. It has the normal far future/dying earth conventions: chatty old cryptic computers still running, mutants everywhere, decayed urbanicity, radiation, pastiche of surviving mass culture, &c.

Novel is structured by Foucault's political dream of a pure community, embodied by the leper colony: "non-functional...more Almost surreal at times, this reworking of Orpheus and Theseus narratives is set on Earth after humans have moved along elsewhere (dead? gone? no idea) and some other wierdos have taken over. It has the normal far future/dying earth conventions: chatty old cryptic computers still running, mutants everywhere, decayed urbanicity, radiation, pastiche of surviving mass culture, &c.

Novel is structured by Foucault's political dream of a pure community, embodied by the leper colony: "non-functionals, idiots, mongoloids, and cretins" (6) are sequestrated in cages until they die. "Difference" regarding phenotype is not tolerated generally. Narrator is "different," but is not functionally impaired. Is involved with another "different" person, and when she is killed, narrator is off to take revenge. Villain is also "different." Later, at an ultra-urban place, "difference" is disregarded as provincial bigotry. So, something there.

Lots of barely comprehensible action and exchanges--it's a Delaney book, after all.

Intellectual core of the book, eponymous intersection, arises out of the confrontation of Einstein, "who with his theory of relativity defined the limits of man's perception by expressing mathematically just how far the condition of the observer influences the thing he perceives" (128), with Godel, "who was the first to bring back a mathematically precise statement about the vaster realm beyond the limits Einstein had defined"--with an explication of incompleteness/undecidability--boiling down to "there are an infinite number of true things in the world with no way of ascertaining their truth. Einstein defined the extent of the rational. Godel stuck a pin into the irrational and fixed it to the wall of the universe" (id.).

Thereafter, "the visible effects of Einstein's theory leaped up on a convex curve, its production huge in the first century after its discovery, then leveling off. The production of Godel's law crept up on a concave curve, microscopic at first, then leaping to equal the Einsteinian curve, cross it, outstrip it. At the point of the intersection humanity was able to reach the limits of the known universe" (id.). So, yeah, damned interesting. I repsectfully contend that this is the real story, and Delaney missed it by writing a neo-mythical love story about a pack of mutants. Delaney would respond that I have given an Einsteinian rather than Godelian criticism, and that'd be a fair riposte.

Recommended for readers haunted by their million year old fantasies, persons in wrestling matches wherein the loser would be dinner, and those who must keep the genes mixing, mixing, mixing.

(less)

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Oct 12, 2012 edward rathke rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Upon finishing this I was a bit speechless. I think of all the Delany novels I've read, this is the most beautiful.

Even though the characters are odd [creatures trying to fit into human forms while remaining very peculiar] and the setting is odd [a post-human earth where only humanity's memories are left], Delany manages to make this a very human story and a retelling, of sorts, of the Orpheus myth, which is often referenced within the text.

Like many of his novels, this deals with narrative, lan...more

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Nov 19, 2010 Charles Dee Mitchell rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: mid-century-sf

An enjoyable short novel, although I am not sure that I understood the end, or that you are particularly expected to. In a far future earth, mutations are so common that villages are divided between functional and non-functionals, the former suited for a productive life and the latter kept in "kages" until they meet most often early deaths. Lobey and Friza are both functional, but in addition they are "different," distinguished by extrasensory powers that also mark them for death at the hands of...more

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Oct 10, 2012 Josiah rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I ripped through this slim tome in record time and really enjoyed every moment of it. After reading Dhalgren, this felt like a cakewalk. There are many of the same themes, recounted in a sort of journey of self-discovery. This far future has earth as a husk of its former self, with society concerned foremost with its genetic mix. Radiation levels mean that the idea of normal has skewed, with the occasional good mutation competing with many more that are not. The functional types are accorded sta...more I ripped through this slim tome in record time and really enjoyed every moment of it. After reading Dhalgren, this felt like a cakewalk. There are many of the same themes, recounted in a sort of journey of self-discovery. This far future has earth as a husk of its former self, with society concerned foremost with its genetic mix. Radiation levels mean that the idea of normal has skewed, with the occasional good mutation competing with many more that are not. The functional types are accorded status depending on how closely they approach what is considered the norm, with the dysfunctional consigned to the "kage." Interestingly to me, that no matter where the main character went, desert, forest, or city, the idea of the kage was always there. Further, there was an interesting conceit that these inhabitants were not human, that they had taken up the work and even bodies of long lost mankind. I never felt that this idea was followed through sufficiently - even the characters seemed confused by it, with several bringing it up as a way to argue for or against something, but never very consistently. Between this and the endless mutations, Delany has plenty of material to mull over what it means to be human. Then he weaves in themes from Greek myths, lyrics from Beatles songs, death and love and strangeness in equal measure. Be warned that Delany never slows the pace of the more or less rambling stream of conscious first person narrative to explain things to the reader. Be patient and most things get explained along the way even without any outside exposition. There are, however, chapters, and at this beginning of each there are quotes from the likes of Joyce, Genet, Dylan, Aloysius Bertrand, Thomas Chatterton, and perhaps most insightfully, Delany himself taken ostensibly from his own journal. A novel this short can't possibly develop everything that Delany is stuffing into it, but this gives it a sense of being barely contained, of a world that is much larger than the borders of the book covers. Only the second book by Delany that I've read, I will be seeking more in the future.(less)

