Samuel R Delany

Samuel R DelanySamuel R Delany (born April 1, 1942, New York City) is an award-winning American science fiction author. He has written works that have garnered substantial critical acclaim, including the novels Nova, The Einstein Intersection, Hogg, and Dhalgren. Since January 2001 he has been a professor of English and Creative Writing at Temple University in Philadelphia. He is widely known in the academic world as a literary critic.

Samuel R Delany was born and raised in Harlem and attended the Dalton School and Bronx High School of Science. Delany and the poet Marilyn Hacker, who met in high school, were married for nineteen years and have a daughter.

Delany was a published science fiction author by the age of 20. He published six well-regarded science fiction novels between 1962 and 1968, as well as several prize-winning short stories (collected in Driftglass). Dhalgren was published in 1974. His main literary project through the late 1970s and 1980s was the Nevčr˙on series. The overall title of the four volumes is Return to Nevčr˙on, which is also the title of the final book.

Samuel R Delany has published several autobiographical/semi-autobiographical accounts of his life as a black and gay writer, including his Hugo award winning autobiography, The Motion of Light in Water.

In recent years, Delany has been teaching English, comparative literature, and creative writing. Samuel R Delany spent 11 years teaching at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, a year and a half at the University at Buffalo, and moved to the English Department of Temple University in 2001. He has also published several books of criticism, interviews, and other essays.

Much of Samuel R Delany's work starting with his 1975 novel Dhalgren deals with sexual themes to an extent rarely equalled in serious writing. Dhalgren and Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand include several sexually explicit passages, and several of his books such as Equinox (UK title, The Tides of Lust), The Mad Man, Hogg and Phallos can be considered pornography, a term Delany himself endorses. (He has also published several books of literary criticism, with an emphasis on issues in science fiction and other paraliterary genres, comparative literature, and queer studies.)

Novels such as Trouble on Triton and the thousand-plus pages making up the stories and novels in his four-volume Return to Neveryon series explore in detail how sexuality and sexual attitudes relate to the socioeconomic underpinnings of a primitive--or, in Triton's case, futuristic--society. Even in works with no science fiction or fantasy content to speak of, such as Atlantis: Three Tales, The Mad Man, and Hogg, Delany pursues these questions by creating vivid pictures of New York City, now in the Jazz-Age, now in the first decade of the AIDS epidemic, private schools in the 1950s, Greece and Europe in the 1960s, and--in Hogg--generalized small-town America.

Samuel R Delany's most recent fiction, Phallos for example, details the quest by a gay man from the island of Syracuse in the second-century reign of the Emperor Hadrian for happiness and security. Other themes that Delany explores in his fiction in detail include language, memory, and (in his early fiction, till 1968) mythology.

Selected Bibliography

Series

  • Neveryon
    • Tales of Nevčr˙on (1979)
    • Neveryona (1983)
      • Variant Title: Neveryóna (1983)
    • Flight from Nevčr˙on (1985)
    • The Bridge of Lost Desire (1987)
    • Return to Nevčr˙on (1987)
  • The Fall of the Towers
    • Captives of the Flame (1963)
      • Variant Title: Out of the Dead City (rev 1968 UK) (1963)
    • The Towers of Toron (1964)
    • City of a Thousand Suns (1965)
    • The Fall of the Towers (1970)

Novels

  • The Jewels of Aptor (1962)
  • The Ballad of Beta-2 (1965)
  • Babel-17 (1966)
  • Empire Star (1966)
  • The Einstein Intersection (1967)
  • Nova (1968)
  • Dhalgren (1975)
  • Triton (1976)
    • Variant Title: Trouble on Triton (1996) (1976)
  • Empire (1978) with Howard V. Chaykin
  • Tales of Neveryon (1979)
  • Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (1984)
  • They Fly at Ciron (1993)
    • Variant Title: They Fly at Çiron (1993)
  • The Mad Man (1994)
  • Equinox (1994)
  • Hogg (1995)
  • Bread and Wine (1999) with Mia Wolff
  • The Fall of the Towers (2004)
  • So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction & Fantasy (2004) with Nalo Hopkinson and Uppinder Mehan
  • Stars In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand (2004)

Collections

  • Driftglass (1971)
  • Distant Suns (1981)
  • The Complete Nebula Award-Winning Fiction (1986)
  • Driftglass/Starshards (1993)
  • Atlantis: Three Tales (1994)

Anthology Series

  • Nebula Awards
    • 13 Nebula Winners 13 (1979)

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