The Tides Of Lust

by Samuel R. Delany

The Tides of Lust is a powerful, erotic and violent encounter with the voices and experiences of characters who linger in a small American seaport. Here is an insatiable African-American ship's captain, a dangerously young slave mistress, an aimless drifter and a supreme artist of the perverse.

Genres: Erotica, Fiction, Science Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Fantasy

ebook

First published January 1, 1973

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

[Charles · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a hard book to read and, in today's climate, it's not surprising to find that it's out of print. It's a delirious piratical sexual fantasy involving the kind of men Delany most favours - tough, hairy, soiled, massively well-hung - and children of both sexes. There's incest and rape, and pretty much everything else, including water sports. It's lyrical, sordid, shocking, compelling, repulsive. It's like nothing else I've ever read. Imagine hardcore porn written by Kipling, revised by Lautreamont on crack. You're halfway there.

[Ben Arzate · Rating 3 out of 5]

Full Discussion Here

3.5 Stars

[Aunt Cassie · Rating 1 out of 5]

Disgusting and too hard to read due to its obnoxiously poetic style. The acid trip section towards the end was particularly laughable. What a kaleidoscope of puke! The continual dominant Black-on-White sex went well beyond kinky and ultimately became ugly and hateful. I had ignored this aspect of the book for most of its length until I got to the horrific and highly graphic rape/murder of the delicate redhead girl which is when I realized how hateful this book is. That's my impression, anyway. Delany tries to excuse himself from any such feedback by lecturing the reader (in the text of this book!) about how art is only concerned with symmetry and not any ideas of morality of sympathy. As if art is just some special form or science or math. Sure, if weird, messy stuff didn't happen then it wouldn't be believable. But the detail lavished on the brutal rape/murder goes well beyond what's required for realism. The rape/murder is described with the same fetishistic attention to detail with which the sex is described in the rest of the book, in other words, it is described as a sex act itself, something to be voyeuristically enjoyed as a kind of pornography.

[Audry · Rating 3 out of 5]

The dirtiest book I've ever read (...so far). I have no objection to XXX-rated smut, as a rule, but there are things in here that made me squirm. Should I knock points for that? Chip is still one hell of a writer, and his prose is no less fantastic for the subject matter of some of the scenes. Do I let personal limits affect how I score this?

Undecided. I'll give it three stars and call that neutral.

[Aaron · Rating 4 out of 5]

A bit lighter in tone than the more readily available Hogg, if no less dirty, Tides of Lust/Equinox is Delany's first published stab at erotica. I wouldn't recommend this to most people, but if you, like me, are a huge fan of Delany's this is a crucial stage in his literary development. Also recommended for fans of fringe lit like Apocalypse Culture, Peter Sotos, Satanburger, and all that freaky nonsense.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a re-read for me, but it had been almost 15 years since I last read it (where in fuck has all the time gone?). I re-read Hogg last year, and I think I like this book more. It's less intense and cohesive, but in some ways I think it's better written. Some of the imagery is absolutely sublime, even if the content is inappropriate for some audiences. It's appropriate for me, so I don't care.

Poor Robby, huh? Oh well; it's their law, not ours, right?

I'd like to get my hands on the first version of this book without the censored ages. What was the point of that, really? It's not like it's unclear on its face that 106 and 113 mean 6 and 13, even without reading the explanatory note.

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is mostly of interest as a precursor to Delany's later work.

Also:
- The publishers felt uncomfortable putting out a book with kids having sex, so they added 1o0 years to any minor's age mentioned in the book.
- There's a fun couple of paragraphs where a character is writing about the language of science fiction (a topic of some of Delany's nonfiction).
- And a few places where Delany or maybe some other narrator break the fourth wall.

[Ilia · Rating 2 out of 5]

A fantastically-written opening chapter devolves a bit as the book goes on. Pornography may be the last genre where you're allowed to leave scruples about consent, or racism, or sexism, at the door – and yet this is still pretty difficult to read. It feels like an indulgence rather than a treatise – and probably not to most people's tastes. Undeniable though that there are passages of striking imagery and description within.

[Monnette · Rating 2 out of 5]

the book was too hard for me to read and 28% through I wanted to put it down and delete it. but my mind doesn't let me not finish books so I finished it. the writing style reminded me of my own... serious, stream of consciousness, reads like a play, semi unfinished. and sex... there is a lot of it... from incest to rape, a short scene of a woman making a man dress her and then putting a collar on him, some toe sucking, face pissing, a lot of guy on guy, child trafficking, bestiality, necrophilia, gang rape, orgy... it was hard to read. like how a clockwork Orange was hard to watch. this is the first book I've read by this author and the tone is so serious I don't know if I'd read another one. I think though, that what I didn't like most, was that there wasn't a story really... unless it really was just about a man trying to come 7x in one day so this other man orchestrates this huge gang to get a woman? why did I read this book???

"is it such a terrible thing to content yourself with only visiting places like this in sleazy books or in... what do they call them--underground comics? If their reports see uninformed, blurred, or inaccurate, you're intelligent enough to doctor them back to your individual specifications, edit out those particular bits which to you are particularly distasteful, thanks to your or the author's prejudices" Proctor tells a disillusioned Peggy-Ann, who had entered a sex house looking for adventure and was ready to leave after her experiences. I feel that this line alone spoke to me too.

I think the best line was "sometimes I think a great great grandmother of hers must have invented religion. After swallowing one of those little red pills, she pissed in some chalice, and some poor man who drank from it was never the same"

[Alex · Rating 1 out of 5]

Well, it serves me right, I guess.
I should've gone for Delany's longer, critically acclaimed works. I should've read a few reviews. I should've closed the book at page 3.
But I kept reading. You never know what surprises the giants of Sci-Fi have in store.

There were no surprises. This is porn. Not a controversial, sexually explicit novel of the "Ice" kind, no. Just a no-frills porn book. Name the sex, name the age, Uncle Sam's gonna tell you a little story...

We're lucky to have the Internet now, where people can vent out their sexual frustrations & find readers within small, tightly knit communities of people who actually want to read precisely that. Hopefully, there's less need for publishing wet dreams in book form now.

[Chris Amies · Rating 3 out of 5]

More p*rn from Delany, not as extreme as Hogg which is saying quite a lot considering what goes on in ToL. A lot of large, ahem, male units and multi-person sex, but a distinct feeling of "all this sex is all very well but have you tried violence?" Delany might, for all I know, be saying, 'what's the point of fantasising about something you can legitimately and legally do anyway?' Hardly anyone comes out of this well and the main one is a dog. Who is named after a West African country. Probably, because there's no lack of N-word privileges here either. Sections are bookended by quotes from "Faust," so who has sold their soul here? The captain, with his ability to have sex seven times a day or whatever it is? It is all deeply perverted, and not in a good way.

[yengyeng · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reading this book on the train seated between a junior high school student and an elementary school student, I was hoping that no one was reading over my shoulders. Is this the smuttiest book I've ever read? Maybe. It's porn made up of paragraphs stringed by sentences made up of words, without the graphics. It isn't an easy read but the craft that went into creating the text is marvellous.

[Reed Woodhouse]

smart porn

[Scott Golden · Rating 3 out of 5]

The most literary piece of filth ever written.
NOT for those with faint hearts or delicate constitutions.