Neveryóna: Or, The Tale of Signs and Cities

Return to Nevèrÿon #2

by Samuel R. Delany

The Hugo and Nebula Award–winning author of Tales of Nevèrÿon “continues to surprise and delight” with this thought-provoking epic fantasy ( The New York Times ).
 One of the few in Nevèrÿon who can read and write, pryn has saddled a wild dragon and taken off from a mountain ledge. Self-described as an adventurer, warrior, and thief, in her journey pryn will meet plotting merchants, sinister aristocrats, half-mad villagers, and a storyteller who claims to have invented writing itself. The land of Nevèrÿon is mired in a civil war over slavery, and pryn will also find herself—for a while—fighting alongside Gorgik the Liberator, from whom she will learn the cunning she needs as she journeys further and further south in search of a sunken city; for at history’s dawn, some dangers even dragons cannot protect you from.
The second volume in Samuel R. Delany’s Return to Nevèrÿon cycle,  Neveryóna  is the longer of its two full-length novels. (The other is  The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals .) An intriguing meditation on the power of language, the rise of cities, and the dawn of myth, markets, and money, it is a truly wonder-filled adventure.
This ebook features an illustrated biography of Samuel R. Delany including rare images from his early career.  

Genres: Fantasy, Fiction, Science Fiction, Literature, Speculative Fiction, Queer, Sword and Sorcery

533 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 1, 1983

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

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Tale of Signs and Cities… She is so young… She dreams of the big city… She dreams of bright lights… She knows how to ride a dragon…

She was fifteen and she flew.
Her name was pryn – because she knew something of writing but not of capital letters.
She shrieked at clouds, knees clutching scaly flanks, head flung forward. Another peak floated back under veined wings around whose flexing joints her knees bent.
The dragon turned a beaked head in air, jerking reins – vines pryn had twisted in a brown cord before making a bridle to string on the dragon’s clay-colored muzzle.

She’s on a journey… She’s on the quest of her life… And on her way she meets people of all kinds… She sees signs and omens… She learns…

This is how, after seven nights’ unchanging stars, eclipsed only by passing clouds or moon glare, Pryn came to be standing on a roadway atop a hill one dark dawn, looking down at port Kolhari.
Fog lay on the city, obscuring detail. But that hulking edifice to the west had to be the High Court of Eagles.

When one is young everything is ahead… The further one goes the more one discovers… And one must learn to comprehend the signs the world reveals…

Pryn frowned. Like most wanderers in that time, whenever Pryn stopped it was because she’d been suddenly overcome with the notion that if she followed the road further, it would soon give out entirely and she would have to confront the ultimate wildness, the unrectored chaos, the unthinkable space in which the very distinctions between earth, air, and water would soon break down. But here, a few hundred yards or so beyond what she had, once again, assumed to be the end of the world, was a major crossroads – or at least the traces of one.

Roads are endless – where one road ends other roads begin.

[Algernon · Rating 5 out of 5]

The metaphysical fantasist is back, ready to guide into another exploration of the land of Neveryon, this time in a full fledged novel instead of a collection of interlinked novellas.



Subtitled "The Tale of Signs and Cities", the story is everything the original cover promises: a sword & sorcery adventure into a mythical land, in the company of a brawny barbarian and a glamorous princess. But even here in the cover there are hints of undercurrents beneath appearances. Notice the role reversal for instance : the girl is modestly covered while the barbarian is flaunting his perky ass in a skimpy bikini. Or the empty seascape they are both gazing at: what are they searching for?

The city: grime, glamor, geometries of glass, steel, and concrete. Intractable, it rises from nature, like proud Babel, only to lie athwart our will, astride our being. Or so it often seems. Yet immanent in that gritty structure is another: invisible, imaginary, made of dreams and desire, agent of all our tranformations. It is that other city I want here to invoke ... Immaterial, that city informed history from the start, molding human space and time ever since time and space molded themselves to the wagging tongue.

or,

To attempt to define more precisely the 'city' is pointless; it is 'civilization' itself we must define.

With epigraphs from Ihab Hassan, Ruth Whitehouse and (later) Susan Sonntag, Delany sets out to decipher the semiotics and the structure of what we call civilization. Sword & Sorcery is a particularly apt medium for the study, since it is usually predicated on the existence of both clanish, wild barbarians and cultured, sophisticated imperial entities. Robert E Howard praised the untamed violence of our origins. Fritz Leiber sung the drunken and amusing recklessness of the true adventurer. Delany lifts the veil of romance and peers at the hidden nuts and bolts that make up the world of Neveryona, breaks apart the motivations and the outside forces that drive his heroes on their quests. Neveryon, being an imaginary land, frees the author from the constraints of historical accuracy or political corectness:

