Comments on: SF Writers: Samuel Delany

By: mark c

mark c — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 19:17:34 +0000

there is that one bit where they go cottaging with six legged space aliengs

Dhalgren has a fair bit of rough sex in it, but nothing really gross

By: Martin Skidmore

Martin Skidmore — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 13:45:41 +0000

I guess it is – there are certainly a lot of non-vanilla sexual elements. The main character is a sort-of-lobotomised slave, male, who has an affair with a male diplomat. I don’t remember anything hard to take in the sexual content, though.

By: a tanned rested and unlogged lørd sükråt wötsît

a tanned rested and unlogged lørd sükråt wötsît — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 13:31:41 +0000

i haven’t reread stars like grains of sand for years: isn’t that a bit of a crossover territory?

(honestly i can’t recall a single thing about it except someone’s a genetically engineered sexslave, possibly?)

By: Martin Skidmore

Martin Skidmore — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 13:16:00 +0000

DV: they are separate things, to the best of my knowledge.

Yes, those are good points, Mark. That territory has always fascinated him – Dhalgren is set wholly in such an interstitial zone writ large, for instance.

By: a tanned rested and unlogged lørd sükråt wötsît

a tanned rested and unlogged lørd sükråt wötsît — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 22:11:07 +0000

i think there’s parallels between “triton” — with its de jure unlicensed zone built into its politics by design — and “the mad man” (which is the one about eating shit), which pretty much argues that real life new york has a de facto unlicensed zone, and so in fact do all large cities: sectors or interstices in the social where the law’s writ just doesn’t run, and the people who prefer to live in them… not because they are more dangerous than the patrolled territory the rest of us live in, but because (most of the time) they are no worse and in some ways more congenial (until they aren’t)

even “hogg” — which is the rapey one — describes an underworld which mixes extremes of ugliness with occasional glimpses of a strange improvised tenderness of communality, among really the very worst kind of people you’d ever hope not to meet

By: DV

DV — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 21:52:24 +0000

Is there a discontinuity between the brainy SF stuff and the unpleasant literary smut, or is there a crossover book where it is all brainy SF AND people eating shit while being sodomised?