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Dhalgren

by Samuel R. Delany

3.83 · rating details · 2,049 ratings · 284 reviews

In Dhalgren, perhaps one of the most profound and bestselling science fiction novels of all time, Samuel R. Delany has produced a novel "to stand with the best American fiction of the 1970s" (Jonathan Lethem).

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 po...more

Paperback, 816 pages

Published May 15th 2001 by Vintage (first published 1974)

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Feb 17, 2008

Stevelvis rated it

Shelves: favorites

Dhalgren, by Samuel R Delany, has been my favorite book since I first read it in 1979. I have read it twice more since then and every time I've read it I got something different out of it. I've given the book away as gifts to several people but I don't think any of them appreciated it (oh well).

I recommend that y'all go to Amazon and read some of the reviews of Dhalgren there. It is interesting to read the long positive reviews by the "smart" people and it's also a laugh...moreDhalgren, by Samuel R Delany, has been my favorite book since I first read it in 1979. I have read it twice more since then and every time I've read it I got something different out of it. I've given the book away as gifts to several people but I don't think any of them appreciated it (oh well).

I recommend that y'all go to Amazon and read some of the reviews of Dhalgren there. It is interesting to read the long positive reviews by the "smart" people and it's also a laugh to read the negative reviews by the people who just didn't get it or who were offended by its explicit sexuality. It seems that everyone there either gives it a 5-star rating or a 1-star rating with a note saying they'd give it no stars if possible.

I have found Dhalgren to be many things, mostly it's a search for self-identity by the main character, both in wanting to know his real name (other characters call him Kid or The Kid), and in finding out who he is through love, power and fame. It is an exploration of societal values, contrasting hippies in the city park to roving street gangs, each with their own hierarchy or power structure. It's an exploration of "family" with Kid and his triangle relationship with two lovers, a gay teenager and a straight woman, contrasted with an apartment building family for whom Kid does some work. And it's also a review of art, religion, friendship, sex, violence, and organization in the midst of anarchy. If New Orleans had simply been entirely walled off and forgotten after hurricane Katrina, then this is perhaps what it may have become. Add to that image elements of a disjointed acid trip through 1960s San Francisco and voila, you have Dhalgren.

It is a lesson in different writing styles, from the psychedelic writing that begins the book to the uber-realism in the middle and the anarchic scribbling in the margins at the end of the book and finally returning to the beginning in a literary moebius loop. And with almost 900 pages of small font in paperback, there are a lot of words.

Dhalgren is my favorite book of all time and I'm planning on reading it at least one more time before I die.... but there are so many books and so little time. If you like Dhalgren, you should definitely read Triton, which I have also read three times. Delany's autobiographical books Heavenly Breakfast and especially The Motion of Light In Water will show you how the author has actually lived a lot of what he has written. If you like his psychedelic writing style you should read Equinox although it is better described as a very kinky book of psychedelic pornography. His Neveryon series is of the fantasy genre and therefore doesn't compare to his science fiction writing style, although those books do continue his explorations of sex, sexuality, and power in social relationships. My favorite book in the Neveryon series was The Bridge of Lost Desire which was released during the very early years of AIDS and was the first popular novel to address the issue in its storyline. There are a few books written by Delany that I just don't like, for example Mad Man, but I do recommend absolutely everything he wrote from the early 1960s to the mid 1980s.

Fans of Delany should also read Sherri S Tepper, Octavia Butler, James Tiptree Jr (real name Alice Sheldon), Ursula K LeGuin, Melissa Scott, Nancy Kress....
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Jun 05, 2007

Michael Alexander rated it

Recommends it for: pomos, queer theorists, 60s counterculture obsessees, open minded SF fans, joycean techno-dreamers

This book is a whole world, part of the constellation of works that help me navigate my intellectual life. It's about the 60s, but it's also about metafiction, about solitude, and about that strange feeling when the dull and the surreal merge (late, late at night. when life has gotten one step too strange. when one more trudge down the street puts you into a reverie where you feel utterly lost).

In it, a nameless guy with a faulty memory (that's why he's nameless--though otherwise his...moreThis book is a whole world, part of the constellation of works that help me navigate my intellectual life. It's about the 60s, but it's also about metafiction, about solitude, and about that strange feeling when the dull and the surreal merge (late, late at night. when life has gotten one step too strange. when one more trudge down the street puts you into a reverie where you feel utterly lost).