... to the criticism that the quest for 'another form of civilization' refuses to submit to the disillusionment of accurate historical knowledge, one can make an answer. It never sought such knowledge. The other civilizations are being used as models because they are available as stimulants to the imagination precisely because they are not accessible. They are both models and mysteries. Nor can this quest be dismissed as fraudulent on the grounds that it is insensitive to the political forces that cause human suffering ... (Sonntag)

I don't like to use the terms post-modernism or deconstruction in relation to this epic series. The connotations of academic pretension and highbrow elitism I believe miss the point and might drive the regular fantasy fan away. The novel does include all the conventional elements of a sword & sorcery story, it just happens to be more self-aware of its origins and mythical significance. The best analogy I can make is to the works of Italo Calvino (in particular "Invisible Cities") and Neil Gaiman (in particular his "Sandman" series). Gaiman I believe is the one who pointed out that myths and fables are still the best teachers we have about the world we live in, the writer who created antropomorhic manifestations of Dreams, Desires, Destruction, etc. in order to explore the psyche of modern man.

Fables taught simple and clear lessons everyone could agree on. Fables were tales that could be put to immediate use, either to instruct or entertain a child, to remind adults of past glories or recurring dangers.

Semantics

There is a plot here, a traditional S & S one, but interestingly enough this plot can be descibed in terms of language. The change of one letter or one inflection in a name can change the whole meaning of the world.

She was fifteen and she flew

A young girl from a small village in the northern wilderness called pryn yearns to break free and to discover the world. After capturing a wild dragon and flying on its back, pryn meets a wanderer, a barbarian woman with a double edged sword and a tale of wonder, buried treasure and of city sunken under the sea (the old Atlantis myth?). This woman also teaches pryn how to correctly spell her name. The newly dubbed Pryn is ready to run away from home and go on a quest.

Along the road, Pryn gets an education in what it means to be civilized, meets various characters from the first volume of the series, and learns the difference between Neveryon and Neveryona (sorry, the author also uses accented letters, but I am only using notepad). what a difference a single letter makes!


Signs

A slave collar, a red scarf, an astrolabe, a walled garden - these are the stone markers by the side of the road that describe and inform Pryn's journey from the her mountain fastness to the capital city Kolhari and beyond. Their meaning is in flux, reflecting the coming-of-age of Pryn, another staple of fantasy literature.

If such a sign [a slave collar] can shift so easily from oppression to desire, it can shift in other ways - towards power, perhaps, and aggression, toward the bitterness of misjudged freedoms by one who must work outside the civil structure.

What can you learn from a man (Gorgik the Liberator) who willingly puts the symbol of slavery around his neck. Or from Wild Ini, a young woman who is gifted with a red scarf, an object she both cherishes and despises? One of Pryn's tutors, a businesswoman named Keyne, has this to say:

Why are you here? The truth is simply that you are a young mountain woman who has come to the city. That is to undertake a kind of education. I, my secretary, the servants of this house, our little Wild Ini, are merely some among the instruments through which part of that education will occur. The city is very different from the country, girl. It is a kind of shared consciousness that begins its work on you as soon as you enter it, if not well before, a consciousness that begins to separate you from the country possibly even before you decide to journey toward it.

Heroes often get lost in unfamiliar territories, and maps become useful. In fact, most of the genre novels start with a map of the new lands we set out to explore. There are signs everywhere for the curious traveler. A garden is a miniature reflection of the bigger world outside. An astrolabe is a tool to help sailors find their way across the trackless ocean. Or are they something more?

Lost in unfamiliar lands, we are merely creatures uninformed, foundering, asking, and finding. Lost in the map of those lands that is the city among them and the market within it, we become one with the map, cartographer and cartograph, reader and read.

Hitchcock called them McGuffins, plot devices used to drive the story forward. Delany treats them in a way similar to the scratches and conventional shapes that define writing and convey meaning.

It's a map of a non-existent coast under an imaginary constellation on an impossible sky in the middle of a ring of meaningless numbers. That's why it's powerful. That's why it's magic.

Signs are a provocation, a challenge, the call of the unknown that pushes us forward, toward learning more about ourselves and about the world.

To the proper hearer, precisely what seems confusing will be the exciting part.


Freedom

A long time ago, my first philosophy teacher tried to convince me that freedom is the understanding of necessity, a Marxist concept. To be free is not to do whatever you like, but to recognize and accept the limitations imposed by the need to belong - to a family, to a group of peers, to a nation or a creed. A barbarian is free because he lives in circular time (a concept used by Delany to define the transition from stone age, tribal culture to city culture- sequential time, from a barter economy to a coin economy). A barbarian is also a slave because he does not know any better - instinct instead of conscience. A civilized man is not free from hunger, cannot go out to forage or hunt - he has to eat, he needs a job to earn money, he needs the security from abuses of power that is given by social institutions.

The central character of the four book series is called Gorgik the Liberator. He is a barbarian freedom fighter, but who are the objects of his quest? And what is he liberating them from? Shouldn't Gorgik start by liberating himself - from prejudice, from base desires, from superstition and ignorance?

