Ballad of Beta-2/Alpha Yes Beta No

by Samuel R. Delany, Emil Petaja

Excellent Book

Genres: Science Fiction, Science Fiction Fantasy

Paperback

First published January 1, 1965

About the author

Samuel Ray Delany, also known as "Chip," is an award-winning American science fiction author. He was born to a prominent black family on April 1, 1942, and raised in Harlem. His mother, Margaret Carey Boyd Delany, was a library clerk in the New York Public Library system. His father, Samuel Ray Delany, Senior, ran a successful Harlem undertaking establishment, Levy & Delany Funeral Home, on 7th Avenue, between 1938 and his death in 1960. The family lived in the top two floors of the three-story private house between five- and six-story Harlem apartment buildings. Delany's aunts were Sadie and Bessie Delany; Delany used some of their adventures as the basis for the adventures of his characters Elsie and Corry in the opening novella Atlantis: Model 1924 in his book of largely autobiographical stories Atlantis: Three Tales.

Delany attended the Dalton School and the Bronx High School of Science, during which he was selected to attend Camp Rising Sun, the Louis August Jonas Foundation's international summer scholarship program. Delany and poet Marilyn Hacker met in high school, and were married in 1961. Their marriage lasted nineteen years. They had a daughter, Iva Hacker-Delany (b. 1974), who spent a decade working in theater in New York City.

Delany was a published science fiction author by the age of 20. He published nine well-regarded science fiction novels between 1962 and 1968, as well as several prize-winning short stories (collected in Driftglass [1971] and more recently in Aye, and Gomorrah, and other stories [2002]). His eleventh and most popular novel, Dhalgren, was published in 1975. His main literary project through the late 1970s and 1980s was the Return to Nevèrÿon series, the overall title of the four volumes and also the title of the fourth and final book.

Delany has published several autobiographical/semi-autobiographical accounts of his life as a black, gay, and highly dyslexic writer, including his Hugo award winning autobiography, The Motion of Light in Water.

Since 1988, Delany has been a professor at several universities. This includes eleven years as a professor of comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, a year and a half as an English professor at the University at Buffalo. He then moved to the English Department of Temple University in 2001, where he has been teaching since. He has had several visiting guest professorships before and during these same years. He has also published several books of criticism, interviews, and essays. In one of his non-fiction books, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999), he draws on personal experience to examine the relationship between the effort to redevelop Times Square and the public sex lives of working-class men, gay and straight, in New York City.

In 2007, Delany was the subject of a documentary film, The Polymath, or, The Life and Opinions of Samuel R. Delany, Gentleman. The film debuted on April 25 at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival.

Reviews

[17CECO · Rating 5 out of 5]

5 stars for The Ballad

Delaney writes his first, tight narrative with philosophical weight, melding the zip and wonder of Jewels of Aptor with the interest in mind-bending ideas of the Fall of the Towers Trilogy. My early impression is that this is a major turning point in his early works.

Ballad’s protagonist is Joneny, a lone galactic anthropologist tracking down the roots of a the Ballad of Beta-2 among what he believes are the backwater Star Folk, travelers who left earth to colonize the stars before technological advancements leapt beyond them.

There's an erotic passage between the galaxy-minded Destroyer and Leela, the aging captain trying to save her ships from fanaticism. Here's the beginning:

Page 88: “What happened next, oh all the powers and audience of the stars, what happened? I don’t know—the colors, the pain, the flood of sensation that caught me up and broke me apart in swirls of metallic ice, that burned me with myriad thoughts complete and incomplete. The color, breaking from white through red, down through cascading green, soaring through gold that glittered and turned to emeralds, emerald as his eyes....”

