Samuel R. Delany is a profoundly influential and award-winning African-American gay author, critic, and teacher, whose many novels, short stories, memoirs, and essays are among the most important of the 20th and 21st centuries. His works have fundamentally altered the terrain of science fiction (SF) due in part to their formally consummate, theoretically sophisticated, materially grounded, and politically radical explorations of difference. These explorations reach an apogee in Dhalgren (1975), a bestselling countercultural classic. Delany is a Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) Grand Master. He is also one of SF’s best critics. The courageous humility and pragmatism with which he treats his subjects, when considered alongside the virtuosity with which he writes, gesture at a cosmologically scaled multiplicity, the understanding of which is dependent on biography, a point rendered clear in his exquisite autobiography The Motion of Light in Water (1988). Delany was born in Harlem, New York, on 1 April 1942. He was educated at the prestigious Dalton School and Bronx High School of Science. He spent summers at progressive youth camps. He also briefly attended the City College of New York. Delany has held professorships at University of Massachusetts Amherst, SUNY Buffalo, and Temple University. From 1961 to 1980, he and poet Marilyn Hacker had an open marriage; they have one child. He has been in an open relationship with Dennis Rickett since 1991. He was astoundingly prolific at a prodigal age. He translated Rimbaud’s Le bateau ivre (1871) when he was eighteen. For a time, he lived in a commune in New York, writing songs for the folk-rock band Heavenly Breakfast. He has worked on shrimp boats in Texas. He has written graphic novels and a couple of stories for the Wonder Woman comics. He has written an opera, and he has written and directed a film. He has published pornographic novels that engage thoughtfully with the HIV/AIDS crisis. In short, to borrow a concept he develops in Empire Star (1966), Delany might be described as “multiplex”: even an ephemeral biography such as this one casts light on his singular ability to sustain and synthesize presumably opposed differences into a greater unity.
The Fault in Our Stars by J. Green - 1st review