Will I take up the cause of the workers who toil for wages only a step above slavery? Or will I take up the marginal workless who, without wages at all, live a step below? Shall I ally myself with those women who find themselves caught up, laboring without wages, for the male population among both groups? For they are, all of them - these free men and women - caught up in a freedom that, despite the name it bears, makes movement through society impossible, that makes the quality of life miserable, that allows no chance and little choice in any aspect of the human not written by the insertion or elision of the sign for production.

Pryn moves from the underground headquarters of Gorgik's rebels to the lush garden of business tycoon , Madam Keyne (Keynesian economics?). The meeting places for the two opposing forces, the two scene of the spectacle of civilization, are the old and new markets in the capital city, Kolhari. Both mentors embrace controversies and irregular behaviour, and Pryn is as much enchanted as repulsed by the sights and by the people of the city, pondering on the hidden forces that give rise to its structures:

The city fascinates - as all who come to it expect it to. Do certain country markets necessarily secrete cities about themselves? Must a nation raise markets, and cities around them?

also,
For better or for worse, she found herself putting aside fear in favor of curiosity.

also,
Commerce and construction? These seemed the centers of life - far more central, certainly, than protest and liberation.

Unable to choose between the world of Gorgik and the world of Madame Keyne, Pryn leaves the big city and takes once again ot the road. She ends up in another small village, not so much different from her own home in the mountains, but this time she is able to look beyond appearances and see the market forces controlling the impoverished life of a labourer family: the tedious, cyclical, inescapable burden of work, eat, drink, procreate, get ill, die - generation after generation. Because names are symbols and tell their own stories this little village is called Enoch, from the Biblical founder of the very first city of Man.

Another epigraph selected by Delany seems more able to illustrate the issue of barbaric and civilized times than my poor prose:

From then on, the succession of generations leaves the sphere of pure cyclic nature and becomes oriented to events, to the succession of powers. Irreversible time is now the time of those who rule, and dynasties are its first measure. Writing is its weapon. In writing language attains its full independent reality of mediating between consciousnesses. [Guy Debord - Society of the Spectacle.]

which brings me to my next bullet point

Writing

One sure way to tell a primitive society from an advanced one is by its recorded history. The discovery of written language and the power of symbols to represent meaning has a lot of benefits, but one major undesirable consequence: it creates a class system and allows the wielders of the new tools to exercise power over the rest of the population (think of priests as the only interpreters of the gospel)

Two things slaves are never allowed to do: learn to write - and drink. Both inflame the imagination. With slaves, that's to be avoided.

An ignorant savage cannot claim to be free if his worldview is limited to the narrow horizon of his small village, if he cannot learn anything useful from life and cannot provide for a better life for his progeny. Pryn is atypical of her time, she is a true heroic figure not only for her inquisitiveness, but more for her ability to read and to write and to work with abstract concepts. Her aunt taught her her letters, and her travels are teaching her the ways that these symbols can be applied to day to day experiences, first by getting her noticed and employed, later by giving her a direction, a goal in life. to her quest. By using her as a writer, Delany can also insert in the text several ideas connected with the art of the novel.

So many things are thought but never spoken, such as this thought itself - which is exactly when the ache in the hand to hold a stylus comes.

also,
The trouble with stories is that when I write them in my head, they're fun because I can write them slowly, make changes, correct them if they're wrong, make sure all the names have the right initial signs. But if I tell them, then they come out any-old-how or however. I don't think I'll ever be a tale-teller.

I find it interesting that the author is making a note of the difference between history and truth, between reality and fantasy, between myths and facts. It appears that fables are better at conveying meaning than hard, uninterpreted data.

Let me tell you, girl. The warrior women of the Western Crevasse do not exist. Nor have they ever existed. They only grew up in stories because women like you - and me - from time to time wished they existed, because men like my father and brother were terrified they might. I think we use them as a kind of model. A model for thinking.

An interesting expansion of the literary investigation could look at the difference between fantasy, dealing with dreams and desires, and science, dealing with experimentation and accurate records (speculative fiction vs non-fiction). Meanwhile Pryn is caught up in her own story, from her initial quest for a sunken city, to a mission to change the real world, to free people from slavery, one at a time.

In brief, the story we might have written had things been only a little different would have told of bravery, wonder, fun, laughter, love, anger, fear, tears, reconciliation, a certain wisdom, a turn of chance, and a certain resignation - the stuff of many fine tales over the ages. But in those weeks Pryn did not once think of dragons.

Her final destination, for now, is a job in a brewery and a visit to the castle of a high lord, both places that still use slaves. Her symbols (the collar, the astrolabe, the hidden city) get contour and a more definite shape - is this not the sign that she is finally coming of age, mature and responsible for her actions, a player instead of a passive observer?

