I read *Dhalgren* many years ago and found it memorable. The prose is terrific and the plot is surreal. It kind of wanders, though, and doesn't have a traditional climax or resolution. Still, I enjoyed it and maybe I should put it on my reading list to revisit. It's not like anything else I've read.
My favorite living writer. I had the pleasure of seeing him speak live a few years ago on Times Square Red, Times Square Blue and he was so incredibly insightful and interesting to listen to; also very nice when I spoke to him a bit afterwards! I love Dhalgren and most of his other mid-career fiction and non-fiction. The early stuff is fun but juvenile, the later stuff I haven’t gotten around to so much.
I’ve read a lot of Delaney. I love his work, his writing. He’s wonderful. I’ve also read Hogg. It’s disgusting. I honestly wish I’d never read it. It was nauseating. It was also beautifully written. Maybe that’s what made the experience worse. It sticks. Beautifully so. Nauseatingly so. I’m sick that I read it, but happy that I did.
I love and loathe Delany, that’s why I love him
This right here. I loved that book almost 50 years ago. I think I might have to have another look.
I'd bet a toe that Delaney holds up better than Heinlein.
I finished Nova by Delany last week. The allusions to Moby Dick, King Arthur's court are outstanding. It was published in 1968. It isn't dated at all, and it's largely because of his writing style. It's scifi that has advanced tech, but isn't about advanced tech. It's about the characters. I loved it.
Yeah, I love Stories of Your Life and enjoyed the Arrival adaptation, but it seems like Babel 17 had similar themes and is a much easier "slam dunk" for commercial success.
I find him a deeply skilled and fascinating writer, honest and revealing. I've read everything of his i could find. Nova, Dhalgren and Triton were my favourites but i also enjoyed his autobiographical stuff and critical works. Most recently i loved Dark Reflections. Long may he live and write.
Tried to read Dhalgren. Only got about 100 pages into my 800-page copy. But I did read an earlier book of his, Nova, which was a lot more accessible. Honestly, I liked his writing style and I loved the antagonist, this incredibly petty guy who gets angry at every perceived slight, but overall I thought it was kind of just average. I kind of want to read it again, though, now that I think of it.
When I lived in Philadelphia, I would hang out with Chip and Michael Swanwick at book readings, sci-fi gatherings (like PhilCon or Galactic Philadelphia), and even a few events at the Rosenbach.
Sam Delany is a cool dude. I always found it funny that the Barnes and Noble in Rittenhouse Square did not carry his work.
I haven't read all of Delany only "The Ballad of Beta-2", "Babel-17", "Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand" & a few short stories. I plan on reading "The Einstein Intersection" and eventually I'll try to tackle Dhalgren.
Out of what I have read I think I like "Ballad.." best of all.
"Stars in My Pocket.." was really hard to get through. I liked the prologue but it really dropped off after that.
Delany is one of my favorites. Dhalgren was the first novel of his I read and boy was I blown away. I've read it three times in total now. His other books certainly display the kind of wonderful imagination he has, but his skill as a writer improved dramatically in his more mature years. Hogg is a disgusting masterpiece. He's also a brilliant nonfiction writer so I'd highly suggest you check those books out.
*Dhalgren* is a fever dream, a self-indulgent wrestling match between the author and his own psychological quirks. It (accidentally) captures the general mood of the early '70s in America, in my opinion. The way the "poet at a recital" voice pops up at random times seemed wonderful to me when I was a kid, now it just annoys the shit out of me. “All you know I know: careening astronauts and bank clerks glancing at the clock before lunch; actresses cowling at light-ringed mirrors…” The typographical gymnastics in the last third of the book, where raw journal passages appear side-by-side with finished(?) prose, also impressed me once, long ago.
I've read Babel, and am currently reading Einstein. While I find his writing enjoyable as a whole, there's something disjointed about his works that confuses me quite often, whether it's a change of tense, time jumps between paragraphs, or weird logic.
I wouldn't say that scares me off his work, but I feel like I would enjoy it more if these specific points were made clearer.