In it, a nameless guy with a faulty memory (that's why he's nameless--though otherwise his recall is excellent, he forgets vast stretches of time and loses days, weeks, even years of his life) who gets called the Kid steps into a bizarre city where something has happened to bring its population down to 1,000 or so misfits who don't do much but gossip, the sky is covered in strange clouds and you never see the sun, two moons appear at night, and time sometimes runs differently for different people. He's searching for his name, and also something else, but his memory is so bad that he can't even remember that much. He finds a journal, snippets of which seem to tell his own story in advance, and starts to write his own story in the marginalia. He joins gangs, has lots and lots of unusual sex before and during his membership in a curious and sort of unsettling poly triad, becomes a poet but might just be plagiarizing the journal, and basically becomes the mythic center of everyone's life by sheer accident. Like Finnegans Wake, it has a sentence that wraps the end back into the beginning, and just like that book, there's a really strong reason to do so. As much as anything, though, it just has some gorgeous descriptions and an incredible mood, not to mention some musings on solitude, the mythologization of life, and the creation of art that are really cool.

Not to be forgotten, and precisely the fulcrum where Delany was writing both in and out of the genre pigeonhole from every direction he could. Fantastic, and neither as sometimes clunky as his earlier work or didactic as his later work (not that I don't love both, in their own ways). This one, he's content to just let be, in all its 800 page glory.(less)

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Feb 27, 2011

Kernos rated it

· review of another edition

Shelves: science-fiction, fiction-classics, favorite-books-re-read

to wound the autumnal city ... I have come to

Dhalgren is the

Unreal City
Under the brown fog of a winter noon
—TS Elliot

This is a difficult book to review, difficult to put one's thought's and feelings into words, the written word is perhaps insufficient to the task (a meme of this novel, I think). Following are some random thoughts.

Overall I found it engaging, for reasons I cannot express; I was compelled to get back to reading, as compelled, perhaps as The Ki...more

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May 03, 2007

Ben rated it

Recommends it for: the adventurous and not-easily-frustrated

Shelves: favorites

It's tough to review a favorite book, especially when it's a book that almost completely changed the way you view literature. But I suppose it's worth a shot.

Dhalgren is a glorious mess, but that's not to say that it lacks structure. In fact, I wrote my senior thesis in undergrad on the narrative structure of the novel, and upon close examination it's stunning just how carefully put together the whole thing is. Everyone knows that it's an imperfectly closed loop, but few really under...more

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Dec 09, 2010

Sherri rated it

Shelves: science-fiction, personal-classics

I've read this book three times since I first discovered Delany at the tender age of 17. Images from the book are now built into my brain and it stands as a sort of monolithic representation of...I'm not sure what, but other books I read are held up next to this one for comparison.

The book itself is a kind of dream, a long, complex, not understood dream, a thing of images and scents, faces and noises, open to interpretation but never quite pinned down. It's a difficult book in some...more

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May 18, 2007

Ash rated it

Shelves: sci-fi, fiction

Dhalgren is a terrible work of genius. By that, I mean that the mechanical writing of the text is brilliant and falls into the category of masterpiece. It is also a terribly dull read.

The structure of the novel is amazing: the narrative loops, the integration of mythology, the accurate portrayal of psychosis, the dazzling postmodern language, etc. Absolutely stunning work.

Of course, the characters are unbelievably boring, the story is filled with lots of meaningless babb...more

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Mar 26, 2008

Dan rated it

Recommends it for: fans of sci-fi literature who I'm not worried will think I'm a pervert

Recommended to Dan by: Chris

I read this book because my home boy Buer from high school recommended it. And then my old roomie Jimbo gave me his copy of this book at his wedding. The conversation went like this:

Me: "I'll get this back to you when I'm done reading it."
Jim: "That won't be necessary. I never want to see this book again."

Quite ominous... The copy of the book I read had a forward by William Gibson. He is one of my favorite authors, and he cited this book as ...more

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Sep 13, 2010

Avani rated it

I passionately hated this book. The additional star is for some neat Greco-Roman allusions, but that's pretty much the only saving grace. This book has been called a "riddle that was never meant to be solved" and that pretty much sums up what makes it so awful. It's stream of consciousness drivel without a consistent direction. It is Joyce without the writing skill and Keats without the poetry. In short, you've been warned.

