Quark/3 | A Quarterly of Speculative Fiction

by Samuel R. Delany (Editor), Marilyn Hacker (Editor), M. John Harrison (Contributor)

• Encased in Ancient Rind by R. A. Lafferty
• Home Again, Home Again by Gordon Eklund
• Dog in a Fisherman's Net by Samuel R. Delany
• The Zanzibar Cat by Joanna Russ
• Field by James Sallis
• Vanishing Point by Sonya Dorman
• Where Have You Been, Billy Boy, Billy Boy? by Kate Wilhelm
• Brave Salt by Richard Hill
• Nature Boy by Josephine Saxton
• Balls: A Meditation at the Graveside by Virginia Kidd
• Ring of Pain by M. John Harrison
• To the Child Whose Birth Will Change the Way the Universe Works by George Stanley
• A Sexual Song by Tom Veitch
• Twenty-Four Letters from Underneath the Earth by Hilary Bailey
• The Coded Sun Game by Brian Vickers

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction

238 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1971

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

[Craig · Rating 2 out of 5]

Quark was a series of original anthologies edited by Samuel R. Delany and Marilyn Hacker, who were at the time married. I read the first book is and didn't much care for it, but was given a copy of the third volume and gave it a chance. I tried, but it just wasn't my cup of fur. I believe what they were going for was the New Wave kind of thing that Michael Moorcock was having success with in his New Worlds magazine, but I thought most of Quark was too self-consciously literary-pretentious and obscure. (Which perhaps means that many of the stories were over my head.) There's an impressive roster of contributors including R.A. Lafferty, M. John Harrison, Kate Wilhelm, Joanna Russ, Gordon Eklund, Hilary Bailey, Sonya Dorman, etc. I remember liking the Wilhelm and Lafferty stories, but feeling kind of lost during most of the read.

[Chris Aldridge · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mindwebs audiobook 42. The 1971 story “Nature Boy” by Josephine Saxton is in this collection edited by Samuel Delaney and Marilyn Hacker (according to the Mindwebs introduction).
An interesting tale from the perspective of a protagonist who is suffering from unwanted thoughts euphemistically described as “nerves”. He seems to be prone to hearing his internal monologue raising
controversial subjects, eg lesbianism is introduced immediately. He thinks a lot about his mother, the natural world and mixes fantasies with obvious guilt at his “evil and wicked” thoughts. Excellent description of the life of a mentally disturbed individual.
A superb insight into the compulsive thoughts of a dangerously violent human.

Coincidentally the incident with the girl and the ant happened to remind me of watching a really beautiful hairy caterpillar make its way across a woodland car park one summer. I stopped to watch it, entranced, until a small boy of four or five, attracted by my interest, approached, watched it with me for a minute and then deliberately stamped on it. If I had not been raised by my conservationist father to respect all life, I might not have controlled my anger, in that moment I really wanted to seriously injure the little brat, but instead I just cursed and walked off pondering the vastness of the inhumanity of man.