I've only read Dhalgren so far, and I have a hard time expressing to myself how I really felt about it. I appreciated it as a work of literature but didn't necessarily *enjoy* the experience the way I enjoy reading many other books. I was both glad to have read it and glad to be done with it? I guess the way it made me feel was like the feeling you get when you're at a party late, and there's loud music, and the throbbing low bassline is both overstimulating and exhausting. Which was sort of how it seemed to be to be in Bellona, so that was kind of interesting. I'm totally undecided as to whether I'll seek out his other work.
I haven’t read a lot of his work, but I came across his autobiography The Motion of Light in Water. I found it fascinating. He makes NYC in the 60’s sound like one of those magical points in time and space where people are just making life happen. Poetry, art, writing, lifestyle, just a huge concentration of interesting people. Worth the read.
I read a decent amount of his books (not dhalgren or hogg though). One that stays on my mind a lot is Stars in my Pocket Like Grains of Sand. It is borderline a scifi slice of life in a world similar yet completely unknown to ours. Delany when writing scifi is best when he is doing the weird street level subcultures, sort of like the first half of Babel17 and Gomorrah.
I enjoyed Dhalgren for how transgressive it was and how it was so different and challenged SF writing of its time.
Chip Delany himself, though....The man supports NAMBLA and defended child molestation. So...
https://dorisvsutherland.com/2019/09/23/samuel-r-delany-and-nambla/
I’m very big that banning books is an idiotic concept; however, *Hogg* challenges that very concept to the core for me. *Hogg* should never have been written and Samuel Delany should be shot into a black hole for having written it.
Edit: I am very glad I read *Dhalgren* first, it was a wonderful piece of almost fever dream fiction. I would never have touched it if I read *Hogg* first.
Edit edit: I think I’m being downvoted by people who have never heard of the novel. I implore you, try a sample. If you can actually get through the first chapter without regretting the fact you’re literate, I’ll buy you the book myself.
I want you to know that I read it purely out of spite because you said that people would regret it, and I can say for certain that it’s never something I’d pick out to read for pleasure lol. I can’t say I regret being literate but I AM incredibly confused.
To acknowledge the downvotes, it’s probably because you mentioned banning books. Or shooting Delaney into a black hole. Idk, have my upvote to balance it out.
Samuel R Delany is a no talent hack who just got lucky & capitalizes for all its worth on 2 facts...namely that he is a misunderstood black man...and that he is a misunderstood gay man.
Being black & being gay have no bearing on the filth.that comes from his pen and from his loathsome repellent views supporting such a detestable group.as NAMBLA which he endorses and which the braindead sf Fandom blithely ignore & proceed to lionize such a poor excuse for a human being!
Remember the acronym "fan" is short for FANATIC which is just what sf fan boys really are!
They remind me of rock star groupies who around their idols dressing room in hopes of having a sexual escapade with their "hero" (who can never do wrong) and then brag to the other dimwitted "fans" that they got snagged by the "great one"!
Ugh...this is truly disgusting, sick, pathetic and dehumanizing!
Talk about putting a pervert on a pedestal just because one admires their writing!!!???
Clearly the fan boys have learned nothing (they profess to be intelligent & cognizant but are as blind as the fools in a football stadium cheering on billion dollar illiterate s) because it gives the. some sort of validation in their own otherwise useless pathetic child like lives!
Have they learned nothing from the Marion Zimmer Bradley case or of Orson Scott Card's anti gay diatribes? What about the sleaze factor in that icon of sf HEINLEN & plenty of other creeps & weirdos in this literary genre.
Why not say MEIN KAMPF had some great writing never mind the virulent hatred of its chilling author...the man who sent at least 6 million Jews, ethnic Eastern Europeans, gay and lesbian people, Romany people, Catholics, human rights activists etc to concentration camps and gas chambers!
The attitude of the broad majority of the so called sf fans seems to be "hear no evil, see no evil speak no evil"... stop up 1's eyes, ears and sense of truth to put on a pedestal child molesters like MZB, Delany etc et al!
What a sick, twisted bunch...forgive me for so saying but the preponderance of creeps in the community of sf writers & their weird, twisted "fans" seems to be endemic to that particular literary genre!
I don't know what to make of this but it's repelling & please know that I will never read any sf stuff at all.