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Feb 15, 2008

David rated it

Recommends it for: Tosh, W

The great gay hippie masterpiece. A vision of urban life as an alternate universe. Seductive. Drug-like. Perfect.

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Jul 24, 2011

DoctorM rated it

I read a lot of Samuel R. Delany's sci-fi when I was young, and all the way up through "Einstein Intersection" (aka "A Fabulous, Formless Darkness") and "Nova", I loved his work. Yet...somewhere around "Triton" he went badly off the rails. The same kind of thing happened to Piers Anthony and Roger Zelazny, but it their cases it was simply the lure of quick, large paychecks for Bad Fantasy Novels. Delany...fell into another trap. He positioned himself as th...more

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Oct 23, 2010

Shirari Industries rated it

Recommends it for: those interested in sexual identity and race politics circa 1974

Dhalgren has an unusual structure and a high level of violence. I had a difficult time getting through it. Even so, I'm glad I hung in there - the book holds an important place in the sci fi canon and it's justified. It was a very unusual read, experimental and interesting. Delany does a lot of things that I haven't seen before.

As in Nabokov's Pale Fire, Dhalgren plays with the line between character and author. The mental state of the this unreliable narrator is in constant question...moreDhalgren has an unusual structure and a high level of violence. I had a difficult time getting through it. Even so, I'm glad I hung in there - the book holds an important place in the sci fi canon and it's justified. It was a very unusual read, experimental and interesting. Delany does a lot of things that I haven't seen before.

As in Nabokov's Pale Fire, Dhalgren plays with the line between character and author. The mental state of the this unreliable narrator is in constant question, as are the laws of physics in the strange city the characters inhabit. This makes for a very disorienting but novel read. However, at 801 pages, at times I found it hard to follow the story and relate to the characters. All of the experimentalness with so little real story-moving payoff for pages and pages got a little boring.

Where the book isn't dull, it's explicitly sexual and/or violent. Delany's protagonists are forging a new way of life that includes exploration of racial and ethnic and class identities, the roles of men and women, human consciousness and sanity, gender roles and expression, ideas about death and violence, and (often queer or polyamorous) sex with many kinks. This makes for some extremely detailed and challenging scenes that include slurs and other sexist and racist language, lots of sweat and grime and body fluids, problematic age differences between sex partners, and racially-charged rape games of questionable consensuality. However, it also has moments of tenderness, deeper consciousness and awareness, and healing. As well as gay leather daddies and gogo dancers. Basically there is a lot of sex and a lot of it may be the dirtiest (I mean actual dirt and grime, as well as raunch) such material you have ever read. John Waters would love it; I'm sure he has a copy.

It's pretty clear that for its time (it was written in 1974) this was an incredibly well-intentioned and radical book. It doubtless opened up space for people to claim identities and relationships that at the time had little public support.

Also of interest is the foreward to this 1996 edition, in which William Gibson (!) points out the connection between the burning city in Dhalgren, and the ephemeral other space created by collective countercultural will and action in the 1960s. I won't say anything else on this count to avoid spoilers, but if you're interested in the changing social mores of the '60s, you will find this a very compelling read.(less)

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Oct 07, 2009

Craig rated it

I really loved the language, some of the characters, and the strong sense of setting in this book. Delany draws you in and is absolutely captivating with his style but holy crap was this book brutally pointless. Just wandering around with no real structure or reason for being. There's lots of grime, gloom, violence, and sloppy sex (both gay and straight). All that's fine, I suppose, but you have to give us a reason for staying with it.

I actually went twice as far as my "10...more

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Sep 01, 2009

Nate rated it

Recommended to Nate by: Kate, Lucy

Shelves: post-modernism, dystopiary, favorites, 70s-delerium

Revision.

This might turn out to be one of those reviews I write over and over.

Perhaps such a novel -- equal parts fine-focused lens, social/personal mirror, and harshly distorting prism -- just demands this endless rethinking.

So what is Dhalgren?

It is a deft cultural analysis, part perfectly current, part more dated 60s/70s scrutiny that is nonetheless perceptive and interesting.