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Apr 22, 2012 Sridatta rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2012, sci-fi, fantasy, awesome-2012

Before hopping onto this book like any self-respecting Goodreads member I went through some reviews across internet. When I found most of them starting with sentences like “I don’t know what to say about this book”, I wondered if they were collectively numbed into unoriginality. After reading this book myself, I gotta admit that there is actually nothing else to say. This one is ridiculously weird. The setting of the post-apocalyptic world reminded me of “The Canticle for Leibowitz”, but the com...more

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Sep 16, 2009 Jeff rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: science-fiction

++++++++++++++++++++
Sep '09: i discovered a bunch of my What Do I Read Next? reviews from the mid-90s when i was on a serious SF-canon reading tear (and, apparently, averse to capital letters).
++++++++++++++++++++

Plot Summary: humans have become extinct or have moved on to other worlds and aliens have taken over our corporal forms; as such, the sentient beings of this time/location relive all the myths/legends/archetypes of interaction that plague/define human existence; identity for individu...more

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Aug 13, 2011 Stephanie A. Higa rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Delany is totally fascinating. His hallucinogenic style, his obsession with orgies, his anti-transitions, which make you think you must have gotten knocked out for at least a few seconds...fascinating. But I think it's difficult to say how good he really is. Yes, he expresses such deep ideas in such beautiful language, but what does this mean? Do I like him because he is actually legitimately good or because his writing makes me feel all fuzzy inside, like the world finally makes sense? It doesn...more

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Mar 09, 2009 Jessica rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: another-country, another-planet, another-time, apocalyptic-post-apocalyptic, aliens-or-magic-animals, incest

I give some Samuel Delany books 4 stars where I would give someone else 5, but only to be able to distinguish the whole-nother-plane ones like the einstein intersection, which gets its eerie effect by literalizing the impression that one's culture and language sometimes feel as though they might be a strange dead shell left by another people in another place. it uses that classic scifi trick that, in this alien world that humans colonized, the thing we refer to as a "dog" may turn out have spine...more

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Sep 08, 2011 Fungus Gnat rated it 3 of 5 stars

It is Earth, some ambiguous thousands of years after man has blown the coop for other worlds, and a new race has discovered the planet, populating it and living its mundane village and city lives and its fantastic myths – or, as well as it can, given the pounding it is taking from residual radioactivity. Our hero is Lobey, a young man, or something like one, with prehensile feet and toes and a way to get music out of a machete. Lobey is a village resident and sometime goatherd who falls in love...more It is Earth, some ambiguous thousands of years after man has blown the coop for other worlds, and a new race has discovered the planet, populating it and living its mundane village and city lives and its fantastic myths – or, as well as it can, given the pounding it is taking from residual radioactivity. Our hero is Lobey, a young man, or something like one, with prehensile feet and toes and a way to get music out of a machete. Lobey is a village resident and sometime goatherd who falls in love with a dark local girl and then loses her when she is killed. In revenge, he sets off to kill whatever killed her. This triggers an odyssey that develops as something of an Orpheus story, but whether it ends that way or not depends on how you interpret events, which unfold in typical, or even more than typical, Delanyan confusion as the end nears.

Some of the strengths of this story seem also to be its weaknesses, a view I bet Delany would appreciate. Delany minimizes explanation, a bugbear of the SF novel whose clumsiness even stultifies Delany’s dialogue when he indulges to the extent he does. However, a tete-a-tete sidebar might have been useful from time to time to shed light on questions such as why the alien race feels it necessary to inhabit human myths. (view spoiler) Does he realize that love is, as the epigraphic quote from Ortega y Gasset says, a mistake – a projection of imagined perfections onto someone else?

But as Neil Gaiman says in his introduction (and, for once, an intro to a classic SF novel that is not fatuous), part of the book’s magic lies in the ambiguity. This almost gets me there, but I don’t feel quite enough of the magic. Some of it is probably supposed to be in the poetic writing, but the book is so dense with poetic monosyllabic Anglo-Saxonisms like “The hills’ rim had begun to gray,” and “Dazed, I punched rain from my eyes,” that it begins to seem like an affect. What is it doing coming out of the mouth of a first-person narrator one of whose attractions is the same kind of folksy speech as Jewel spoke in "Empire Star"?

And speaking of Ortega y Gasset, what about all those epigraphs? Several adorn the first page of each “chapter,” or unnumbered, unlabeled piece of the book. Most of them seem tangential – challenges whose relation to the text are left as exercises to the reader. But they all have some evocative or entertainment value, which Delany’s quotes from his own “writer’s journal” do not. Those, together with the avowed presence of Orpheus, Christ, and Billy-the-Kid figures combine with some of the prose to impose on this slim volume more weight than it can handle.

But what can I say? It held my interest, I like an unusual turn of phrase, and puzzles intrigue me. I’m tempted to re-read it, and see if I can figure out which of the portentous assertions, or demurrals to make assertions, are really meaningful in context of the whole global story, and not just material dropped in because it sounds good locally.

(less)

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Apr 12, 2009 Manny rated it 3 of 5 stars

Psychedelic 60s SF version of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, quite nicely done. The Orpheus character is sympathetic and well-realized, as is his demonic opponent, Kid Death. Eurydice is suitably beautiful, tragic and mysterious, but doesn't have much of a personality. Not a serious problem, however, since she's dead for most of the book.

6 likes · like · see review

Feb 12, 2011 Keith rated it 1 of 5 stars

Sorry, but I just don't get this book at all.

It seems to have been writen during that weird 60s psychedelic period, when spouting nonsense was in fashion!

I haven't the foggiest why this book is so feted: the plot (sic) goes no where, and you find yourself completely disinterested in the fate of Lobby; the book's central character.

I haven't quite reached the end yet, about another twenty pages to go, and to be honest the only reason I am bothering to finish it, is because it is such a short book....more

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Nov 02, 2009 Maya Panika rated it 2 of 5 stars

The imagery was brilliant, the descriptive quality, the inner-mind of Lo Lobey, stunning but the story…? It was prettily told but it would have helped if I’d known what the heck was going on.

Even knowing the background, the central core of thought that underlies this story of an alien people trying to make a new culture on a ruined Earth, long abandoned by humanity, using human myth to make sense of their lives, the plot consistently failed to make sense.

I know many – including, apparently, Ne...more

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Apr 22, 2013 pjreads ♫ rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: prize-winner-listed, sf-fantasy, classics, best-first-lines

Best first paragraph:

"There is a hollow, holey cylinder running from hilt to point in my machete. When I blow across the mouthpiece in the handle, I make music with my blade. When all the holes are covered, the sound is sad, as rough as rough can be and be called smooth. When all the holes are open, the sound pipes about, bringing to the eye flakes of sun on water, crushed metal. There are twenty holes. And since I have been playing music I've been called all different kinds of fool--more times

...more

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Mar 11, 2012 Chris rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: science-fiction

Without a doubt, one of the strangest, oddest, least complete, slightly unacessible, and most thought-provoking SF novels I've ever read. I had a hard time wrapping a review around it, so here goes.

Humanity has abandoned Earth long ago; it’s been inherited by a group of aliens with malleable genetics, struggling to retain a unified physical norm in the wake of run-amok mutation. They even adapt titles, Lo, La, and Le, to signify a “functional” male, female, or androgyne. Non-functionals—those to...more Without a doubt, one of the strangest, oddest, least complete, slightly unacessible, and most thought-provoking SF novels I've ever read. I had a hard time wrapping a review around it, so here goes.

Humanity has abandoned Earth long ago; it’s been inherited by a group of aliens with malleable genetics, struggling to retain a unified physical norm in the wake of run-amok mutation. They even adapt titles, Lo, La, and Le, to signify a “functional” male, female, or androgyne. Non-functionals—those too mutated to pass as normal—are cared for in an enclosure until they succumb to their deformities, taking them out of the gene pool.