Indeed, what I love to observe, to gaze down into and explore its subterranean workings, is ... power!

then,
The driver laughed without looking back. "You're a strange one."
Pryn watched the clouds.
"I hear that you can," the driver said. "Read and write, I mean."
"I do all sorts of thing: read, write, free slaves, ride dragons - kill, if I have to."

finally,
Now, old city of dragons and dreams, of doubts and terrors and all wondrous expectations, despite your rule by the absent fathers, it's between us two!

Go, girl! I hope to come across your path in the next two books of the series.


Desire

What separates the group from the individual? Power works indiscriminately, often guided by external factors. The mind can work with signs and symbols, but the heart follows its own pathways, more often than not at cross purpose with logic and common sense. Pryn want to find buried gold in a lost city. Gorgik wants to liberate slaves. Madam Keyne wants to control commerce. Their journeys are stopped and twisted by private lusts and subconscious messages. In this aspect, as in her intial knwoledge of the world, Pryn is still very much a virgin, in need of answers:

Madame Keyne, before I came here, my life was caught up in a world of men, where everything was purpose, plan, and plot - yet I was always outside it. But here, where everything is nuance, emotion, and jealousy, somehow I have found myself at the most uncomfortable and precarious center - where I feel just as excluded!

These barriers and divisions between sexes cannot be fully blamed on the old-fashioned patriarchal society. Pryn is made aware of the link between freedom and necessity in the most dramatic way when she becomes pregnant on the road and has to choose between living in a hovel, raising a family, abandoning her dreams and continuing her quest for the dragon gold. Some are rebel, some are willing slaves when it comes to love, but very few can escape its clarion call (I was thinking of monks, but then even their veneration is a form of love)

Whether she wears my scarf or no, she does not accept us. But we have a compensation which, in the long run, is denied her. It is, simply and insipidly, love. As confused with other motives as it may be, deferred, displaced, speaking in codes when it would speak at all, written in shaky signs in shadowy ill-lit corners, it is still what brought you here. Somewhat purified, somewhat clarified, somewhat analyzed - and that is all any of us can ask it to become - it is what sends you on your way. [...] You must know, as you make your way into the world, the same play of power and desire rages in all men and women, contouring all acts, aligning all motivations, no matter what the object. Nor will your soul be free of that play. That play is desire, in all it myriad forms.

A concept that I would have liked to see developed more is this particular balance between the self and the society. It will probably come back into focus in a future episode:

Community can, however awkwardly, replace individual relationships. But individual relationships only grow poisonous and resentful if there is no community to support them.


Invisible Cities

Neveryon, Neveryona, Kolhari, Enoch - geography and imagination, economics and passion, reality and illusion, the map and the territory, the house and the symbol representing a home, the ephemeral and the eternal, science and magic:

Does anyone in this strange and terrible land ever go anywhere, without having been there before in myth or dream?

We turn to fantasy because we are not satisfied with what is. We want something more, we want the miracle, the revelation, the mystery. Civilization has broken our primordial connection with nature, it has made us strangers in our own cities. Art is a way to return to Neveryon - to those "brutal and barbaric" times, to that "strange and terrible" land when the world was in flux and anything seemed possible:

The road ahead was all wonders: rocky streams, shaggy trees, flowering copses - each, a moment later, followed by some artfully made thing, a wooden bridge, some group of winged stone leopards, a marble bench. Culture informed nature with a host of human ghosts, or nature surrounded culture with a field of breath-stopping beauty and unknown history. In concert, astonishment and agnosia abolished their own distinctions. (Was that magic?)

Two Thumbs Up!

[Nate D · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having pushed the sci-fi genre into new terrain over the first two decades of his career, Delany turned to an even more seemingly blighted genre to present his most thoughtful and theory-heavy sequence of works: the barbarian novel. If you actually dive into any of the Neveryon works, you won't be fooled for long. Delany's main conceit is to take the moment of coalescence of civilization out of hazy pre-history as the perfect test chamber in which to study the foundations for all of our societal conventions -- economics, culture, politics, everything that's still with us today. He has much to say about all of this, all the while toying with the audience over the fact that he's induced them to read ostensible pulp, or else has enticed them to read critical theory by way of pulp.

Incidentally, this is also a markedly feminist work, not just for having strong female characters (which is just a basic necessity of writing a good book, not necessarily a feminist one!), but for its actual interrogation of gender roles and social constructs. As well as for choosing its theoretical epigraphs for each section almost entirely from female thinkers and philosophers, which given the usual male-domination of the discourse definitely did not happen by accident.

[Kara Babcock · Rating 4 out of 5]

That classic cover, tho, with the weird … fishnet? bikini thing on Gorgik, and his awesome ponytail mullet. The 1980s were a wild time.

Neveryóna: The Tale of Signs and Cities is another visit to the fantasy time and place of Nevèryön. Whereas the previous book was a series of connected stories, this one follows a single protagonist, Pryn, a mountain girl from Ellanon as she makes her way to Kolhari and into the world. Although each chapter is indeed its own little vignette, as a whole they form a coherent narrative. Even so, Samuel R. Delany is up to his usual tricks, encouraging us to question even what we might consider a narrative to be.

Pryn’s adventure begins when she encounters Norema, who was a protagonist in the previous book. Already agitating for adventure, Pryn listens to Norema’s tales and advice, and it shapes and focuses her energy. She heads off to Kolhari and ends up spending time with Gorgik the Liberator as well as a wealthy investor and businessperson, Madame Keyne. These chapters have some fascinating conversations on economics and the politics of liberation. Gorgik is this complex character, portrayed as a liberator of slaves; Delany positions Keyne as a foil, pointing out through her that one can be a liberator of slaves but not yet a force for general equity within society. Pryn acts as a literal go-between, someone still young and removed enough from these forces that she hasn’t yet formed her own strong opinions on the matter.

It’s brilliant how Delany captures these diverse voices and patterns of thought. I mean, I would hope that we can all agree that slavery is bad. Yet it’s really easy for an author to create characters who are extremely black-and-white in their opinions. Delany gives us characters who have much more nuanced views, characters who might agree that slavery is bad and wrong but disagree with what should happen once slavery is eliminated—or characters who conceptualize slavery differently. There’s this dense, complex conversation running throughout this book, both in the discussions Pryn has with characters and in the lives we see them lead.

This latter part is the second brilliant thinga bout Neveryóna. Pryn takes us on this little mini-tour of Nevèryön. We get glimpses at how different parts of the country live, at how different villages cook and sleep and work, and how these lifestyles influence the ways in which people interact and develop their philosophies. This is a thin book, but Delany avoids creating either monocultures or cookie-cutter “planet of hats” type cultures. Neveryóna is this wonderful, dazzling tour of smaller microcultures dotted across the landscape.

Delany is one of my favourite authors because his work never fails to make me think, and even his most straightforward-seeming stories usually end up blowing my mind with the critical subtext they contain. On the surface, Neveryóna is a pulp fantasy story about a girl coming of age. But it won’t take long for any but the most casual of readers to notice that there is so much more going on here. Each chapter involves a slightly different adventure or encounter of Pryn’s. But the substance is much more involved. Delany tosses ethics and economics, politics and personal pleasure, questions of history and semiotics and moral philosophy at us … this slim book is so densely packed!

Finally, Delany always reminds me of Ursula K. Le Guin. They both have a very deliberate yet very subversive way of approaching serious topics through science fiction and fantasy—by subversive, I mean sometimes you don’t even see what they’re doing until it’s too late, and then they’re upon you, all up in your brain, educating the hell out of you. I have two massive anthologies of Le Guin’s short fiction awaiting my attention, but I’m kind of saving them for the summer. Amidst my sadness at her passing, it was nice to delve into some Delany and be reminded of how good it feels to have my mind stretched in these particular ways.

[Edward Rathke · Rating 4 out of 5]

The second book and sixth story in the Neveryona series, and the first novel length story.

It is the story of Pryn who leaves her northern smalltown life and world on the wings of a dragon. Her adventure takes her through the intricacies of Kolhari [the capital of this country] where she meets a powerful merchant and Gorgik the Liberator. From there she heads south, travels with smugglers, finds herself in a new small town, which she quickly leaves, to find herself working at a brewery, formerly owned by a noble family, which she then encounters and must flee from.

More than her physical journey is her mental journey, which we take with her. The world expands to an unimaginable degree, only for her to realise that nothing's different, no matter how far she goes. Like the previous story, it is very much concerned with power and the interplay of those who have and those who do not. It is about language, but mostly it is about the nature and power of stories.

Everywhere she goes, she finds people who want to impose a life upon her, to make her who they want, whether it be rebel, slave, lover, whore, or more or less. She finds, here, on her journey, the ability to define herself and choose which version of her is the one she wants to be, is the one she actually is.

There are some truly mindblowing passages in here that make you question so many things, from life to words to knowledge itself.

It is the most cohesive book of the series, I think, but it meanders widely and is low on action, so if that's the kind of fantasy you're looking for, you're in the completely wrong series here.

It is concerned with ideas most of all, and with the nature of stories at the center. It's about maps and mirrors, what these signs mean, as metaphors, as actual objects, and what the relation between the two is. And that interplay, that relationship, the significance of the signs, is not at all a simple answer.

Highly recommended.

[Dont · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a great read. Having already read the first Neveryon book, I was already prepared for Delany's mix of experimentation with the philosophy of language, inquiry into the confluence of race, class, gender and sexuality, and the medium of fantasy fiction. So with volume two, I was able to settle in for good long read. The narrative of the book is like a picaresque tale with the lead character moving from one set of circumstances to another, each encounter offering her a chance to dialogue on the issues of class and culture from various social positions (the peasant, the thief, the revolutionary, the bourgeois merchant, the workers, and finally the aristocracy). Really wonderful. I couldn't help but imagining what it would be like to SEE this book as a movie. But eventually I gave that up realizing any attempt to translate the book would only flatten out the inquiry-based nature of the tale and would probably attempt to impose some sort of conventional narrative. But nonetheless, it's a great book and I look forward to diving into volume three.

