The Jewels of Aptor is Samuel Delany’s first book, written when he was just 19 and published a year later. His wife, the poet Marilyn Hacker (with whom he went on to edit the speculative fiction anthology/journal Quark) was an assistant editor at Ace Books at the time, and so nepotism greased the machine to give the world this weird, highfalutin’ fantasy novel about the dark gods of the future and the post-nuclear mutants who believe in them.

I’m tempted to draw parallels between this book and Octavia Butler’s Patternmaster, which I reviewed a few weeks ago: they’re both early novels from iconic black science fiction writers who made careers on unflinchingly drawing out the sexual, racial, and gendered subtexts of the genre. They both employ a narrative conceit that I call “Mythological Futurism,” that is, they set their action in such a distant post-apocalyptic world that the technology of our time has been reduced to a set of symbolic associations, fables, and ruins. They both erase the world, tabula rasa, and give it back to the reader in knowing glimpses: fragments of once-great cities peeking out from overgrown jungles, piecemeal stories about a mute people who once built machines and traveled to the stars. The difference, however, is that Delany’s novel predates Butler’s by a decade–enough of a gap that it could well have been an influence–and is much more ambitious.

Science fiction appears to welcome young genius. Maybe it’s the imaginative streak of youth, or its proximity to the leading edge of the future: Bradbury was published at eighteen, as were Isaac Asimov and Frederik Pohl. John Brunner published his first novel, Galactic Storm, when he was seventeen, and Theodore Sturgeon sold his first story when he was twenty. Of course, none of those guys are as good as Delany, whose command of language in The Jewels of Aptor is rare at any age.

The novel is intensely lyrical, complicated, and peppered with poems and songs whose strangeness suits the fact that they’re supposed to be ritual fragments from an alien civilization. It’s heavily mythic, a kind of post-apocalyptic hero’s trial where the journey’s purpose weaves and folds into itself like one of Mandelbrot’s fractal coastlines: you must seek a goddess on a damned island populated by shape-shifting creatures. No, wait, the goddess is manifold. She is and isn’t her own mother. Thieves and poets run wild. What are the jewels, technology or magic?

This, it turns out, is the central theme of the novel: the distinctions (and diffusions) between magic and technology. In this novel, isolated cults employ the scientific tools of the nuclear age (or, rather, what’s left of it) in a highly ritualized manner. Casualties of the bomb, generations down the line, barely resemble humanity but rather a hierarchy of mutants and flying creatures straight out of Dante. Words banal to our ears float through their minds like mystical incantations: radio, electricity, diode. A television, without context, in the hands of such a believer, takes on oracular form. Where religion is a culture performed publicly, technology, in this novel, is a kind of cargo cult secreted in the jungle, bearing occult knowledge.

In principle, religion satisfies its own metaphysical ends, but magic is a functional art, one which shoots for tangible results. In this respect, magic already resembles technology and science–it doesn’t take much to imagine their conflation somewhere down the timeline–and Delany plays knowingly with these nebulous distinctions. The end result of the hero’s journey to procure a handful of magical jewels is that they could be used to build an engine. When they are lost, it’s discovered that they were just shorthands; machines can (and will) be built without them. It’s the knowledge that was sacred.

In the hotel room carpeting that is my life, The Female Man was a major event. It’s among the most important-feeling events of my career as a reader, but it’s also the kind of book that sounds crummy on paper.

But here goes.

The Female Man takes place in four worlds inhabited by four different women who share the same genotype and whose names all start with the letter J. There’s Jeannine Dadier, who lives in 1969 in an America that never recovered from the Great Depression; Joanna, who also lives in 1969, but in an America like ours; Janet Evason, an Amazonian beast who lives in an all-female world called Whileaway; and Alice Reasoner, or “Jael,” who’s a dystopian warlord from a future where women and men have been launching nukes at each other for decades.

When all these women get together throughout the course of the book, you come to realize that all their realities are “worlds of possibility” with no linear relationship to one another. So, although some of the book takes place in the future, no one woman’s world is supposed to be “our” past or “our” future. Rather, they’re each inter-dimensional travelers. Not to mention that they’re all manifestations of the same woman, spread out over time, situation, and possibility.

