The Towers of Toron/The Lunar Eye

by Samuel R. Delany, Robert Moore Williams

1st Ace F261 1964 edition, paperback original vg In stock shipped from our UK warehouse

Genres: Science Fiction

255 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1964

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 3 out of 5]

// turn this book over for second complete novel // These doubles are a guilty pleasure. Or one can see early Delaney exploring the boundaries and personhood w/in the sci-fi genre as he keeps looping his Fall of the Towers narrative over w/variations RE: the psychic and extremely vague enemy Lord of the Flames causing Toron to make war on itself. This was, for me, the least necessary installment. It's Delaney's Ace doubles tho that underscore how even his slightest works are for more interesting than worlds of 60s pulp sci-fi. Robert Moore Willams & Keith Woodcutt might explore alien worlds and subjectivities but their narratives seem to retreat into a pro-earth / pro-imperial stance that reveals the authors inability or refusal to think a future that doesn't valorize the United States' ascendent role in the Post-WWII global order. From The big pro-earth, hey just accept colonization speech: "Accept this flood of new life coming to you. True, the new life will mean enormous changes in your ways of life...." Then when that doesn't work: "He begged the listening Tuanthans to listen to the only kind of reason they really understand, that of force." Whew. If I ever teach sci-fi again, I'd lv to pair some wild-ass mind expanding shit w/The Lunar Eye. Poles of the genre. Thx Ace Doubles.

[Niels · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Towers of Toron 4.5
The Lunar Eye 3.5

[Val · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was really pulled into the world, the characters and the story. My only complaint was that it was too short and I wanted to see more of the Lord of the Flames

[Roddy Williams · Rating 3 out of 5]

‘THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOON

The year was 1972 and on rocket bases in the parched deserts of California and the vast wastes of Siberia, the race for the moon entered its final, frenzied lap, Both America and Russia were ready to step out into space and all that seemed in doubt was which country would set foot on the moon first.

But unknown to both nations, a third force – a power far more insidious than any evil ever devised by a human mind – was plotting the destruction of any rocket that tried to touch the moon's pitted surface.

The key to overcoming this plot against mankind was contained in the mystery of THE LUNAR EYE – and unless its secret could be unlocked, mankind would be forever shackled within the bounds of this planet.’

Blurb from the 1964 Ace Doubles paperback edition F-261




Just predating the moon landings, this piece is interesting in that it is written against the backdrop of the Russian/American race to reach the moon.
Art Harper and his brother Gecko run a gas-station which serves the traffic visiting the desert rocket base from which the US rocket will leave for the moon. Odd delays and accidents have occurred though, and the launch is behind schedule.
While in a diner, chatting to a tyre-salesman, Art receives a call from a mysterious woman who speaks in a foreign language and is surprised that Art has ‘not woken up’. The woman wants to delay a truck delivering vital supplies to the rocket base. Art refuses to help, and the truck subsequently crashes.
Art then discovers that he is not Art Harper at all, but a member of part of the human race that left Earth thousands of years ago and now live in a vast city on the dark side of the moon. Art’s people do not want anyone from earth landing on their world.
Art and his brother Gecko are subsequently taken to the Moon, where they (and the rest of the Earth) are put on public trial, and where the brothers have to convince the whole of the Lunar race that welcoming the people of Earth would be the best thing for everyone.