[Andrea · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book has the best opening and ending I have read in ages:

"She was fifteen and she flew.
Her name was pryn--because she knew something of writing but not of capital letters.

Who could ask for more from an opening? And the end?

"Now, old city of dragons and dreams, of doubts, and terrors and all wondrous expectations, despite your rule by absent fathers, it's between us two!"

Amazing. The plot is compelling too, but only when you get it. At the beginning it is utterly secondary, it must first pick up the philosophical threads from the earlier book and spin them out at length. It does it in the mouths of characters, and to me it doesn't quite work. To me that makes this harder than it would be were it written as essay or book of theory, while also making the story bog down and falter.

But I liked the ideas, I liked it as a sequel, and overall I liked it.

[Geoffrey · Rating 3 out of 5]

Definitely denser than its predecessor--very little plot and much less action, not that the first volume was exactly pulse-pounding. Really, it's an intriguing hybrid between fiction and theory, but I wouldn't call it entirely smooth sailing. I know there are aspects of it that went whizzing over my head, which is okay--but then, a lot of what I DID decipher seemed perhaps overly straightforwardly borrowed from people like Derrida and Foucault. Sometimes the very lengthy dialogues mesmerize; sometimes you just want everyone to SHUT UP. My favorite part may actually be the playful erudition of the academic correspondence that makes up the appendix. Probably not for the general reader, but I reckon I'll finish the series one of these days.

[Megan · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book, and series, is a flood of knowledge. and yet, so patient and careful with its words. not flood at all, i take that back, but a carefully constructed MAP that charts or MIRRORS (these words are in caps because there are many maps and mirrors in the series and i am making a fun inside joke) the history of writing, the production of knowledge, the shift from a barter to a money economy, and the flow of power in its various guises. all this with a backdrop of slave liberation, dragons, and a masked woman on the loose with a double-bladed sword. plus sly metafictional swipes and queer sexualities. i love this series. LOVE IT. excited for Flight from Neveryon.

[Luke · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5/5

With adolescence, Pryn had certainly taken on the sometimes troubling knowledge that almost anything with an outside and an inside supporting movement from one to the other could be sexually suggestive.

I've been penning reviews for the last decade and a half for partly reasons of futureproofing my memories, theoretically. Practically speaking, this doesn't happen much outside of post-publish edits and post-common skimthroughs. The latter was where I found myself in the midst of my scribblings on this sequel's predecessor, wherein I described my waning reception of Delany's fiction and burgeoning hopes for his nonfiction. Case in point, I adored his The Motion of Light in Water, while this had me hankering at the bit the further I traversed from page 300. What the matter is that, I'm as big a fan of thinking as any who goes through the amount of nonfic, theory especially, that I do on a regular basis. However, I've both read and witnessed enough of fecundity of thought development spanning the globe across the centuries to find the tedium in the refrain of 'this individual did this and this one did that and every discourse was manna learned rote in Socratic dialogue', rather than a fluke of fortune birthed in a foment of community and chaos.

There's also the worldbuilding, which suffered in comparison to my just read Samatar, whose iron skeleton did not disdain the supple flesh and weaving song and thus makes one feel the words rather than simply remember. Delany's approach was the natural history museum in the wake of the first Jurassic Park movie, where the bones begrudged what skin dared stretch and all the feathers and the colors and the honks were likely laughed out of the lunch room on a regular basis. I also didn't jive well with the prose style, which is a sore thing to figure out five books later, but considering how much I've changed with my first encounter with Dhalgren a decade ago.

Now, in terms of what I did like, there was a certain scene, where both character and fate coalesced into themselves that made me drive the rating up to three, as well as a few scenes and cogitations toothsome to my brain/aesthetics/both. Alas, though, it may be wise to forgo that other piece of sci-fi I purchased alongside this as insurance against future curiosity whose genre preference was still unknown. At this point, it would be much wiser to commit to a reread of said Dhalgren in order to reset my lodestone, if nothing else. In any case, if you're looking for queer Black SFF that will not steer you wrong (if in an unorthodox sense), I still have to recommend Delany. You'll just have to have a tad more patience for "hard" definitions of the genre(s) than I do.