It’s complicated. Janet, faced with a world populated by men, balks. Jeannine becomes complicit in Jael’s war. Joanna, exasperated, calls herself a Female Man, ostensibly to separate herself from being identified as “just another” woman. Jael attempts to set up anti-man military bases over space and time. The women travel from place to place, to Janet’s world, Joanna’s, Jael’s.

There’s nothing straight about the book, in any sense of the word. Russ’ style is epically woozy, disjointed, and, for lack of a better word, “feminine,” unconcerned with structure or the rigidity of narrative. Unsurprisingly, too, the novel plays heavily with voice, with characters playing multiple roles, and speaking from diverse points of view. It’s usually impossible to identify who the speaking “I” is, which is maddening until you learn to realize that “I” is the key to power and all that fiddling with it is an attempt to speak to a universal (albeit feminine) point of view all while eradicating whatever prejudices are built into our language: “I, I, I. Repeat it like magic.” In a sense, the traditional authority of The Novel is futzed about, as very few concessions of logic and characterization are made to the reader: Russ even espouses, “to resolve contrarieties, unite them in your own person.” In short, you are forced to loosen your grip, which in turn throws out all the usual assumptions about readers having a “right” or “getting to” know what’s happening and why.

This is actually, to me, the most subversive gesture of the novel, despite all the other, more vitriolic points about power and gender dialectics (athough some of that stuff can be fustian in a “hell yeah!”-empowering kind of way). Here’s a book that’s telling you all kinds of heavy shit, but it’s not condescending. It holds the insight firmly in its grip and it won’t just give it to you. It demands to be decoded. It demands consideration. It demands, most of all, to be read with both feet firmly planted on its own turf.

This is why it works so well as science fiction, which is a genre that demands a hearty suspension of disbelief from its readers. As readers of SF, we are ready to believe a great deal of improbable things, but we are rarely asked to indulge a writer’s style so profoundly. And yet, why not? Isn’t that why we’re here — to experience things which readers of traditional fiction scarcely know exists? Joanna Russ says “try harder.”

Samuel Delany noticed this, too. In a 1977 review of Russ’ work (which is cryptic but presumably positive, since he mentions The Female Man in Dhalgren), he asks “What does one do with an SF novel like The Female Man, which demands its politics be taken seriously, and presents those politics without naivete or bombast, but rather through a whole host of distancing devices that make it an “epic novel” in almost exactly the way Brecht used the term “epic theater”?

Which is to say: No Fourth Wall.

Which is to say: No Walls At All!

NEXT BOOK: SAMUEL DELANY’S DHALGREN

As far as science fiction anthologies go, Quark #1 is weird. Co-edited in the early 70s by the poet Marilyn Hacker and Samuel Delany (who were married at the time, but have long since separated and both self-identified as homosexual), it purports to be an quarterly of “speculative fiction,” an all-encompassing buzzword for outsider literature that was particularly in vogue at the time. Perhaps as a result, the first book in the series (of four) is both utopian and vague, full of middle-ground short stories that either couldn’t or wouldn’t hack it as pure science fiction. Familiar names are there — Ursula K. LeGuin, A.E. Van Vogt — but they’re all flubbing a little, trying out different styles. It’s often funny, and certainly worth seeking out, but the real highlight of Quark #1 is an essay from Samuel Delany, who tries nobly to place “speculative fiction” into a larger historical context.

In the spirit of open sourcery, and because I love it when other sites do this, I’ve scanned Delany’s article and PDF’ed it for anyone interested. This is a relatively hard-to-find essay, and a quick read to boot. The brunt of the piece has to do with the largely unspoken similarities between science fiction and poetry; in Delany’s argument, both genres have an incantatory function, in that they are both preoccupied with conjuring up the “thingness” of things.

An interesting aside: science fiction is the most fertile area of writing in the production of new words — a position held, up until the mid-1930s, by poetry. Coincidence?

