| Product Summary | | Format: Paperback | | ISBN: 9780819568830 | | Publisher: Wesleyan Publishing House | | Publish Date: 7/30/2009 | | Buy.com Sku: 208756217 | | Item#: | | Buy.com Sales Rank: 68799 | | Dimensions (in Inches) 8.75H x 5.75L x 0.75T | | Pages: 288 |
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| | | An indispensable work of science fiction criticism revised and expanded
| Author Bio| Samuel R. Delany | | Born in 1942, Samuel R. Delany began writing early, with his first publication coming at the age of 20. By 1967 he had been called "the best science fiction writer in the world" by critic Algis Budrys--although he had met and would continue to occasionally meet with critical rejection, based not only on his writing, but, distressingly, on his sexuality and race as well. Delany's writing career can be divided into at least four distinct segments. The first phase began with his debut, a full-length novel called THE JEWELS OF APTOR (1962) and ended in 1970 with the fourth volume of the Fall of the Towers series. Delany's fiction from this period shows his interest in language and its uses, mythology--both existing and imagined--and characters who are often marked by a profound "defect" which, in turn, drives them on to a quest of some sort. These works include numerous award-winners like the novel BABEL-17 and short stories like "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones" and, perhaps his most well-known title, "Aye, and Gomorrah...". Delany then published almost no fiction between 1970 and 1974, when his massive novel DHALGREN appeared. Marking the second phase of his writing, DHALGREN featured many of the same elements of the earlier works, but also focused on issues such as sexuality and race. It was not a critical success--many thought that it was overlong and overly convoluted--at the time of publication, but, somewhat bizarrely, it was a huge bestseller in the U.S. Subsequent critical opinion has been much more favorable, crediting it with, among other things, being a progenitor of the cyberpunk movement. His next novel, TRITON--later retitled TROUBLE ON TRITON--was subtitled "An Ambiguous Heterotopia" and continued Delany's explorations of sexuality, which have carried through to his critically lauded Neveryon fantasy series. In the third segment of his career, Delany has focused on memoirs and autobiographical studies of his life as a gay, black man from the mid-1950s to the 1970s in New York City. Most well known in the period is THE MOTION OF LIGHT IN WATER, another critical success, which was subtitled "Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village 1957-1965". The fourth--and by no means least--segment of Delany's writing has been a voluminous body of critical work, much of it involving linguistic and post-structuralist theory. He has written critiques of other critics and writers, but, perhaps most interestingly to the fan of his science fiction works, he has written a considerable amount of criticism of his own work, under various pseudonyms. Many of these pieces appear as introductions or afterwords to his books, providing further refinements to his theories on language and mythology. Delany has also published several books of social and sexual criticism--including THE MAD MEN and HOGG--in the guise of what surely must rank among the most disturbing examples of pornographic fiction in print. He has taught at numerous universities, been a fixture on lecture circuits both within and outside of the science fiction world, and, with his current work and through reprint programs at several publishing houses, is destined to remain at the top of the short list of America's most consistently interesting writers. |
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