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But I also know intellectually it’s a great story. Even though I love other Delany stories, I’m not connecting with this one. We definitely read to experience what we haven’t and to get to know people unlike ourselves. I think we’re just miscommunicating over slight misunderstandings. They get excited about literary aspects of science fiction that I don’t. And I believe this line of thinking explains why the VanderMeers included so many stories I don’t like. And that has its fun aspects, but it’s not why I read science fiction. When I read “Aye, and Gomorrah,” I want to analyze it like an English assignment. And Heinlein probably got sick of all his fans who couldn’t get beyond his 1950s novels. I bet Le Guin got tired of everyone talking about The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, and The Lathe of Heaven and not reading her many later novels.
I’m sure artists hate when their fans fixate on a period. I can get into his other periods, but I’m really hung up on “The Star Pit,” Empire Star, Babel-17, and Nova.
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There are times I’m into his folk period, and other times I’m into his Christian albums, and other times I’m into Blood on the Tracks and Desire, but nothing compares to his 1965-1966 period to me. But I favor Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde way above all the other periods of Dylan’s career. I’ve bought most of his albums over my lifetime as they came out. Maybe here’s another angle of explanation. And fiction works best when it’s not intellectual. I do a lot of nonfiction reading about sexuality and gender in hopes of achieving insight, but it’s always intellectual. If you’re part of the lowest common denominator in any group, then understanding unique members is via abstractions. And I must also admit, sexuality and gender have never been important themes in my fiction reading. That isn’t a criticism, but a way to explain why I like it less than Delany’s space opera. “Aye, and Gomorrah” uses science fiction to explore sexuality and gender, but it feels more literary than science fiction.
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But that’s a whole different kind of fun than just reading a science fiction story for science fiction fun. Delany does appeal to my literary side and there are times I want to study his early work by delving into his biographical information, and literary criticism. Delany, Volume 1, 1957-1969 to see if that hunch is true. I’ve been wanting to find the time to read In Search of Silence: The Journals of Samuel R. Delany was traveling during those years and he put his life experiences into his science fiction stories. Most of the stories in Driftglass except “The Star Pit,” but including “Aye, And Gomorrah” are interesting to me intellectually because I’ve read some of Delany’s nonfiction books, and they hint that his short stories were somewhat autobiographical.
#THE STAR PIT SAMUEL R DELANY FULL#
It was full of vivid imagery but not thrilling action, like my favorites. Actually, I was impressed that I finished such a large novel. Later on, in the late 1970s I read Dhalgren, and I was impressed with its adultness and size. And when I think about that, I think it’s because I resonated with Delany’s colorful space opera at a time when I was an immature teenager daydreaming of space adventure. However, it doesn’t excite me like my favorite Delany stories. I’ve read “Aye, and Gomorrah” several times over the years and I think it’s an impressive work, especially when you consider it’s Delany’s first published story, and was the closing story in the legendary Dangerous Visions anthology edited by Harlan Ellison. I bought his collections, Driftglass (1971), Distant Stars (1981), and Aye, and Gomorrah (2003) as they came out, but I never got into his short works, or later novels like those stories I first read in high school. My all-time favorite short work of science fiction is still “The Star Pit.” But looking back, I realized I only liked a very few works by Delany: “The Star Pit,” Empire Star, Babel-17, Nova, and Dhalgren. They felt exciting and different from the old writers I loved. Delany, Le Guin, and Zelazny were a new generation, SF writers who began publishing in the 1960s as I began to read new science fiction as it came out. I started out reading Verne, Wells, Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, but they were all old writers who had been around for years. Delany was my favorite young SF writer I discovered back in the 1960s when I was growing up. Story #50 of 107: “Aye, and Gomorrah” by Samuel R. Group Read 27: The Big Book of Science Fiction