Return to Nevèrÿon: The Complete Series Read online

  PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF SAMUEL R. DELANY

  “I consider Delany not only one of the most important SF writers of the present generation, but a fascinating writer in general who has invented a new style.” —Umberto Eco

  “Samuel R. Delany is the most interesting author of science fiction writing in English today.” —The New York Times Book Review

  Dhalgren

  “Dhalgren’s the secret masterpiece, the city-book-labyrinth that has swallowed astonished readers alive for almost thirty years. Its beauty and force still seem to be growing.” —Jonathan Lethem

  “A brilliant tour de force.” —The News & Observer (Raleigh)

  “A Joyceian tour de force of a novel, Dhalgren … stake[s] a better claim than anything else published in this country in the last quarter-century (excepting only Gass’s Omensetter’s Luck and Nabokov’s Pale Fire) to a permanent place as one of the enduring monuments of our national literature.” —Libertarian Review

  The Nevèrÿon Series

  “Cultural criticism at its most imaginative and entertaining best.” —Quarterly Black Review of Books on Neveryóna

  “The tales of Nevèrÿon are postmodern sword-and-sorcery … Delany subverts the formulaic elements of sword-and-sorcery and around their empty husks constructs self-conscious metafictions about social and sexual behavior, the play of language and power, and—above all—the possibilities and limitations of narrative. Immensely sophisticated as literature … eminently readable and gorgeously entertaining.” —The Washington Post Book World

  “This is fantasy that challenges the intellect … semiotic sword and sorcery, a very high level of literary gamesmanship. It’s as if Umberto Eco had written about Conan the Barbarian.” —USA Today

  “The Nevèrÿon series is a major and unclassifiable achievement in contemporary American literature.” —Fredric R. Jameson

  “Instead of dishing out the usual, tired mix of improbable magic and bloody mayhem, Delany weaves an intricate meditation on the nature of freedom and slavery, on the beguiling differences between love and lust … the prose has been so polished by wit and intellect that it fairly gleams.” —San Francisco Chronicle on Return to Nevèrÿon

  “One of the most sustained meditations we have on the complex intersections of sexuality, race, and subjectivity in contemporary cultures.” —Constance Penley

  Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand

  “Delany’s first true masterpiece.” —The Washington Post

  “What makes Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand especially challenging—and satisfying—is that the complex society in which the characters move is one … which contains more than 6,000 inhabited worlds and a marvelously rich blend of cultures. The inhabitants of these worlds—both human and alien—relate to one another in ways that, however bizarre they may seem at first, are eventually seen to turn on such recognizable emotional fulcrums as love, loss and longing.” —The New York Times Book Review

  “Delany’s forte has always been the creation of complex, bizarre, yet highly believable future societies; this book may top anything he’s done in that line.” —Newsday

  Nova

  “As of this book, [Samuel R. Delany] is the best science-fiction writer in the world.” —Galaxy Science Fiction

  “A fast-action far-flung interstellar adventure; [an] archetypal mystical/mythical allegory … [a] modern myth told in the SF idiom … and lots more.” —The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction

  “[Nova] reads like Moby-Dick at a strobe-light show!” —Time

  The Motion of Light in Water

  “A very moving, intensely fascinating literary biography from an extraordinary writer. Thoroughly admirable candor and luminous stylistic precision; the artist as a young man and a memorable picture of an age.” —William Gibson

  “Absolutely central to any consideration of black manhood … Delany’s vision of the necessity for total social and political transformation is revolutionary.” —Hazel Carby

  “The prose of The Motion of Light in Water often has the shimmering beauty of the title itself … This book is invaluable gay history.” —Inches

  Return to Nevèrÿon

  The Complete Series

  Samuel R. Delany

  CONTENTS

  Tales of Nevèrÿon

  Return … a preface by K. Leslie Steiner

  The Tale of Gorgik

  1

  2

  3

  The Tale of Old Venn

  1

  2

  3

  4

  The Tale of Small Sarg

  1

  2

  3

  4

  The Tale of Potters and Dragons

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  The Tale of Dragons and Dreamers

  1

  2

  3

  Appendix: Some Informal Remarks Towards the Modular Calculus, Part Three by S. L. Kermit

  1

  2

  3

  4

  Neveryóna, Or, The Tale of Signs and Cities

  1. Of Dragons, Mountains, Transhumance, Sequence, and Sunken Cities, or: The Violence of the Letter

  2. Of Roads, Real Cities, Streets, and Strangers

  3. Of Markets, Maps, Cellars, and Cisterns

  4. Of Fate, Fortune, Mayhem, and Mystery

  5. Of Matrons, Mornings, Motives, and Machinations

  6. Of Falls, Fountains, Notions, and New Markets

  7. Of Commerce, Capital, Myths, and Missions

  8. Of Models, Mystery, Moonlight, and Authority

  9. Of Night, Noon, Time, and Transition

  10. Of Bronze, Brews, Dragons, and Dinners

  11. Of Family Gatherings, Grammatology, More Models, and More Mysteries

  12. Of Models, Monsters, Night, and the Numinous

  13. Of Survival, Celebration, and Unlimited Semiosis

  Appendix A: The Culhar’ Correspondence

  Appendix B: Acknowledgments

  Flight from Nevèrÿon

  The Tale of Fog and Granite

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  The Mummer’s Tale

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals, or: Some Informal Remarks Towards the Modular Calculus, Part Five

