A, B, C Read online

  samuel r. delany

  a, b, c: three short novels

  Samuel R. Delany’s stories are available in Aye, and Gomorrah and Other Stories (science fiction and fantasy) and Atlantic: Three Tales (experimental fiction). He has won multiple Hugo and Nebula awards. His novel Dark Reflections won the Stonewall Book Award in 2008. He has been inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame and received the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master of Science Fiction Award. His novels include science-fiction works such as Nova, Dhalgren, The Fall of the Towers, Babel-17, The Einstein Intersection; also the four-volume fantasy series Return to Nevèrÿon. Delany is the author of several other novels and works of nonfiction. He lives in New York City and has recently retired after sixteen years of teaching creative writing at Temple University.

  also by samuel r. delany

  FICTION

  The Fall of the Towers

  Babel-17

  Empire Star

  The Einstein Intersection

  Nova

  Dhalgren

  Equinox

  Trouble on Triton

  Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand

  Return to Nevèrÿon:

  Tales of Nevèrÿon

  Neveryóna

  Flight from Nevèrÿon

  Return to Nevèrÿon

  Empire (graphic novel)

  The Mad Man

  Hogg

  Atlantis: Three Tales

  Aye, and Gomorrah (collected stories)

  Dark Reflections

  Phallos

  Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders

  NONFICTION

  The Jewel-Hinged Jaw

  Starboard Wine

  The American Shore

  Heavenly Breakfast

  The Motion of Light in Water

  Wagner/Artaud

  The Straits of Messina

  Silent Interviews

  Longer Views

  Bread & Wine (graphic novel)

  Times Square Red, Times Square Blue

  1984: Selected Letters

  Shorter Views

  For Dennis Rickett and Junot Díaz

  FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, JULY 2015

  Foreword and afterword © 2015 by Samuel R. Delany

  The Jewels of Aptor copyright © 1962 by Ace Books, Inc. Revised version copyright © 1968 by Samuel R. Delany

  The Ballad of Beta-2 copyright © 1965 by Ace Books, Inc.

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Ltd., Toronto. Published with the cooperation of the author and Henry Morrison, Inc., his agents.

  They Fly at Çiron first appeared in a different, much shorter version, as “They Fly at Çiron,” by Samuel R. Delany and James Sallis, in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, June 1971, Vol. 40, No. 6, pp. 32–60. Copyright © 1971 by Mercury Press, Inc.

  “Ruins” has appeared thrice previously, in versions slightly different from one another: as “In the Ruins,” by Samuel R. Delany, in Algol, No. 13, January 1968, copyright © 1968 by Andrew Porter; as “Ruins,” in Distant Stars by Samuel R. Delany (New York: Bantam Books, 1981), pp. 279–291, copyright © 1981 by Samuel R. Delany, and in They Fly at Çiron, in a trade and a limited edition first published by Incunabula, Seattle, 1993. Copyright © 1993 by Samuel R. Delany.

  Vintage and colophon are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress.

  Vintage Books Trade Paperback ISBN: 9781101911426

  eBook ISBN 9781101911433

  Cover design: Evan Gaffney Design

  Cover photographs: face © Alfonso Vidal Quadras/www.favorite-picture.com; stars: NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration

  www.vintagebooks.com

  v4.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Also by Samuel r. Delany

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Foreword

  The Jewels of Aptor

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  The Ballad of Beta-2

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  They Fly at Çiron

  Dedication

  Note

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Ruins

  Return to Çiron

  Afterword

  foreword

  The Jewels of Aptor…

  The Ballad of Beta-2…

  They Fly at Çiron…

  Aptor, Beta-2, Çiron…A, B, C, and there’s my title.

  The subtitle tells what follows: Three Short Novels.

  This book contains my first published novel, a science fantasy, The Jewels of Aptor, much as I wrote it in the winter of 1961–62. Officially it was released December 1, 1962. I saw copies late that November.

  As I’d conceived and written the book, its audience was my brilliant, talented wife of those years, the poet Marilyn Hacker—nine months younger than I but always at least a year ahead of me in school. Walking up and over the school roof to get to classes, as all the entering students had been instructed to do, so as not to bother the elementary school students with whom we shared the building, we’d met on our first day of high school. Two years later Marilyn went on to NYU as an early admissions student at fifteen and finished her classes in three years. When we married on August 24, 1961, she was eighteen and I was nineteen.

  Those interested in the invaluable part she played in discussing the ideas in Aptor and getting it published—she wrote some of the poetic spells in the book—can read about it in my autobiography, The Motion of Light in Water (1988; exp., 1992). Without her, it wouldn’t—it couldn’t have happened. After our marriage, Marilyn’s first job was with the publisher, Ace Books. She took my manuscript in under a pen name. That’s how it was submitted. That’s how it was read. That’s how it was accepted.