But many traces of humanity remain; its myths have survived and become subverted—its protagonist parallels that of Orpheus, it features an allegorical Billy the Kid—and the world of myth has expanded: the Beatles turn into a legend of Greek proportion, the population believes in the great rock and the great roll, Elvis is a replacement epithet in for God. Like with many other SF stories from the same era, it reads like a psychedelic far-future fantasy, moreso because this novel blends so many mythological elements and allegories into its story-arc.

Lo Lobey is a shepherd in one rural village, a functional with hand-like feet and a musical machete-flute. He falls in love with Friza, a barely functional girl with secret telekinetic powers; one fine day, when he’s out shepherding with her, she dies under mysterious circumstances. In this world steeped in mythology and tradition, the village elders decide the crestfallen Lobey is filling the role of Orpheus (also, Ringo Starr), so he’s sent out to reclaim the dead Friza; the hope is he won’t make the mistake Orpheus did, and Lobey won’t turn around at the last second and lose his Eurydice. It turns out both Friza and Lobey are differents, as in, evolved super-mutants; Lobey can sense the music within a person, and can recreate it with his musical flutechete.

Along the way, he meets Kid Death, Friza’s killer, who prods Lobey along as he flings chiding discouragement; Spider the dragon herder; PHAEDRA, AI oracle of a dead past; the Dove, eternal sex-symbol; Green-Eye, a mute different undergoing a long-dead race’s ritual; and a bunch of other people (plus things!) not listed on the back cover which I’m not going to give away. For the most part, this is a journey tale, taking place in an ornate, far-flung future, a melting pot of Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces, 1960s pop culture, literary leitmotifs, and the baroque far-future wasteland of Jack Vance’s Dying Earth or Cordwainer Smith’s Norstrilia.

The novel feels modern, with an array of deep concepts entwined with metafictional surrealism—snippets from the author’s journal, parenthetical footnotes from Lobey to further detail his narrative. Come to think of it, it feels more postmodern than modern (literary joke, nod and smile). The analogues to Greek myth and the hero-journey are unavoidable; the roles of myth, heroes, and stories are all examined. The parallels are surface-level and frequent, from the elders’ early retelling of the myths of Ringo and Orpheus, to Lobey’s fight with a bull-headed mutant biped as part of his first training steps on his journey to reclaim Friza. There’s a strong theme of language and mathematics, though I’m not the best candidate to go into those; the novel’s title comes from the intersection where Einstein’s theory of relativity (realism and logic) crosses Gödel’s incompleteness theorem (irrationality).

But the novel’s macro-scale focus is difference, playing out in a future of mutant aliens possessing psionic powers (and more), struggling to keep the sense of “normalcy” left to them by their human precursors. You can read it as an allegory for nonconformity, perhaps, or the more obvious connotations it has for gender or ethnicity or sexuality—Delany self-identified as gay. In any case, it deals with the Other; in fact, a whole world of Others, clinging to a concept of normalcy and the self idealized by a foregone and vanished mankind. There’s a chill irony about a race of aliens taking on human husks, clinging to our faded memories, then trying to retain our aesthetic ideals of form; as they mutate and diversify, so does their concept of “functional” normalcy.

If my armchair psychology paints the book as dull or stodgy, that’s not my intent; it’s very accessible and engaging, never stopping you dead and beating you with grandiose concepts. Rather, it raises issues that crop up often enough to make you ponder, later, what the author is getting across; it’s sometimes frustrating to spot its intellectual discourse, its brilliance, and ponder through Delany’s insinuations in fits and grasps as you surmount its slopes. (I’ve seen several people say, as a compliment, that reading Delany makes them feel like their IQ is bleeding away; the novel aims to fly over the reader’s head, and not everyone likes that feeling of being out of their depth.) The novel never talks down to you—though you can accuse it of being pretentious, Delany being a self-proclaimed child prodigy—nor does it stoop to long, dry monologues of explanation: it’s all here, ready and eager to be read, but the explanations are not clear or laid-out.