Download: Samuel Delany, Critical Methods: Speculative Fiction (1.3 MB)

NEXT BOOK: RENÉ BERJAVEL’S THE ICE PEOPLE

The Einstein Intersection takes place on an indeterminately future Earth: humanity is long gone, replaced by a genetically troubled race of people, largely mutants and idiots, living within the ruins of human society, struggling to make sense of abandoned technologies and enacting the remnants of our culture through exaggerated myths about the ancient heroes of Earth, such as the Beatles, Jean Harlow, and Elvis.

For example:

“You remember the legend of The Beatles? You remember the Beatle Ringo left his love even though she treated him tender. He was the one Beatle who did not sing, so the earliest forms of the legend go. After a hard day’s night he and the rest of the Beatles were torn apart by screaming girls, and he and the other Beatles returned, finally at one, with the great rock and the great roll.”

Incredible. Anyway, the central character is a kind of alien Orpheus, who sets out across the bombed-out world, defeating lush monsters and hanging out with psychics and Vikings, in order to rescue his love (an equally alien Eurydice) from Death. It’s a doomed mission from the start, and he unwittingly enacts, undoubtedly for the millionth time, the tragic archetypes of human mythology.

I’ve never read Samuel Delany before, although I’ve heard his work represents a substantial segment of the literary sci-fi canon. I can see why: The Einstein Intersection is lyrical, intricate, and peppered with self-consciously meta author’s notes that say things like, “you are twenty-one years old, going on twenty-two: you are old too get by as a child prodigy, your accomplishments are more important at the age at which they were done, still, the images of youth plague me, Chatterton, Greenburg, Radiguet.” And here, a book that is essentially a fantasy, about a musical troll trekking across a sumptuous planet on dragon-back, but the references — to the myth of Orpheus, Isidore Ducasse, Machievelli, and Yeats — are spot on, and you know that it’s all a kind of tragic allegory about love and myth. It’s Joyceain in its scope, and childlike in its approach to the redress of wrongs: tears, music, and disbelief in the face of evil.

This book is positioned strongly in a kind of academic, trans-genre critical position. It’s about mutants, but also: it’s not about mutants at all. Hence, this is my entrée into a new kind of science fiction. It seems to me that the ultimate enactment of the genre’s purpose is as a kind of subterfuge for academic freaks; since science fiction is ostensibly for outcasts, and is generally unread by the literary establishment, there is a safety blanket there, some room to get weird and still get published. At the same time, the primary demographic of science fiction is of the action-figure collecting persuasion, so the reaction to a book like The Einstein Intersection from traditional male geeks (i.e. Larry Niven fans) is one of terrified, shocked betrayal — of alienation from their own culture. Can you imagine? Coming across a science fiction book that looks like it’s going to be about talking dragons and mutant babes, but then finding out that it’s written by a gay, dyslexic black man with, like, a hand fetish and an obsession with classical mythology. Seriously, start browsing reviews online, and you will find pages and pages of virulent nerds damning Delany’s work.

Too deep for nerds, too weird for the traditional canon: it’s the real borderland.

Ray Davis, in a critical essay (Delany’s Dirt) about Delany’s later, slightly-pornographic books, writes, “…genres may assume reading protocols which are not those of a particular ideal of literature. But a given piece of fiction can fit more than one set of protocols, and the set of ‘literary’ protocols is notable for its flexibility.” Which is to say that the genre — science fiction, as it were — has a set of strict conventions, to the point that fans will become deeply betrayed when they aren’t adhered to, but genre-specific content like this can often tell us things that mainstream books, non-genre books, can’t. And the mantle of “literature” (flexible as it is) can float down, too, to grace the shoulders of the most unlikely books.

It’s kind of a Catch-22: to understand Delany, you have to be at least somewhat fannish, willing to let down your guard and accept that genre-specific content isn’t a sign of weakness. At the same time, you can’t be so committed to the genre that you would sell someone like Delany down the river for getting liberal with the rules.

NEXT BOOK: H.G. WELLS’ THE INVISIBLE MAN.