  Only when contracts were drawn up, did she admit that the writer was her husband—and the name on the contracts was hastily changed to mine.

  Eventually it got a few (generous) reviews; but the thousand-dollar advance I received—$500 on contract signing in April and $500 in December on publication—back then would have covered fifteen months of our $52-a-month rent on our second-floor, four-room tenement apartment—rent for more than a year! (Would that it did so today.) And I could think, “Hey, I’m making my living as a writer!”

  And I had a publisher. If I handed in anything that more or less met my editor’s genre expectations, I assumed, I could sell it.

  For my second book (what today is They Fly at Çiron), I took two old fantasy stories and quickly wrote three more. Each section had as a protagonist someone who was a m
inor character in one of the others. One involved only a name change for a character in one of the already completed tales.*1 Nor were the landscapes the tales took place in much related to one another. Rapidly reading over passages, I decided on a few more things that might connect them and wrote out bridges from one to the next. But I put into Çiron neither the time nor the intensity of thought and imagination I had put into Aptor.

  A few weeks after I handed it in to Ace Books, Don Wollheim rejected it.

  Today, I feel that rejection was the most important thing that happened to me in my first years of publishing. I’ll try to explain how and why it was so useful, so instructive, so important—though I don’t know if, finally, it’s possible to describe it in a definitive way.

  Understand, I’d had novels rejected before. I’d been writing them since I was thirteen, and from seventeen on I had been submitting them to New York publishers—who’d been declining them. But also I’d been getting a fair amount of attention for them. Two years before, Marie Ponsot, a poet who had been very supportive of both Marilyn and me, spoke to her friend Margaret Marshall, an editor at Harcourt Brace. At Marie’s request and on the strength of one of those early manuscripts, Marshall had secured me a work-study scholarship for the Bread Loaf Writers Conference at Middlebury College, Vermont. While attending the novel-writing workshops and lectures on the grassy and sunny Middlebury campus, where, even before the inception of the already legendary conference, novelists as varied as Anthony Hope and Willa Cather had written some of their most critically acclaimed pieces, I’d worked those two July weeks as a waiter in a white-painted dining room with square glass panes in the window doors along one wall. I’d attended the lectures, readings, and novel-writing workshops; I’d talked with writers and editors, new and established, and I’d found two or three who were willing to read my work and were even enthusiastic about it. Both before and since Bread Loaf, I’d submitted my novels. They’d been rejected too. What remains from those rejections, however, are the hours or even days of encouragement preceding them.

  Wollheim’s rejection, brief and final, I recall, however, with documentary clarity.

  Wollheim phoned me at our apartment on East Fifth Street. The phone sat on an end table, discarded by my mother-in-law in the Bronx, and I sat on the armchair’s arm. He said, “Hi, Chip. This is Don—Don Wollheim. I read your second manuscript this weekend.” Somewhere in an office on Forty-eighth Street in Midtown, he paused. “I don’t think they quite make a book, Chip. So I’ll pass on them. But I’m certainly interested in seeing the next one you do. Okay?”

  I said, “Oh…um, yeah. Okay. Yes, I see! Um…thanks.”

  Don said, “You’re welcome. So long.”

  I said, “Good-bye…Um, Good-bye,” and hung up, surprised and disappointed.

  I was twenty. It was still painful when I wrote about it in my autobiography twenty-five years later, so I told it there as quickly as I could. Here’s a little more of the tale:

  I wanted to talk to Marilyn—badly—but she was out looking for work; so after I hung up I went downstairs and outside for a walk, to think over what had happened. It seemed clear, though.

  One reason why I felt it so deeply was because with this particular rejection, the rejection of what would become Çiron, I had been turned down by an editor (and publisher) who had accepted something already.

  Walking through the chill spring slums, I thought about the differences between the kind of work I’d done for the book that had been accepted (so enthusiastically, too), and the kind for the book that had been turned down (so summarily). With Aptor, before each scene, each writing session at the writing table, or with my notebook, cross-legged on the daybed, I’d worked to picture as many details of that scene and its physicality as I could. Many of those scenes had begun as disturbingly vivid dreams, so that for a number of them—the waterfront, the jungle, the beach, the temple, and the morning light or the evening light that suffused them—already I had complete images in mind, in some cases unsettlingly so.

  Others, though, I’d had to visualize from scratch.

  Aptor had commanded high imaginative involvement throughout. I had not used all the results or even most of them. But having them when I needed them seemed to loan the work (for me) coherence and authority.

  For Çiron, however, I’d taken some odd texts, hastily forced them into what I thought might do for a linear narrative, which I’d realized in the hour since the rejection was nowhere near linear enough. I had read over passages quickly and decided what might connect them to the next and wrote it out; but I’d put into it neither the time nor the intensity of thought and imagination I had put into the earlier book.

  For a scene here or there I’d done a bit of the mental work. But the things that I’d felt (that I’d hoped…) had made Aptor lively, vivid, and given it momentum, were the things I’d failed to do in Çiron. Don had read it, felt how thin it was. Now, so did I—and I realized as well what the world’s reaction would be, as exemplified by Don and Ace Books.

  I’m glad I saw this—with only a sentence from Wollheim to prompt me over the phone, a kindness granted my second book doubtless because he’d published my first, and probably because I was twenty. In those days, young writers starting to sell, when and if they found themselves in that position, often didn’t understand this.

  It didn’t need to be another kind of written piece. It needed to be a better quality piece. The book didn’t need more sex. It didn’t need more violence. It didn’t need more action. It needed to be better organized from start to finish. It needed to be more richly imagined, first part to final. That meant I had to do the work, start to finish, I hadn’t done. Had I done it, that work would have suggested better organization because I would have seen the material more vividly along with its many incoherent lax spots. The missing or extraneous material would have stood out more clearly and provided me with a clearer view of how to fix it—delete, insert, rewrite, expand, replace, connect to something earlier or farther on, several of them or one, the choice hinging on the clarity and intensity of my apprehension of the whole book.

  As I’d read and reread Aptor, during its composition, that’s how the details had come to me: in further specifics of landscape, characterization, psychology, dialogue, and incidents for the story.

  This was the work I hadn’t done on Çiron.

  I thought this, however, not because any of it had been mentioned in the workshops at Bread Loaf or in E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel or in Lajos Egris’s The Art of Dramatic Writing or in Orwell’s essays or even in Gertrude Stein’s Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas or Lectures in America—books I’d read on writing that already had been, up till then, so helpful. Today I suspect five different writers, each going through some version of this, might go through it in five different ways and arrive at five different conclusions, all of which would accomplish much the same. What seemed most important, however, as I walked through the smells and confusion of our crowded neighborhood was: think about this seriously. Your life hangs on it. (That’s another year’s rent you don’t have now…!) You can’t fuck around….

  It’s surprising how far that can take you—about anything.

  Returning from my walk, past the East Side tenements, the fish store on Avenue C, turning into the dead end of East Fifth Street where we lived, walking over the broken pavement before the parking garage’s gaping door, by the plate-glass window edged in the flaking paint of the bodega next to it, set back, and up three steps, I thought: if I’m a writer and I want my pieces to place, I have to do that work.

  This was not a case of writing the kind of pieces that would place. I could decide that pretty easily. I needed to write the quality of pieces that would place. It was neither the acceptance nor the rejection that had been so instructive, but the differences between them and what I knew now I might expect from each, and the information about my future in the world those differences comprised.

  I knew what the two kinds
of work felt like, behind my face, in my belly, along my arms, in my feet against the floor, my hands moving over the typewriter keys or across the notebook pages as I gripped my ballpoint, now that I could associate each with their different results.

  If each had a shape, a shape I could grasp at in the world, even if those shapes were not entirely pensive, spatial, mental, or muscular, descriptions of their form or the content that could arrive to fill them out would always be incomplete—including this one. But now I had a nonverbal sense of what each was.

  When Marilyn came home, we talked about what I might do. In my journal I’d already made notes on possible projects. One was the barest sketch for a trilogy of SF novels that would show what war was like in its effects on the country attacking, rather than the country invaded.

  After several conversations with Marilyn, a few days later we walked across the Brooklyn Bridge to visit some friends in Brooklyn Heights for brunch. Walking back, we talked about it more. When we got home, I sat down in front of the typewriter, typed out a title page for the entire project, and began the first of the three-volume series I had planned out with her, and began the work I needed to generate the material necessary to construct its first volume, in order to write the best book that, at that very immature age, I could manage.

  Basically I’d decided that if I was going to write something of the highest quality I could achieve, it had best be about something I felt was important. And we were a country at war.

  It was a lot of work—I’ve written about it several times. The middle volume was more work than I’d ever imagined it might be. Often, I was afraid the work would defeat me. There are places where I believe it did. But I also knew, by now, that if I didn’t do it, not only couldn’t I sell it, but I couldn’t live with myself either. By now I was afraid to avoid the work or to try for shortcuts.