On the back cover, Judith Merril—then editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, the most literary of all the SF digest magazines—proclaimed Delany “comparable only to [Theodore] Sturgeon, [J.G.] Ballard, Vonnegut, and Cordwainer Smith.” Merril’s comparison is on target, in that the work is of staggering poetic and literary genius… so much so that comparing existing ’60s literary SF poets like Bradbury or Sturgeon to Delany is like comparing victorious Olympic athletes to a Greek god. Delany, with seemingly effortless ease, transcends genre conventions and SF expectations. He holds many secrets to his chest in The Einstein Intersection, and is slow to play his cards. Even when he does so, their greater meaning is often left to you to decipher. The result is a cerebral, clever novel—perhaps too clever for its own good. Within its pages, you can see the rise of science fiction’s heady, insightful, and game-changing New Wave... expanding the boundaries of SF not in creative setting or prophetic science, but, as this book does, in vision, style, and literary technique.

(Full review found here.)(less)

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Feb 08, 2012 Scott Harris rated it 3 of 5 stars

This is one of those science fiction reads that takes almost as much to dissect as to read. In fact, it is very short - a novella - and the environment is so foreign that it takes time to get oriented, only to have the landscape change once again. It is however a playful book that presumes, in an almost Jungian way, that our myths and experiences write themselves into our future - or in this case an alien future - as archetypes and shadows. The playfulness occurs not only in having the character...more

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Dec 16, 2012 Chris rated it 3 of 5 stars

The Einstein Intersection is about Lo Lobey, a psychic music player who lives in a future Earth and travels from a small community to a city called ‘Branning-at-sea’. He seeks to resurrect his lover, Friza, and take revenge on Kid Death, a figure who may not be the person Lobey thinks he is.

This is a futuristic retelling of the Orpheus myth with Lobey regaling us, the readers of the past, with his exploits in the future. Lobey encounters dragons and mystics and technology from our time. Delany’s...more

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Apr 07, 2012 Matthew Hunter rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: science-fiction

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. What just happened? Is "The Einstein Intersection" the work of a genius or a drug-addled madman? By giving it the Nebula award in 1967, the powers that be appear to lump Delany in the genius category. I'm in the Delany-as-madman camp. I far from enjoyed the book for a number of reasons.

Delany's pop cultural references and sources were lost on me. Jean Harlow's name triggers nothing. And since I've never seen "Black Orpheus," a source of inspiration for Lobey's character and journey, I failed to...more What just happened? Is "The Einstein Intersection" the work of a genius or a drug-addled madman? By giving it the Nebula award in 1967, the powers that be appear to lump Delany in the genius category. I'm in the Delany-as-madman camp. I far from enjoyed the book for a number of reasons.

Delany's pop cultural references and sources were lost on me. Jean Harlow's name triggers nothing. And since I've never seen "Black Orpheus," a source of inspiration for Lobey's character and journey, I failed to grasp much of what Delany was trying to accomplish. Would knowledge of Ringo Starr really be interesting to an alien civilization 30,000 years into the future? Nope. For me, such references make "The Einstein Intersection" a dated work linked too directly to it's own decade to be considered a great work.

And don't get me started on the quotes at the beginning of each chapter. Delaney includes long excerpts from his own travel log, lyrics to Dylan songs, snippets from Erasmus and Joyce, even Pepsi ad jingles. In addition to feeling self-indulgent and pretentious to me, these chapter intros go even further in dating the work.

Despite the book being (at least in my opinion) nonsensical, overly dense and self-indulgent, I did enjoy Delany's creative description of the societal implications of blowing past the intersection point of Einstein's and Gödel's mathematics:

"Two mathematicians between them ended an age and began another for our hosts, the ghosts called Man. One was Einstein, who with his Theory of Relativity defined the limits of man's perception by expressing mathematically just how far the condition of the observer influences the thing he perceives. ... The other was Gödel, a contemporary of Einstein, who was the first to bring back a mathematically precise statement about the vaster realm beyond the limits Einstein had defined: In any classical mathematical system - you may read 'the real world with its immutable laws of logic' - there are an infinite number of true theorems - you may read 'perceivable, measurable phenomena' - which, though contained in the original system, cannot be deduced from it - read 'proven with ordinary or extraordinary logic.' Which is to say, there are more things in heaven and Earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy, ... . There are an infinite number of true things in the world with no way of ascertaining their truth. ... The visible effects of the Einstein theory leaped up on a convex curve, its productions huge in the first century after its discovery, then leveling off. The productions of Gödel's law crept up on a concave curve, microscopic at first, then leaping to equal the Einstein curve, cross it, outstrip it. At the point of intersection, humanity was able to reach the limits of the known universe with ships and projection forces that are still available to anyone who wants to use them ... and when the line of Gödel's law eagled over Einstein's, its shadow fell on a deserted Earth."

According to Delaney, humanity had broken the bonds of the rational, moved into to realm of infinite possibility, and what? Left earth behind? Become gods? Experienced a form of rapture? Become extinct? We aren't told the exact fate of humanity. But the revolutions brewing in Branning-at-sea show that the alien race wants to experience the mind-blowing potential of the limitless. Conservative forces of order hold the Einstein line. Will Gödel win again? Sounds interesting doesn't it? Unfortunately, Delany's writing style has managed to sap all the joy out of my life. In the end, I don't care what happens. Two stars for you!
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Jan 23, 2012 Sara rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

So much fun discussing this book with Think Galactic! There's a broad narrative where Lobey is on a quest to bring his love back from the dead, but Delaney's multi-layered writing and meanings seep out all over. This is a great book to ruminate over with others - we each brought our pieces of knowledge and insight about myths, beliefs, science... And the details are lovely - a flute (with 20 holes, not 10, since Lobey plays with his hands and his feet) that is also a weapon, carnivorous flowers...more

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Feb 08, 2012 Pedro León rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Lo compré porque estaba de oferta y el título me llamó la atención, pero me ha gustado bastante. Se llevó un Nébula en el 1968. Me imagino que para aquella época fue un tema muy nuevo. Para nosotros ya no tanto, pero el tratamiento es curioso. Trata sobre lo que quedará de la humanidad después de una catástrofe nuclear-medioambiental. La forma en que escribe Samuel R. Delany me ha recordado a William Gibson, salvando las distancias, claro.

Recomiendo leer el libro en una o dos sentadas porque de...more

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Apr 22, 2011 yengyeng rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: prescribedreading, otherworldly

And with this text, the SF journey thus began. I love this book so much I have 2 copies!

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Feb 06, 2013 Kiv rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 300-pages-per-week, nebula-winners

Like many others, I don't exactly have a full grasp of everything that went on in this short little work. What I can say, though, is that it made me feel a large range of emotions quite powerfully. I have read many of Delany's books, and every time I find myself swept away in his beautiful words. He has a distinct style of describing things that seems so deeply human, it's hard to ignore, even if you're not sure what you're reading. At least, that's how I always feel. All in all, I really enjoye...more

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About Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Ray Delany, also known as "Chip," is an award-winning American science fiction author. He was born to a prominent black family on April 1, 1942, and raised in Harlem. His mother, Margaret Carey Boyd Delany, was a library clerk in the New York Public Library system. His father, Samuel Ray Delany, Senior, ran a successful Harlem undertaking establishment, Levy & Delany Funeral Home, on 7t...more Samuel Ray Delany, also known as "Chip," is an award-winning American science fiction author. He was born to a prominent black family on April 1, 1942, and raised in Harlem. His mother, Margaret Carey Boyd Delany, was a library clerk in the New York Public Library system. His father, Samuel Ray Delany, Senior, ran a successful Harlem undertaking establishment, Levy & Delany Funeral Home, on 7th Avenue, between 1938 and his death in 1960. The family lived in the top two floors of the three-story private house between five- and six-story Harlem apartment buildings. Delany's aunts were Sadie and Bessie Delany; Delany used some of their adventures as the basis for the adventures of his characters Elsie and Corry in the opening novella Atlantis: Model 1924 in his book of largely autobiographical stories Atlantis: Three Tales.

Delany attended the Dalton School and the Bronx High School of Science, during which he was selected to attend Camp Rising Sun, the Louis August Jonas Foundation's international summer scholarship program. Delany and poet Marilyn Hacker met in high school, and were married in 1961. Their marriage lasted nineteen years. They had a daughter, Iva Hacker-Delany (b. 1974), who spent a decade working in theater in New York City.

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 eleventh and most popular novel, Dhalgren, was published in 1975. 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, gay, and highly dyslexic writer, including his Hugo award winning autobiography, The Motion of Light in Water.

Since 1988, Delany has been a professor at several universities. This includes eleven 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. He 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. In one of his non-fiction books, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999), he draws on personal experience to examine the relationship between the effort to redevelop Times Square and the public sex lives of working-class men, gay and straight, in New York City.

In 2007, Delany was the subject of a documentary film, The Polymath, or, The Life and Opinions of Samuel R. Delany, Gentleman. The film debuted on April 25 at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival.(less)

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