Alpha Yes, Terra No! is not so good. Though it includes an interesting imagination of a future San Francisco with touches of Petaja’s SF bohemian present. The protagonist is essentially Bob Dylan as some sort of space messiah who uneasily teams up with a colonial plutocratic (colonizing Mars) to voyage into space for mystical reasons. But the real hero is Stranger the dog/secret alien ally who fixes all their problems. They crash on a frozen space planet with yetis. And end up on the Soviet Union planet which was their destination to plead the case for humanity before Soviet Union planet preemptively blows up humans in fear of their expanding colonial activities. Also per many sci-fi novels of this era there is some fucked up genetic stuff going on. The protagonist is a very special genetic bridge being, which helps him, the very special boy, in another trope of this era, to successfully plead humanity’s case at a climactic trial on planet Alpha. War of civilizations, climactic trial with a big speech--It's very cold war US sci-fi!

[N. M. D. · Rating 2 out of 5]

I reviewed Beta-2 separately. So this is just a review for Aloha Yes.

Humans have started reaching their tendrils into space. As we approach Alpha Centauri, the intelligent species there raises alarm against the violent, greedy creatures that will spread like cancer on their worlds. The agreed action is to destroy humans. A lone Alphan makes an illegal trip to Earth to pursue a connected history with humans, but an assassin is in hot pursuit.

This slim story is divided into three parts. The first is from the perspective of the alien as he hops from body to body and travels to various countries as he searches for certain people. The second part follows several humans as they go from earth to Mars to a crash landing on a desolate ice world. The third takes place on the planet Xo in Alpha Centauri.

At the end of this book, a topic that is near and dear to me is touched on: the idea of brotherly oneness amongst all beings. But it's brief. There are some really worthwhile ideas here but the book is too lean to give them the time they need, and the bad editing makes it all feel rushed. The conveniences and good luck are absurd. The ending is abrupt and hard to swallow in its easiness. I would have greatly preferred the Alphan character as the primary character for the whole duration.

The Alphans are a compassionate, gentle and highly civilized people—except that they want to atomize whole planets. This is a pretty bizarre decision just from a scientific perspective. The humans are the problem, not the Earth. And what effect could that have on nearby planets? And maybe just talk to us? Use your calming mind powers to make us understand and maybe we'll stop being shits. That being said, I would have voted for blowing up Earth. The case against us is a compelling one.

[John Peel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Both books in this Double are rather experimental in nature. The Delaney begins as the story of a student attempting to understand a song and then jumps into an SF mystery story. The Petaja starts as an SF mystery story and then moves to a more philosophical tale. Both could have been told in more straight-forward manner, but the stylings are part of the appeal of these stories. Not the most exciting of tales, but certainly worthwhile attempts.

[Niels · Rating 4 out of 5]

Alpha Yes, Terra No! 2.5

The Ballad of Beta-2 4.5

[Tyrannosaurus regina · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've always had a secret fondness for Ace Doubles--what could be better than two science fiction books in one? My mother's shelves used to be full of them when I was a kid, so when I started finding them in bookstores as an adult I decided to build a collection of my own. Most are lesser-known works by well-known authors, or works by lesser-known authors, and for all the issues that I have with classic science fiction (mostly due to technical advances being projected while social advances were left far behind), its strength is in the unrestricted creativity that authors showed.

Not all books are created equal, of course, and my overall rating reflects both books (novellas, really, when taken individually) but each deserves its own rating.

Alpha Yes, Terra No! * * *
While this book had its moments of stunning prescience (I read paragraphs that could have precisely described the world today), it didn't hold my attention particularly well and tended towards the preachy.

The Ballad of Beta-2 * * * *
This one clipped along at a much faster pace, and I was pleasantly surprised by how it didn't fall into the pitfall of overt sexism that I see over and over again. While I liked the story in and of itself, there were also details of the setting that I would love to see spun off in other directions as well.

[Ralph McEwen · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book has an interesting twist in that it is two books in one. I enjoyed the The Ballad of Beta-2 more than Alpha Yes, Terra No!. Yet both stories are worth reading. Both stories avoid being dated. Thank you to the libarain Michael who added this book to the Goodreads database.