From the Bookshelf of Sci-fi and Heroic Fantasy…

The Einstein Intersection

Samuel R. Delany

Start date: March 1, 2014

Finish date: March 30, 2014

Discussion: Book Discussions

Discussion leader: Hillary Major

Why we're reading this: Nebula Award Winner 1967
Group Classic Novel Discussion March 2014
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Group Classic Novel Discussion March 2014

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What Members Thought

Dec 19, 2007 Jim rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 1paper, 2fiction, scifi, favorites, 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 different ways & make me think of ...more

15 likes · Like · see review

May 09, 2018 Jim rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: 2fiction, scifi, 1audio, apocalyptic

This is one of my favorite books of all time, rather odd since I've never cared for anything else that Delany wrote. None of his other books hooked me at all & I've tried several over the decades quite a few times. I've often wondered at his popularity until I found out he's black & gay (Who cares?) so put it down to political correctness especially after attempting to read Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders which is such gross gay porn that I wonder how anyone could get through more than ...more

14 likes · Like · see review

Jun 06, 2021 Tani rated it liked it

Shelves: male-author, scifi, novella, sff-2021, sff-explorer-2021, sff-awards-2021, 2021-shortstuff

Basically, this is a sf retelling of Orpheus, which I read for my Hugo/Nebula winners bookclub. I liked this, but I felt like the ending fell apart completely. For 75% of the book, you have a fairly coherent narrative, if a bit underexplained, and I was enjoying it well enough. Then as the ending drew near, events spiraled out of control, and I lost the thread. Looking back, there was so little sense there that I can't say I particularly remember what happened, just two days later, and I won't b ...more

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Aug 27, 2011 Fungus Gnat rated it liked it

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 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.

...more

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Mar 12, 2014 Karen rated it liked it

Shelves: guardian-1001-books, sf-f-grandmaster

Well.That was different. This was my first book by Delaney and right off the writing drew me in. However, somewhere in the last 25% I was just reading to finish. I am sure that there were deep messages there but...they went past me.

1 like · Like · see review