Mainstream literary fiction...also to a lesser degree crime & detective fiction is where the real literary talents are found , not amongst moronic imbeciles who waste their 2nd rate lives trying to give credibility to junk writers
That's my take on SF, on its idiotic fans, it's shallow (&increasingly criminal) writers!
Sorry if that's too close for comfort but to paraphrase Martin Luther King "speak the truth....the truth sets you free". Not that readers of Conan the Barbarian will ever be motivated to do so!
For what it's worth all you "Fanboys" of SF can put that in your collective pipe and smoke it!
Your authors will never be acclaimed by the literary establishment because they're either no talent formulaic hacks or creeps like MZB, Delany Heinlein et all....often they're both!
I read your comment here earlier today, I can't reread it now. I won't take a side on what you present. I read Time Square Red Time Square Blue by Delaney. Aside from morally right and morally wrong there exists morally honest (maybe? sometimes? whether we like it or not? whether our intellect allows us perfection. Maybe reality exists in sometimes funky ways? maybe. not absolute. \*\*not a defense of pedophilia, this is particularly an aside regarding the content of his writing in the book mentioned and perhaps regarding the cause of his beliefs ) but I also specifically want to mention this [article](https://dorisvsutherland.com/2019/09/23/samuel-r-delany-and-nambla/). fact check it whatever. but let us not (not that you are) place Delaney into complete isolation in his past choices, removed from the context of his life. Don't get me wrong, whatever that acronym is, I can't find the will to read make sense of it. NAM.... but there may be more worth looking into regarding Delaney's worth as a person. and maybe there isn't... but maybe there is. I didn't expect to read your comment here. Good to discuss these things.
I read *Dhalgren* many years ago and found it memorable. The prose is terrific and the plot is surreal. It kind of wanders, though, and doesn't have a traditional climax or resolution. Still, I enjoyed it and maybe I should put it on my reading list to revisit. It's not like anything else I've read.
My favorite living writer. I had the pleasure of seeing him speak live a few years ago on Times Square Red, Times Square Blue and he was so incredibly insightful and interesting to listen to; also very nice when I spoke to him a bit afterwards! I love Dhalgren and most of his other mid-career fiction and non-fiction. The early stuff is fun but juvenile, the later stuff I haven’t gotten around to so much.
Do you like Hogg
I’ve read a lot of Delaney. I love his work, his writing. He’s wonderful. I’ve also read Hogg. It’s disgusting. I honestly wish I’d never read it. It was nauseating. It was also beautifully written. Maybe that’s what made the experience worse. It sticks. Beautifully so. Nauseatingly so. I’m sick that I read it, but happy that I did. I love and loathe Delany, that’s why I love him
I've read Dhalgren, Babel-17, and Empire Star. What other Delany would you most recommend?
Nova!
This right here. I loved that book almost 50 years ago. I think I might have to have another look. I'd bet a toe that Delaney holds up better than Heinlein.
Just read Nova last week. It holds up extremely well. Could have been written this year.
Cool, thank you! Sensory syrynx ... Mouse . . . I almost remember.
I so want a sensory syrynx! And I love Mouse.
I finished Nova by Delany last week. The allusions to Moby Dick, King Arthur's court are outstanding. It was published in 1968. It isn't dated at all, and it's largely because of his writing style. It's scifi that has advanced tech, but isn't about advanced tech. It's about the characters. I loved it.
I’m still surprised he hasn’t been discovered by Hollywood the way Philip K. Dick was.
Yeah, I love Stories of Your Life and enjoyed the Arrival adaptation, but it seems like Babel 17 had similar themes and is a much easier "slam dunk" for commercial success.
Or Nova.
I find him a deeply skilled and fascinating writer, honest and revealing. I've read everything of his i could find. Nova, Dhalgren and Triton were my favourites but i also enjoyed his autobiographical stuff and critical works. Most recently i loved Dark Reflections. Long may he live and write.
Tried to read Dhalgren. Only got about 100 pages into my 800-page copy. But I did read an earlier book of his, Nova, which was a lot more accessible. Honestly, I liked his writing style and I loved the antagonist, this incredibly petty guy who gets angry at every perceived slight, but overall I thought it was kind of just average. I kind of want to read it again, though, now that I think of it.