  Appendix A: Postscript

  Appendix B: Buffon’s Needle

  Return To Nevèrÿon

  The Game of Time and Pain

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  The Tale of Rumor and Desire

  The Tale of Gorgik

  1

  2

  3

  Appendix: Closures and Openings

  A Biography of Samuel R. Delany

  Tales of Nevèrÿon

  For Joanna Russ, Luise White,

  and Iva Hacker-Delany

  Contents

  Return … a preface by K. Leslie Steiner

  The Tale of Gorgik

  1

  2

  3

  The Tale of Old Venn

  1

  2

  3

  4

  The Tale of Small Sarg

  1

  2

  3

  4

&n
bsp; The Tale of Potters and Dragons

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  The Tale of Dragons and Dreamers

  1

  2

  3

  Appendix: Some Informal Remarks Towards the Modular Calculus, Part Three by S. L. Kermit

  1

  2

  3

  4

  Return … a preface

  BY K. LESLIE STEINER

  Humankind still lives prehistory everywhere, indeed everything awaits the creation of the world as a genuine one. The real genesis is not at the beginning but at the end, and it only begins when society and existence become radical, that is grasp themselves at the root. The root of history, however, is the human being, working, producing, reforming and surpassing the givens around him or her. If human beings have grasped themselves, and what is theirs, without depersonalization and alienation, founded in real democracy, then something comes into being in the world that shines into everyone’s childhood and where no one has yet been—home.

  —ERNST BLOCH, Das Prinkzip Hoffnung

  Come to a far when, a distant once, a land beyond the river—but a river running no-one-knows-where. That’s the invitation the following fantasy series here holds out. But where does its landscape lie? Some have suggested it’s Mediterranean. Others have thought it Mesopotamian. Yet arguments can be made for placing it in either Asia or Africa. And its weather and immediate geography (sun, fog, rain, but no snow, in a city on the sea surrounded by mountains) make it sound like nothing so much as prehistoric Piraeus—or San Francisco, in both of which modern cities, in the years before he began his series (if we are to trust the several books on him by over-eager commentators), Delany lived.

  What’s certain, however, is that it was a long time ago.

  But four thousand years? Six thousand? Eight thousand?

  The most accurate placement is, after all, a happy accident of the advertising copy on the back of one of the paperbacks in which some of the tales were first published, putting it at ‘the borderland of history.’ For before this ancient nation there is only the unrectored chaos out of which grew (and we watch them grow page on page) the techne that make history recognizable: money, architecture, weaving, writing, capital … Yet a whiff of magic blows through it all, now as the flying dragons corraled in the Faltha mountains, now as a huge and hideous monster, part god, part beast, turning back would-be defectors as it patrols the ill-marked border.

  Re-readers of these tales may be curious why I, who am after all only a fictive character in some of the pieces to come, have taken this preface on. Yes, it’s an odd feeling—but finally one I like. The publisher wanted me to jot something on the stories’ cryptographical origins. (You may have already encountered a note on their archeological ends.) I agreed, under condition I might include this extended historical disclaimer. But something about these stories defers origins (not to say endings) in favor of fictions. Still, for those readers, old or new, who do not recall, I will (again) explain:

  Picture me, if it will help, as your average black American female academic, working in the largely white preserves of a sprawling mid-western university, unable, as a seventies graduate student, to make up her mind between mathematics and German literature. (The politics required eventually to secure me a joint line in our Math and Comp. Lit. departments are too rococo to recount.) Category theory was all the rage when I emerged from my first meaningful degree. But there was an intriguing spin-off of it called naming, listing, and counting theory, which perhaps seventy-five people in the world knew anything at all about and another twelve actually could do anything with. There, on those rare and stilly heights, I decided to dig in my heels—while, during summers, I ran around the world reading as much as possible in the oldest and most outré languages I could find.

  Well.

  Sometime in the mid-seventies, my mathematical work led me to apply a few of naming, listing, and counting theory’s more arcane corollaries to the translation of an archaic narrative text of some nine hundred or so words (depending on the ancient language in which you found it), sometimes called the Culhar’ Fragment and, more recently, the Missolonghi Codex. That fragment has come down to us in several translations in several ancient scripts.

  The occasion for my own translation was the discovery, in a basement storage room of the Istanbul Archeological Museum, of a new version of the Culhar’ in a script that was, by any educated guess, certainly older than most previously dated. Appended to it was a note in an early version of Greek (Linear B) to the effect that this text had been considered, at least by the author of the note, to be humanity’s first writing.