Tomorrow I shall go to the High Court of Eagles for...the first time? Does anyone in this strange and terrible land ever go anywhere, without having been there before in myth or dream? The minister with whom I shall confer will ask me a simple question. Beyond my campaign to free Nevèrÿon's slaves, whom will I ally myself with next? Will I take up the cause of the workers who toil for wages only a step above slavery? Or will I take up the marginal workless wretches, without wages at all, live a step below? Shall I ally myself with those women who find themselves caught up, laboring without wages, for the male population among both groups? For they are, all of them—these free men and women—caught in a freedom that, despite the name it bears, makes movement through society impossible, that makes the quality of life miserable, that allows no chance and little choice in any aspect of the human not written by the presence or elision of the sign for production. That is what Lord Krodar will ask me. And I shall answer...

P.S. I recognize the important work Delany was doing in the late 20th c., esp regarding the subversion of highfalutin academia with humble genre lit. These days, it's just all a tad myopic for my tastes.

[Adam · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am somehow simultaneously confused that this series doesn't have a higher profile these days and baffled that it exists at all. It's a cliche to say that a book is weird or unique, but there is nothing like the Neveryon series. Its conception is kind of inscrutable but also gleefully exciting. Like, why is this considered a sword and sorcery series? It maybe speaks to the limited scope of how the fantasy genre was conceived at the time, but that just raises the question of how it got published when it did. In fact, this series is doggedly anti-commercial for any era. One of the things that makes it so exciting for a contemporary reader of my particular tastes is just how much of a fuck you it is to any dumbass who picked it up looking for another Conan the Barbarian or Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. The problem is, in part, that it goes so far to stymie and defy readers looking for a shallow adventure story that, to be frank, it kind of forgets to have any fun at all.

For instance: Gorgik is a mighty warrior, who happens to be a freed slave who starts a revolutionary abolitionist movement. He’s also a gay black man who roleplays a slave master in sexual dominance play. You're probably pretty excited about this story, imagining a smart subversion of the fetishization of violence and otherness and especially power in sword and sorcery, a kind of Tarantino-esque fantasy revenge story but written by a gay black man with experience and thought. But that is not the book Delany wrote. This is not Gorgik’s story at all; he is an occasional character, rarely a point of view character. The fighting and strategizing and adventuring and scheming involved in his quest to free slaves are rarely mentioned, and when they do appear they're summarized in retrospect, not told for their own sake.

Instead, the book takes and even further left turn from expectations and focuses, in this second volume especially, on domesticity and women's work. unlike the first book, Neveryona is a single story with the single protagonist: a young girl who leaves her home and goes on an adventure. But the sort of adventures that Pryn encounters are more like being an exchange student than performing a heroic quest. She is taken in by the various households and learns the dynamics of power and gender, of labor and food and culture, and then leaves and travel some more until she finds someone else to live with and learn from. This too, feels like an exciting and meaningful subversion of the many flaws of the sword and sorcery sub-genre. And it is closer to what the book actually is.

I've been meaning to keep reading the series since I read the first one a couple years ago, but I decided to pick up the next volume when I did because Cat Valente’s Orphan’s Tales reminded me of it and I wondered how much water that comparison held. And the answer is more than a little--much of the book is told to Pryn rather than experienced by her, and it has the same sort of fascination with distant ripples through time and space that connect disparate sub stories to each other, tracing webs of linguistic and material evolution. But while it isn’t a subversion of sword and sorcery so much as fairy tales in the mythical fantasy, Orphan’s Tales is it much better, or at least more fun, incarnation of a feminist fantasy interested in these aspects of its world.

Ultimately, Neveryon as a series is far more interested in dialoguing with philosophical texts than sword and sorcery. This is kind of hard to miss--every chapter opens with a multi paragraph epigraph from some postmodernist writer or historian, often fairly dense and jargon heavy. Yet somewhat surprisingly it's never hard to pick up on their implications for the contents of the following chapter. In fact the problem is kind of the reverse: every chapter feels tailor-made to illustrate some (Generally somewhat basic) postmodernist idea. Of course this is the thing that I about the series, the way it feels unashamed to speak my language, not just post-modernism 101 but also concepts in the evolution of material culture, storytelling, social hierarchy, and other science of human history things that rarely come up in fantasy to this day.

And maybe this is a subtle distinction that doesn't actually mean anything, but the problem I have with this isn't so much that every character is an ethnographer/intellectual with keen but utterly anachronistic insights about their society (this, incidentally, is Gorgik’s actual role in the story). It's that the world feels so plainly constructed to provide fodder for those observations. This isn't a China Mieville “Come for the monsters, stay for the politics” situation. You come for the politics or you don’t come at all; the storytelling and worldbuilding otherwise are perfectly serviceable (and honestly that isn’t a bar all sword and sorcery can clear) but utterly boring on their own merits. Neveryon is the most generic historical setting imaginable, not the standard European fantasy setting but nor does it really match anything else. It has whatever traits--cities, slavery, abolitionism, capitalism, etc--Delany wants the characters to be able to talk about, and nothing else. No sense of identity or culture or history or flavor. There are a couple of very literal science-class demonstrations of (fake, for some reason) hydrology or (afaik real) geometry ideas, and they are kind of a microcosm for the whole setting: like puppets or toons acting out scenarios in a Crash Course video or something. It’s just nowhere near as independently compelling as other pomo-101 fiction, like Calvino or Borges or Eco (not to mention that their conceptual work is a lot more concise and revelatory, though that might just be an artifact of exposure).