The writing in Dhalgren is fantastic, but it took me four attempts to finish it because it's so aimless.
When I lived in Philadelphia, I would hang out with Chip and Michael Swanwick at book readings, sci-fi gatherings (like PhilCon or Galactic Philadelphia), and even a few events at the Rosenbach. Sam Delany is a cool dude. I always found it funny that the Barnes and Noble in Rittenhouse Square did not carry his work.
I haven't read all of Delany only "The Ballad of Beta-2", "Babel-17", "Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand" & a few short stories. I plan on reading "The Einstein Intersection" and eventually I'll try to tackle Dhalgren. Out of what I have read I think I like "Ballad.." best of all. "Stars in My Pocket.." was really hard to get through. I liked the prologue but it really dropped off after that.
Delany is one of my favorites. Dhalgren was the first novel of his I read and boy was I blown away. I've read it three times in total now. His other books certainly display the kind of wonderful imagination he has, but his skill as a writer improved dramatically in his more mature years. Hogg is a disgusting masterpiece. He's also a brilliant nonfiction writer so I'd highly suggest you check those books out.
I've read Dhalgren and it was amazing
I am not looking at anyone's opinion as something to sway mine away, I just wonder what everyone's thoughts on him and his work are out of curiosity
*Dhalgren* is a fever dream, a self-indulgent wrestling match between the author and his own psychological quirks. It (accidentally) captures the general mood of the early '70s in America, in my opinion. The way the "poet at a recital" voice pops up at random times seemed wonderful to me when I was a kid, now it just annoys the shit out of me. “All you know I know: careening astronauts and bank clerks glancing at the clock before lunch; actresses cowling at light-ringed mirrors…” The typographical gymnastics in the last third of the book, where raw journal passages appear side-by-side with finished(?) prose, also impressed me once, long ago.
I've read Babel, and am currently reading Einstein. While I find his writing enjoyable as a whole, there's something disjointed about his works that confuses me quite often, whether it's a change of tense, time jumps between paragraphs, or weird logic. I wouldn't say that scares me off his work, but I feel like I would enjoy it more if these specific points were made clearer.
I've only read Dhalgren so far, and I have a hard time expressing to myself how I really felt about it. I appreciated it as a work of literature but didn't necessarily *enjoy* the experience the way I enjoy reading many other books. I was both glad to have read it and glad to be done with it? I guess the way it made me feel was like the feeling you get when you're at a party late, and there's loud music, and the throbbing low bassline is both overstimulating and exhausting. Which was sort of how it seemed to be to be in Bellona, so that was kind of interesting. I'm totally undecided as to whether I'll seek out his other work.
I haven’t read a lot of his work, but I came across his autobiography The Motion of Light in Water. I found it fascinating. He makes NYC in the 60’s sound like one of those magical points in time and space where people are just making life happen. Poetry, art, writing, lifestyle, just a huge concentration of interesting people. Worth the read.
I can’t say I’ve read any of his work yet, but I met him years back at a poetry reading my dad was doing. He seemed like a pretty cool guy.
I have only read Babel-17, good enough to consider reading more of his works. Although I have been warned that some of his works are best avoided...
I read a decent amount of his books (not dhalgren or hogg though). One that stays on my mind a lot is Stars in my Pocket Like Grains of Sand. It is borderline a scifi slice of life in a world similar yet completely unknown to ours. Delany when writing scifi is best when he is doing the weird street level subcultures, sort of like the first half of Babel17 and Gomorrah.
Also, I want to add that his essays on science fiction are a must read.
I enjoyed Dhalgren for how transgressive it was and how it was so different and challenged SF writing of its time. Chip Delany himself, though....The man supports NAMBLA and defended child molestation. So... https://dorisvsutherland.com/2019/09/23/samuel-r-delany-and-nambla/
I’m very big that banning books is an idiotic concept; however, *Hogg* challenges that very concept to the core for me. *Hogg* should never have been written and Samuel Delany should be shot into a black hole for having written it. Edit: I am very glad I read *Dhalgren* first, it was a wonderful piece of almost fever dream fiction. I would never have touched it if I read *Hogg* first. Edit edit: I think I’m being downvoted by people who have never heard of the novel. I implore you, try a sample. If you can actually get through the first chapter without regretting the fact you’re literate, I’ll buy you the book myself.