It is a probing of time and perception laid out in dilatin...more

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Jan 13, 2009

Bryan rated it

Shelves: downtherabbitholebookclub, all-time-fav-novels

Wow. Either there is a fictional Midwestern city, Bellona, where some sort of environmental disaster has occurred and now space-time there is in flux, or there was a disaster in said city and the narrator has escaped from a psychiatric hospital and we experience things through his perspective. The narrator in question can’t remember his name, but chances upon moniker “the Kid.” Also seemingly falling to place-time is Kid’s emergence within the half-abandoned city as its de facto poet laureate an...moreWow. Either there is a fictional Midwestern city, Bellona, where some sort of environmental disaster has occurred and now space-time there is in flux, or there was a disaster in said city and the narrator has escaped from a psychiatric hospital and we experience things through his perspective. The narrator in question can’t remember his name, but chances upon moniker “the Kid.” Also seemingly falling to place-time is Kid’s emergence within the half-abandoned city as its de facto poet laureate and chief gang leader.

The relationship between the upper classes and rebellious gangs is amorphous due to the necessities of survival. The city becomes a laboratory for social experiments about sexuality, gender, race, class, violence, and mental health. The novel is metafictional and the relationship between reader/author, signifier/signified, intention/perception is all on the table. The line between the author and characters are blurred. We are never sure if Bellona constantly geographically shifting or Kid’s mind is shifting. We are never sure if things are happening by chance or whether Kid is willing them to happen. The novel is hyper-subjective, but I’m not sure if the narrator is Kid or the city of Bellona itself. Dhalgren is a fantastical carousel of possible meanings that Delany places devilishly on the blurry edge between figure and ground.

The length of this book intimidates some readers, but Delany brings it all home in the end with a satisfaction you'd rarely get from get from other ergodic texts. Not that all that much is resolved, but meaning impregnates the text retroactively. The final sections of the book justify the picaresque structure of first three fourths. Dhalgren has been wrongly classified by many into the science fiction genre. Dhalgren is surreal, but its images to do not emerge from the unconscious. Its images are the nightmare traces of the structures of power revealed. In this way, Dhalgren is not an unconscious work, but a hyperconscious one.

dhalgrendhalgrendhalgrendhalgrendhalgrendhalgrendhal
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Nov 18, 2008

Andrew rated it

Recommends it for: People who like reading about (hetero-, homo-, group, willing, semi-willing) sex.

Shelves: literary, fantastic, scientific, religious, genre

My rating is based on how much I admire the book; if I were rating for enjoyment, I'd probably give it four stars. An 800-page-long catalogue of fighting, fucking, and philosophy wears a little thin, especially when it's mostly fucking.

I don't really know what to say about Dhalgren. Even though I think Delany may have failed to achieve his goal, it was so lofty that the result is still breath-taking. There are some moments that will stick with me forever, I think, and some of them...more

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Jan 19, 2009

Stephen rated it

I just finished this book. Dhalgren is a wild sci-fi tome about a post-apocalyptic American city and the gangs and "normal" people who live there. The main character is a bisexual dude with a case of amnesia both retro and antero. He goes by the name of "The Kid" and though initially he is more of a down-to-earth hippie sleeping under the stars and doing odd jobs, he gradually becomes dragged into the anarcho-punk gangbanger lifestyle.

Of course who really knows? T...more

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Sep 17, 2007

Chris rated it

Recommends it for: Serious SF or Modernist Lit Readers

It's a tough call as to whether this is a 4 or 5 star book (rating things in such restrictive terms is hard enough to begin with...). While this book does have some flaws, it is nonetheless a remarkable meditation on a multitude of themes and has many passages of absolutely amazing prose. The first page contains one of my favorite paragraphs written in English. It is also the quintessential example of the application of techniques of (high) modernism to SF material.

The Kid(d) ...more

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Dec 12, 2007

Tyson rated it

I couldn't resist the book when Jonathan Letham claimed that Delany was writing American Magic Realism ( a partially justified claim) and with a forward by William Gibson, I figured I'd give it a try. It covers a general them I'm fascinated with, that of cities and puzzles. The city is a fisctional city in America that constantly re-combines itself. the ciiy changes overnight and there is a certain eeriness to the story as the author never quite divulges which city it could be (like Springfie...more

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Dec 27, 2011

David rated it

This was an important book for me because it came to me at a confusing time, and helped me revel in the confusion rather than fight it. I'm pretty sure than Delany failed to do some of the things he was trying to do with this book. But he succeeded spectacularly in many other ways. Dhalgren is ambitious and unconventional. I liked this book so much that I wanted to identify myself with it. This is funny to me now, because the book itself is a veritable morass of identities. Because of its unique...more

