recent reading (a report from the stfnal itch)

[arkuat]

So 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.

Comments

[timprov.livejournal.com]

Have you read Butler's collection Bloodchild? If not you should seek it out.

[arkuat]

Not yet but it has certainly been on my list

[jandrewm.livejournal.com]

More on Delany, and Trouble on Triton (his preferred title).

I taught this novel alongside Virginia Woolf's Orlando, as both deal with gender switching and use this device to play around with ideas about identity and social order.

We spent a lot of time on TOT's last paragraph (of the novel proper, not the appendices), which is pretty dense-- it features a lengthy sentence broken up by an even longer parenthesis, which itself includes many clauses). I actually think it's a brilliant ending, but it took me a while to come to this perspective. An interview I read with Delany helped me to see what was going on: Bron is teetering on the edge of psychosis in the last paragraph, those few seconds of suspension between sanity and madness. We never know which way Bron is going to go on this, and that's surely deliberate.

I asked my students to make a case for which fate seems most likely for Bron, and we had a lively discussion of why he's so sick (social and psychological factors) and whether there's any hope of healing. We talked about how Delany uses Bron's problems in this far-future "ambiguous heterotopia" to comment on our own time.

I've now read TOT three times and it really holds up. As for Dhalgren, definitely give it a try! I tried to read it numerous times in my youth, but about five years ago (in the midst of an intensive Delany reading period), I picked it up and had no problems with it. Certainly I don't understand a lot of the book, but it's not the kind of novel that one "gets." It's like Moby Dick or Ulysses or Ada, a great whoosh of a book.

One other Delany book that I love is his recent collection of novellas, Atlantis. That, and his memoir, The Motion of Light in Water.

[tanac.livejournal.com]

You're reminding me that I need to step back into Delany one of these days... I started with Dahlgren about 7 years ago and absolutely loved it. It's actually colored my perceptions to such an extent that his other work seems somehow... I don't know, not as weighty? Have made it through about half of the Neveryona books, but haven't yet picked up any of the standalone novels.