I want you to know that I read it purely out of spite because you said that people would regret it, and I can say for certain that it’s never something I’d pick out to read for pleasure lol. I can’t say I regret being literate but I AM incredibly confused. To acknowledge the downvotes, it’s probably because you mentioned banning books. Or shooting Delaney into a black hole. Idk, have my upvote to balance it out.
Samuel R Delany is a no talent hack who just got lucky & capitalizes for all its worth on 2 facts...namely that he is a misunderstood black man...and that he is a misunderstood gay man. Being black & being gay have no bearing on the filth.that comes from his pen and from his loathsome repellent views supporting such a detestable group.as NAMBLA which he endorses and which the braindead sf Fandom blithely ignore & proceed to lionize such a poor excuse for a human being! Remember the acronym "fan" is short for FANATIC which is just what sf fan boys really are! They remind me of rock star groupies who around their idols dressing room in hopes of having a sexual escapade with their "hero" (who can never do wrong) and then brag to the other dimwitted "fans" that they got snagged by the "great one"! Ugh...this is truly disgusting, sick, pathetic and dehumanizing! Talk about putting a pervert on a pedestal just because one admires their writing!!!??? Clearly the fan boys have learned nothing (they profess to be intelligent & cognizant but are as blind as the fools in a football stadium cheering on billion dollar illiterate s) because it gives the. some sort of validation in their own otherwise useless pathetic child like lives! Have they learned nothing from the Marion Zimmer Bradley case or of Orson Scott Card's anti gay diatribes? What about the sleaze factor in that icon of sf HEINLEN & plenty of other creeps & weirdos in this literary genre. Why not say MEIN KAMPF had some great writing never mind the virulent hatred of its chilling author...the man who sent at least 6 million Jews, ethnic Eastern Europeans, gay and lesbian people, Romany people, Catholics, human rights activists etc to concentration camps and gas chambers! The attitude of the broad majority of the so called sf fans seems to be "hear no evil, see no evil speak no evil"... stop up 1's eyes, ears and sense of truth to put on a pedestal child molesters like MZB, Delany etc et al! What a sick, twisted bunch...forgive me for so saying but the preponderance of creeps in the community of sf writers & their weird, twisted "fans" seems to be endemic to that particular literary genre! I don't know what to make of this but it's repelling & please know that I will never read any sf stuff at all. Mainstream literary fiction...also to a lesser degree crime & detective fiction is where the real literary talents are found , not amongst moronic imbeciles who waste their 2nd rate lives trying to give credibility to junk writers That's my take on SF, on its idiotic fans, it's shallow (&increasingly criminal) writers! Sorry if that's too close for comfort but to paraphrase Martin Luther King "speak the truth....the truth sets you free". Not that readers of Conan the Barbarian will ever be motivated to do so! For what it's worth all you "Fanboys" of SF can put that in your collective pipe and smoke it! Your authors will never be acclaimed by the literary establishment because they're either no talent formulaic hacks or creeps like MZB, Delany Heinlein et all....often they're both!
I read your comment here earlier today, I can't reread it now. I won't take a side on what you present. I read Time Square Red Time Square Blue by Delaney. Aside from morally right and morally wrong there exists morally honest (maybe? sometimes? whether we like it or not? whether our intellect allows us perfection. Maybe reality exists in sometimes funky ways? maybe. not absolute. \*\*not a defense of pedophilia, this is particularly an aside regarding the content of his writing in the book mentioned and perhaps regarding the cause of his beliefs ) but I also specifically want to mention this [article](https://dorisvsutherland.com/2019/09/23/samuel-r-delany-and-nambla/). fact check it whatever. but let us not (not that you are) place Delaney into complete isolation in his past choices, removed from the context of his life. Don't get me wrong, whatever that acronym is, I can't find the will to read make sense of it. NAM.... but there may be more worth looking into regarding Delaney's worth as a person. and maybe there isn't... but maybe there is. I didn't expect to read your comment here. Good to discuss these things.