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Nov 25, 2011

Jeroen rated it

Shelves: science-fiction-soft

While the setting sounded truly interesting, I would hardly call this book a page-turner. It is not here to be experienced as a story with head and tail, but, as many before may have mentioned, as a circle that encloses your brains and makes you wonder...
That is, if you manage to read until the end of the (material) novel, which could be bothersome, for Delaney sets so many things in motion that make you wonder... "what has this to *do* with the story?" Yet I found it convenient t...more

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Nov 14, 2011

Perry rated it

Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany, a professor who I studied under at Temple, is about a 27 year old known as Kid who's lost his memory and finds himself in a strange city called Bellona.

I really enjoyed this. Bellona suffers from a lot of the same problems that - at least what my limited view sees as - East Coast American city's problems. Like racial tension, poverty, crumbling infrastructures, etc. It was really cool. I've never read a sf novel like this but I also must admit that I s...more

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Nov 12, 2011

Paige rated it

Shelves: postapocalyptic, specfic, lgb, genre, recs

I didn't think I'd like this. It's as dense as a fruitcake and uses images and language and ideas that are sometimes pretty damn repugnant. But I did. It's...imbued with a queer sensibility, and despite not being usually very good with experimental fiction, I found that queerness and the realism of characters that eat/sleep/screw/shit/piss to be almost refreshing.

There isn't much to say about it in a wee review such as this, other than that you'll either get something from it or you wo...more

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Oct 18, 2011

Gregory Huish rated it

I gave this five stars based on how it impacted my life and thought process. That's important to me in a book. I take what I read with me, or sometimes want the book to take me away from where I read...

If one can say anything about Dhalgren; it is incredibly engrossing. I couldn't look away (perhaps not only physically but psychologically as well) from what was going on in those pages. Heck I craved it. Delany takes you to a world that I found comforting. Its a mix of absurdism,...moreI gave this five stars based on how it impacted my life and thought process. That's important to me in a book. I take what I read with me, or sometimes want the book to take me away from where I read...

If one can say anything about Dhalgren; it is incredibly engrossing. I couldn't look away (perhaps not only physically but psychologically as well) from what was going on in those pages. Heck I craved it. Delany takes you to a world that I found comforting. Its a mix of absurdism, stream of thought, impulse, vitality, and darkness.

As a somewhat morbid fan of post apocalyptic fiction I related internally to this destroyed and forsaken city where people chose to stay and live, impulsively from moment to moment, consumed by their own psychoses, failings, and/or strengths. The absurd throughout is delicious, for instance when Kid goes to work or 5 dollars an hour in a city where everything is laying around or as he loses memory randomly and acts on the total need to experience whatever is at hand but forgetting his purpose.

The graphic sexuality is not a hindrance to the story, but serves to place it in what I see as the realm of the reactive. There is light interplay of social structures and behaviors more or less reminiscent of the era during which it was written but for the most part all characters are acting on a fairly barbaric and basic level. Among that barbarism there are the flavors of order like Calkin's manor, the insane family that pretends nothing is amiss, the monastery, the bar that continues to operate for free. The whole book is a tableau more so than anything I have ever read. That's where the magic of Dhalgren lies.

I disagree with a lot of reviewers that the characters were dull. On the contrary they were so real to me, maybe not exciting or fast paced but completely convincing. The absurdity of the ending actually broke my heart (relating to Lanya and Denny). But I suppose that is what it is.

At any rate, its an experience not to be missed by any thinker or feeler. I would still hesitate to recommend this to most people I know just because the content is so raw and we're all so sheltered.
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Sep 18, 2011

Lord Humungus rated it

Picked up this book because I'd read Delany was very good and this was possibly his magnum opus. William Gibson, one of my favorite authors of all time, was recommending it on the cover, so I knew I had to read it.

I was sorely disappointed. Writing this review years after reading it, I can say I recall little from the book except being thoroughly unimpressed. There was some fun typesetting of paragraphs a la Alfred Bester, but other than than, a giant shrug.

The main c...more

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Sep 22, 2009

Brad rated it

It is difficult to approach a book as widely praised and remarked upon as Dhalgren.

The cover has quotes from William Gibson and Jonathan Lethem, for God's sake. Luxurious praise surrounds the work like a corona: It's baffling, prescient, postmodern, premodern, an enigma, a sexual challenge, and on and on.

Many reviews compare it to David Foster Wallace, or Borges, in terms of length and circular structure.

So, in short, I came to the work with many preconce...moreIt is difficult to approach a book as widely praised and remarked upon as Dhalgren.

The cover has quotes from William Gibson and Jonathan Lethem, for God's sake. Luxurious praise surrounds the work like a corona: It's baffling, prescient, postmodern, premodern, an enigma, a sexual challenge, and on and on.

Many reviews compare it to David Foster Wallace, or Borges, in terms of length and circular structure.

So, in short, I came to the work with many preconceptions.

What I admire, is that Dhalgren slipped through all these filters- I can see moments of the sublime. Consider the beautiful opening sequence: The protagonist emerges from a fragment of a poem ('...to wound the autumnal city...') and is pursued through moon-dappled forest night by a beautiful woman- they make love, and he comes to the whispering of dead leaves- he descends into a cave and retrieves a chain of prisms and lenses. His lover is transformed into a tree, and he hitches a ride towards the ruins of a metropolis.

Evocative, powerful, dreamlike. Rendered in prose right at the verge of poetry (Gibson's debt is obvious).

Sadly, that's about as good as it gets. The structure is not that compelling, nor particularly difficult. There's a notebook, see. And the notebook contains- sit down for this- the text of Dhalgren. Vonnegut, Delaney's contemporary, covered the same meta fictional turf with a lot more style and humor.

The remaining 750 pages haven't aged that well. They struck this youngish (under 35) reader as mostly a backwards-looking memorial to the late 60's: Young people frolic in parks, have sexual liaisons both hetero, homo, pedo and other. Street gangs without menace wander the depopulated streets. If anything, the 'edgy' material seems nearly quaint- the average modern fifteen-year-old sees the same references to alternate sexuality and S&M approximately a thousand times a day on youtube music videos.

I did like the circular and non literal structure- which does in fact, prefigure Infinite Jest- but the sprawling language and uninvolving characters was too much for me.

The first one hundred pages would make for a great novella. I credit Delany for breaching topics with long cultural reach: Sexuality, gender, race, conformity, decay, language as mediator, mental health. Ultimately, the strands are too widely cast, and outside of some lush writing, I can't see this novel being of interest to many modern readers.(less)

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Jan 26, 2010

El gato calculista rated it

this is absolutely one of the best books i have ever read.

i may be one of the few out there, but i actually really enjoy REALLY long books. to me it provides you with the opportunity to really get to know the characters, and it allows to progress the story in a way that shorter books can't. i remember being half way through and being a little sad that i only had 400 more pages to go.

the style of writing is superb. up until reading Dhalgren i thought Cortazar's Rayuela (ho...more

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Oct 01, 2011

El rated it

· review of another edition

Shelves: late20th-centurylit, society-went-boom

I finished this book this morning, and I just haven't managed to find the words to write a proper review. I still can't quite decide between 3, 4, or 5 stars. I started re-reading the first few pages when I finished, and just now read some more of the book - this time at random places in the text.

I don't know what I expected when I started this, but purposely didn't get excited since the whole science fiction genre and I are so hit-or-miss most of the time. I also heard this is li...moreI finished this book this morning, and I just haven't managed to find the words to write a proper review. I still can't quite decide between 3, 4, or 5 stars. I started re-reading the first few pages when I finished, and just now read some more of the book - this time at random places in the text.

I don't know what I expected when I started this, but purposely didn't get excited since the whole science fiction genre and I are so hit-or-miss most of the time. I also heard this is like the science fiction version of James Joyce, and considering how I felt reading Ulysses, I thought I'd be a hateful wench during the reading of Dhalgren.

If nothing else, this book has almost convinced me to try reading Ulysses again. Maybe I really was too hard on Ulysses when I read it. Maybe... or maybe I'd rather just watch paint dry.

But really I think Delaney had a clearer vision than Joyce, and expressed himself much more eloquently and - well - interestingly. I'm not going to sit here and wax philosophical about what the book meant, and I'm not going to turn my nose up at others who didn't like the book and accuse them of "not understanding it". No one understands it, not really. William Gibson says so in the introduction to my edition. I like to think I had moments where I thought I understood what was happening, or the direction in which it was going, but it never quite gelled in the right way. Not saying it gelled in the wrong way either. It just... was. One of my GR friends likened it to LOST meets Burning Man, and that's about right (and I'd like to suggest throwing in a little David Lynch as well). As I'm re-watching all of LOST with my brother, and having just spent the afternoon doing that just with him today, that's the most accurate comment yet. And it's not even accurate. Make sense? Of course not.

This isn't the review I wanted to write, not that it even really qualifies as a review. I have a feeling I'll be re-reading this one. Now that I know the story I can look for other things. I probably won't be doing this anytime soon, but the fact that I want to is unusual for me. So that means something. And maybe then I'll erase this entire box and write a real review. One that includes the stuff I really dig about it, the themes, the fact that it was written in 1975 and is filled with issues of the time - sex & gender, race, religion, philosophy, homosexuality & heterosexuality, feminism, mysticism... so many -isms in this book. It's chock-full of -isms.

I wouldn't recommend this book. I probably won't recommend this book. (Except to my brother, and I'm curious what my boyfriend would think, but really, that's it.) It's not a book for everyone, and I wouldn't even know what kind of person it would good for anyway. I think it was good for me because I ~~enjoyed~~ loved reading it. I wanted to know what happened, to the best of my ability. To me that's the sign of a good book - I hated my job the most during the week I spent reading this, not because my job sucks (ummm...) but because I wanted to read this. This book is the reason that I am a reader. When I think about what makes Reading exciting to me, it's because of books like this. The books that I live, breathe, eat, and sleep. My brother might wind up hating it and we'll probably never speak again because he might hate me for recommending this to him. But that's okay. This was my experience. I loved it. There. I said it.

So, okay. I guess that answers my question. 5 stars.(less)

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May 03, 2010

Tom rated it

Somewhere in the middle of the United States, the city of Bellona suffers a catastrophe. Fires burn, a cloud of smoke enshrouds the city, ninety-eight thousand of the city's one hundred thousand inhabitants flee.
he remaining two thousand live in an anarchical environment where time, weather and space are, or seem to be, unhinged from their moorings.
Enter The Kid, a twenty-seven year old (who looks younger) metally unstable man who can't remember his name. The Kid comes...more

· see review

Jan 13, 2009

Corvidae rated it

Never. Read. This book.

Ok, I should be a bit more intelligent. I read it for a class focusing on race and gender issues in scifi, many books by non-canonical (i.e. not white male) authors. I can appreciate what it tries to do. I can appreciate it for its unique and askew looks at culture and class and identity.

But its impossible to read. There are easier-to-read books that deal with the same sorts of issues (I recommend Octavia Butler and Karen Traviss' original work in ...more

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Jul 17, 2011

Andrew added it

Shelves: american-fiction, african-american-fiction

Delany is less interested in plot than in generating Bellona, a space where anything can and will happen. Inside Bellona, a sort of free play goes on where race, sexuality, criminality, knowledge, and literacy collide, collapse, and recombine. Oh, and Delany clearly works his sexual fantasies in. Oh shit, it's a leather daddy with a heart of gold and a bad straight boy going astray. Which I find quite amusing.

One thing that I think a lot of critics ignored is the strong parallel be...more

· see review

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About Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Ray Delany, Jr. (born April 1, 1942, New York City) is an award-winning American science fiction author. He has written works that have garnered substantial critical acclaim, including the novels Babel-17, The Einstein Intersection (winners of the Nebula Award for 1966 and 1967 respectively), Nova, Hogg, Dhalgren, and the Return to Nevèrÿon series. Since January 2001 he has been a professor...moreSamuel Ray Delany, Jr. (born April 1, 1942, New York City) is an award-winning American science fiction author. He has written works that have garnered substantial critical acclaim, including the novels Babel-17, The Einstein Intersection (winners of the Nebula Award for 1966 and 1967 respectively), Nova, Hogg, Dhalgren, and the Return to Nevèrÿon series. Since January 2001 he has been a professor of English and Creative Writing at Temple University in Philadelphia. He is widely known in the academic world as a literary critic. (from Wikipedia)
Samuel Delany, also known as "Chip," 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 and is currently in medical school.

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. He spent 11 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, 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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