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arkuatSo I got it into my head that I'd been putting off reading too much Delany and too much Butler for far too long. (Worry not, somehow I'm not feeling the same way about, say, Ellison.) This was largely because I reread Babel-17 (and liked it much better than I had on that first reading years ago) not long after I had read Wild Seed for the first time.
So, since then I've read Triton, and most of the stories in Driftglass. I bounced off of "Cage of Brass", which is near the end, and the last story in the collection, "Time considered as a helix of semiprecious stones", is one that I've read several times before. It's an old favorite from my Golden Age of Science Fiction (I was 14 years old in 1979). Somehow I had latched onto Triton as something to follow up Babel-17 with. I wasn't paying attention to how early Babel is, and was shocked to discover that Triton was published immediately after Dhalgren. I enjoyed Stars in my pocket like grains of sand and intend to read it again, but I'm not sure I'll ever be ready for Dhalgren.
Triton was fascinating, but frustrating. I'm not a fan of the antihero technique, but it's always lovely to see it being done well, because it is so hard to do well. Delany gets away with almost enough weirdness of the good-to-read kind to make me forgive his non-ending. You know, the Grateful Dead could hardly ever write a good ending for a song either.
But for Butler's Seed to Harvest collection of novels, I have nothing but gushy praise. I will limit myself here to this, which I finally managed to articulate in a recent conversation with pameladean: Back before I ever tried reading horror fiction, this (Butler's Seed to Harvest) is the sort of fiction that I imagined they were describing to me, before I went and tried to read some of the titles they actually recommended to me as good horror fiction (which I mostly didn't like, preferring to read horror nonfiction -- AKA sober history -- instead). The events in Butler's stories horrify me more often than not, but they keep me reading eagerly; they scratch the same itch that keeps me up late reading horror-nonfiction such as The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico.
And at the same time they scratch the stfnal itch, which conventional horror sometimes does in an oblique way, and history by definition never tries to.
So, since then I've read Triton, and most of the stories in Driftglass. I bounced off of "Cage of Brass", which is near the end, and the last story in the collection, "Time considered as a helix of semiprecious stones", is one that I've read several times before. It's an old favorite from my Golden Age of Science Fiction (I was 14 years old in 1979). Somehow I had latched onto Triton as something to follow up Babel-17 with. I wasn't paying attention to how early Babel is, and was shocked to discover that Triton was published immediately after Dhalgren. I enjoyed Stars in my pocket like grains of sand and intend to read it again, but I'm not sure I'll ever be ready for Dhalgren.
Triton was fascinating, but frustrating. I'm not a fan of the antihero technique, but it's always lovely to see it being done well, because it is so hard to do well. Delany gets away with almost enough weirdness of the good-to-read kind to make me forgive his non-ending. You know, the Grateful Dead could hardly ever write a good ending for a song either.
But for Butler's Seed to Harvest collection of novels, I have nothing but gushy praise. I will limit myself here to this, which I finally managed to articulate in a recent conversation with pameladean: Back before I ever tried reading horror fiction, this (Butler's Seed to Harvest) is the sort of fiction that I imagined they were describing to me, before I went and tried to read some of the titles they actually recommended to me as good horror fiction (which I mostly didn't like, preferring to read horror nonfiction -- AKA sober history -- instead). The events in Butler's stories horrify me more often than not, but they keep me reading eagerly; they scratch the same itch that keeps me up late reading horror-nonfiction such as The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico.
And at the same time they scratch the stfnal itch, which conventional horror sometimes does in an oblique way, and history by definition never tries to.