  And Linear B has not been written for a very, very long time.

  But since the Culhar’ only exists in its various partial and, sometimes, contradictory translations, we do not know for certain which script it was initially supposed to have been written in; nor can we be sure of its presumed initial geography.

  The origins of writing are just as obscure and problematic as the origin of languages in general. Some of those problems are discussed, in the appendix to Delany’s first published volume of Nevèrÿon stories, by my friend and sometime colleague S. L. Kermit. Yes, that appendix was written at my request. For, though I have (still) never met him, Delany, after he had written his first five tales, sent me at my university a warm and appreciative letter about what my work had meant to him. (Till then, bits had been scattered only in the most recondite journals; though soon—praise all the gods of tenure—they were to coalesce into the precious, precious book.) He also asked if I, or someone I knew, might write a piece about my cryptographic successes that would serve as an appendix to his collection. On his behalf, then (regardless of what my old and dear friend claims—though I’ll admit the circumstances were confused, the time period rushed, and the weather just frightful), I asked Professor Kermit to lend the entertainment his limpid expository manner.

  But anyone interested in the details may consult the appendix to this first volume and pursue the matter through the first appendix to the second.

  I have worked with that ancient, fragmented, and incomplete narrative, with its barbarians, dragons, sunken cities, reeds and memory marks, twin-bladed warrior women, child ruler, one-eyed dreamer and mysterious rubber balls, for many, many months, spread out over what has become many years; and I’m delighted that the pressure of my own attentions drew Delany to pose (with the help of my commentary) his own land of Nevèrÿon.

  Professor Kermit’s generous essay, which concludes this volume, is rich in suggestions as to ways the Culhar’ may have prompted Delany to elaborate elements in his fantasy. But to say too much more about that, especially before you have read the stories themselves, is to suggest there is a closer juncture between post-modern tales and ancient Ur text than there is. For the relation between the Culhar’ and these stories is one of suggestion, invention, and play—rather than one of scholarly investigation or even scholarly speculation. If anything, Delany’s stories are, among other things, a set of elaborate and ingenuous deconstructions of the Culhar’—a word I take to mean ‘an analysis of possible (as opposed to impossible) meanings that subvert any illusions we have of becoming true masters over a given text,’ a word which I have, like so many in the last decade, become rather fond of; and one which Professor Kermit abhors.

  Still, I am as happy to fulfill the publisher’s request for a general introduction to the series as I was first pleased by the fact my translation called Delany’s attention to the Culhar’ in the first place.

  But there, really, you have it.

  This recompilation of Delany’s immense and marvelous fantasy will mark a return to the series for thousands on thousands of readers, some of whom may even recall when the first piece, ‘The Tale of Gorgik,’ appeared in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine for Spring of 1979. That story was nominated for a Nebula Award; and the collection of the first five tales (with
Kermi’s intriguing appendix) in a paperback volume that same year became an American Book Award nominee. And, lo, the opening tale is now longer.

  Taken all together, Delany’s mega-fantasy is a fascinating fiction of ideas, a narrative hall of mirrors, an intricate argument about power, sexuality, and narration itself. In the second piece, ‘The Tale of Old Venn,’ we can watch sophisticated intellection and primitive passion play off one another. By the third, ‘The Tale of Small Sarg,’ sadomasochism has reared its endlessly fascinating head; while the ninth, ‘The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals,’ explores the impact of AIDS on a major American city.

  Where did the fantasy go …?

  But that is precisely the fascination of the series.

  Some critics have found within the stories, as well as the individual tales’ arguments with one another, critiques, parodies, and dialogues with and of writings as diverse as Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sex, G. Spencer-Brown’s The Laws of Form, Marx’s Critique of Political Economy, Popper’s two-volume study, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Derrida’s ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’—and even The Wizard of Oz. To others, however, it was all ponderous and pointless beyond bearing. For certain critics, the ten years Delany devoted to this most massive yet marginal project in an already marginal sub-genre seemed manic willfulness.

  But we do not have to be alert to every nuance of the fantasy’s sometimes dauntingly allusive play to enjoy this epic of the rise to political power of an ex-mine slave in a world of dragons, barbarians, Amazons, prehistoric splendor, perverse passions, and primitive precocity. If we did, the series never would have gained the audience it has—which, thanks to its initial three-volume paperback appearance (with a fourth in hardcover), already numbers in the hundreds of thousands. And it is equally a fact: few of us are such provincial readers that we won’t catch some.

  This heroic saga has been characterized many ways. Delany himself has written of it as ‘a child’s garden of semiotics.’ Once, at a department party, I overheard someone who asked what to expect of Delany’s fantasy sequence receive the suggestion that he would find it closer to Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften than Die Frau ohne Schatten. My favorite description was given, however, by SF writer Elizabeth Lynn. Within my hearing, out on some screened-in Westchester porch, Lizzy was speaking to someone who’d asked her about the first volume, just published. (At this remove I don’t remember if they realized I was listening.) She said: