Empire

by Samuel R. Delany, Howard Chaykin (Illustrator)

Delany, Samuel R. / Chaykin, Howard V. Empire - A Visual Novel [Graphic Novel]. [An Incredible New Science Fiction Novel by Samuel R.Delany [Author of 'Dhalgren'] and Howard V. Chaykin [Illustrator of 'Star Wars']. No. 408 of a signed, limited edition of 1500 copies. New York, Byron Preiss Visual Publications, 1978. Folio. 114 unnumbered pages with many illustrations. Original Hardcover with original dustjacket in protective collector's mylar. Excellent condition with only minor signs of external wear.

Genres: Comics, Science Fiction, Graphic Novels, Fiction

112 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1978

About the author

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.

Reviews

[Jordan West · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5; impressive art, with every panel painted, matched with a narrative that would have been much successful if rendered in the form of a conventional novel or much longer multi-volume comic series; as is it feels truncated by its form, and despite the innovative presentation ultimately can't transcend being a fairly standard space opera partially redeemed by self-awareness and some clever touches.

[Aaron · Rating 4 out of 5]

Glorious, technicolor nonsense. I love Delany without reserve, so I'm fully on board for this, his most manic stab at planet-hopping space opera—even as the prose skids toward the ludicrous zone. Dig this piece of pivotal exposition:

"Restore the Meta-Max, place it in the Central Information Flow that runs, like a living organism's obstetric seam, through Ice's giant structure, and it will be carried to the structural fulcrum: furnace and phallus, heart and womb. The whole will totalize, toppling outward, destroyed by the seven catastrophes at work on the structure's own entropic equilibrium's insistence. Thus the Kūndūke's Information control will end."

Now set that to some seriously groovy hand painted visuals, and you've got yourself a party among the stars. Recommended, if you can find a copy.

[StrictlySequential · Rating 4 out of 5]

*All 3 paperback editions listed are the same thing*

The similarities with Star Wars are PROFOUND and, because they written at the same time, there's no telling who stole what from the other.

It's SHOCKING how similar the two are- they tell the same story with the same characters, settings and technology except instead of "A Long Time Ago... "Empire" takes place in the 63rd century. Of course they don't have the same faces and everything else has a different look but there is even a female "rebel" with the ()[ ]() Leia hair-buns.

HVC did the art for BOTH too! The profound DIFFERENCE is that he used pencils (I'm pretty sure someone inked him) for the Marvel adaptation of Star Wars while this is 100% HVC painted. BEAUTIFULLY. He did over 300 panels that are close to the best of Chaykin, to my eyes, and I've read almost all of his best stuff.

One of the reasons Star Wars was such a success was it's simplicity and familiarity. Georgel did a BRILLIANT cut and paste job from a wide range of literature and, with some spice of his own, fabricated a MASTERPIECE. Personally "The Empire Strikes Back" is my favorite but that takes NOTHING away from it's predecessor.

I brought that up because THIS BOOK- "Empire" is best explained, as is anything, by comparison to something that is tremendously familiar.

Empire, to its individual credit, goes significantly farther intellectually. I'm not going into it because that would take a too long so I'll leave you, WITH MY RECOMMENDATION TO READ THIS and something to think about: instead of the Death Star, the young man has to "blow up" all the crystallized information the bad guys keep hostage from the idea-cleansed planets they rule.

[Steve Boose · Rating 4 out of 5]

My grandfather knew I loved comic books and was getting into weightier things and picked this up for me when I was about eight. Every time I went over to his house for the next five years, I spent at least a little while immersed in its beauty. Eventually, the book was lost somehow, some way, and I picked up another copy several years later.

It's not a perfect book. It's a transition between a novel and a comic book, with a story that jumps like a movie in some ways. The fashions demonstrated by the characters have that blend of future and present - bell-bottom pants and big glasses being just two of the most notable points! And computers were not what they are now, so something like the MetaMax isn't what we'd think of today as a computerized interface.

But take it for what it is, put it in its place in time, and let it be beautiful...

I don't think you'll be disappointed!

[David Merrill · Rating 3 out of 5]

Samuel R. Delany is one of my favorite writers. This is an older work at this point, but from the heyday of some of my favorites by him, so I had high hopes for it. I didn't find it to be the best of his work. I don't think he was used to working in this form, though he had written a couple of Wonder Woman issues. It wasn't an awful story, but it was choppy, which I'm not used to from Delany. The art didn't work well. I think there were problems with the paper and ink combination. Either that or the plates weren't properly made because there were times when words were supposed to knock out from the picture, but it didn't work. There were whole paragraphs I couldn't read. The art was muddy (maybe problems with the coloring?) It made it tough to tell one person from another at times. The names didn't help this. I had trouble connecting them to their characters. For some reason, the publisher didn't want to use speech bubbles or anything to set the text off from the art. This made it difficult to follow what should be read when and difficult to find the text. Sometimes it was at the top of the picture, sometimes at the bottom and sometimes inside. Using a more traditional comic book format would have helped a lot. All of this resulted in the waste of a format larger than usual for comics. That can be wonderful if handled properly (Marvel Treasury Editions). In this case, the larger format, with words only at the extremes of the page for the most part, became a hindrance to taking in the story. I think this was just a bad combination of writer, artist and publisher. All have done much better work.

[Mike · Rating 3 out of 5]

I applaud Delany and Chaykin's attempt to tell a more sophisticated science-fiction story in a graphic novel format in 1978, a time when comics were largely considered a juvenile medium. However, I can't help but think this particular story would have been better if it was told in a prose format, rather than the attenuated treatment it gets here. Alternately, this story could have been told in several volumes, to give it adequate time to develop.

Some aspects of the story borrow heavily from classics of the genre, like "Dune" and the "Foundation" books. There are some similarities to "Star Wars," as well, although this may be mere coincidence. Delany states in his foreword that he wrote "Empire" before Star Wars was released.

One significant difference in this case is the fact that the titular galactic empire controls not through mere force of arms and intimidation, but also through a vast effort to control all sources of knowledge and information. Unfortunately, the plot careens haphazardly from one point to the next, moving at breakneck pace, with little explanation of the main characters' quest to assemble an lost artifact to break the Empire's oppression of thousands of worlds. How or why this artifact works is not adequately explained, and this interesting aspect of the story is poorly developed before the story hurtles to what feels like a premature conclusion.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a fun read.

I think the basic story would probably have been stronger if Delany had written it as a regular novel.

It's kind of funny how defensive the cover copy is about this being a serious "novel." (Comics and graphic novels can be great, serious, and legit, but their value doesn't come from the similarity to traditional prose novels, it comes specifically from them doing something different.)

There's an interesting point in Delany's intro about how our language is rooted in planetary gravity, specifically with "up/down" and "high/low" connoting "more/less" and "better/worse"

[Joachim Boaz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Full review: https://sciencefictionruminations.com...

"Art: 4.5/5 (Very Good) + Story: 2.5/5 (Bad)

If you enjoy more experimental comic books/graphic novels, then Samuel R. Delany and Howard V. Chaykin’s flawed Empire (1978) might be for you. If you enjoy Delany’s fiction, I can’t solidly recommend it for the story itself. Empire (1978) is an epic adventure across fantastic worlds pulsating with visual flare, a half-hearted" [...]

[Sean · Rating 3 out of 5]

Maybe 3.5

[Charles · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a very early graphic novel, and while interesting, I found it flawed. It was difficult to follow at times, and in several cases during the reading I kept turning back and forth between pages to see if I had missed a page where the action just jumped from one place to another with no transitions. Since the book has no page numbers, it may be possible that my copy is missing some pages. But some of the troubled transitions occurred on a single page so that isn't the whole problem. There were quite a few interesting ideas in the work, though.

I'm setting it to today, which marks when I reread it. I first read it probably in the 1980s.

[Erik Wirfs-Brock · Rating 3 out of 5]

A curiosity from the seventies, two great talents colliding for something less than great but still intesting. Basically a bunch of action scenes strung together with a bit of Delaney philosophical sf, hampered by the fact that most like most painted comics there is not a lot of sequential flow, and that for soeme reason they wanted to not use speech bubbles. Still worth reading though as sort of a proto adult comic book.

[Cary Lee Baker · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bought this book because of Howard Chaykin and just to see the man's fantastic artwork. Have not read any Delaney (I have Dhalgren on the bookshelf) books but this was a good story.