The thing that makes this even weirder to me is that there’s a framing device: scholars discussing a (fake) ancient scrap of writing from the Mediterranean around which the fiction is ostensibly spun. It’s a more explicit attempt to link Delany’s treatment of sword and sorcery’s central Civilization/Barbarian dichotomy with the first emergence of civilization itself (though perhaps a less elegant one than Howard’s dumb expedient of drawing his map over a real map of the Mediterranean). I just don’t understand what it adds, or how this piece is meant to fit in. The appendix in this volume is literally a set of suggested edits to the appendix in the first book, none of which apparently have anything to add to the book’s own themes. The link suggests perhaps Neveryon is a setting based on early Fertile Crescent cultures. Or others have inferred it is meant to be a pre-Uruk African Neolithic setting, making a sly but potent statement about black achievement. Yet none of this is apparent in the text itself. Compared to modern books actually set in fantasy-African or historical Middle Eastern settings, Neveryon is anonymous. The series feels intellectually ahead of its time in some ways (cultural evolution is still to some extent a novelty in archaeology 40 years later) but perhaps the archaeological descriptions of those cultures just weren’t sufficient to really develop at that time. It probably goes without saying, but Delany eschews all the orientalist nonsense that Howard et al populated those unknowns with. The problem is that he doesn’t replace them with anything else.

I feel like I’m coming down pretty hard on this, which is kind of surprising because I more or less enjoyed my time reading it. I’m resigned to the idea that this is a series I’ll read out of historical interest and affection for the conceit, moreso than for what it actually achieves. It’s a much more interesting historical piece than most sword and sorcery, after all. But I guess the conceit is kind of wearing thin after two volumes, and I don’t know that I’ll pick up the third one any time soon.

[Jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Maybe don't read this review unless you've already read this second book in Delany's Nevèrÿon series, because the books stand so strong by themselves that any review will be less than. They're inherently better as a post-read discussion than as a pre-read heads-up.

The Nevèrÿon books are so hard to characterize - they're not sci-fi, they're not fantasy, they're more philosophical fairy tales that explore deep ideas and extended observations using self-consciously familiar tropes. The first in the series is comprised of interlocking stories that dig into economics, social norms, power, and how we process information - when we first see it, when we recreate it, when we remember it, when we mirror it, how we rework it, how we remake it. And this study of information's cycles and overlays is a recurring (ha!) theme in this second book, as well, which begins with a reiteration of a story from the first book, but with subtle changes that test our memory while triggering the sense of the familiar and even deja vu. It's brilliant. And this book is about all of the above, but more focused on writing. The power of writing is here, the practical value of it, the way that writing does all of the things mentioned above w/r/t information. There's writing as storytelling, as confidence-building measure in economic transactions, as note-taking and record-keeping, as the container for information, as art.

The conveyance this time is still stories, but now with just one protagonist at the center, an explorer and adventurer, a not-classically-beautiful teenaged girl who is absolutely wonderful: courageous, contemplative, curious, and bold. She writes her own story, unsatisfied with unsatisfying endings, adjusting as she learns, observing closely and building on her understanding. Where she could settle in, she heaves herself up and moves on; where she could give up, she just doesn't; where she is being told one story, she finds its offshoots and roots and tests them against the world and against other stories. She is a scientist in life, a discoverer, an inventor, and an author.

As in the first book, Delany spins out more layers by continuing the fictional academic discussion of his work. In effect, he's telling the story using yet another language, doubling down on his themes substantively as well as in the very act of writing this "Appendix." In this perfect spun fiction, he brings in another academic's voice, chiming in on the debate around Nevèrÿon's roots in a found object that itself represents everything about writing that's built into the series' themes. And the mirroring of the book's protagonist and one of the fictional academics is perfection. This "Appendix" is not only endlessly cool, it's delightful.

All that said is really too much said, since the book's power is in the masterful telling, so I'll leave this here as is, except to note that it was wonderful to return to Nevèrÿon and the next book in the series is sitting on the table next to the bed, ready to open tonight. There is so much joy in Delany plucking my mind's strings, carving new paths in my brain, making me think and notice and delve into currency and currents and history and tales and power. I'm just so so grateful.

[Euan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Maybe 4.5? While in the middle there were times where I didn't know why things were happening or strictly why I should care (it's very picaresque, but without even the main characters having that strong of a personality), and Delany often went on self-indulgent philosophical tangents, it was just a very impressive work. Each chapter begins with some quote from a real life essay or book, and the chapters embody in action whatever that philosophy espouses. And, being Delany, it's excellent structurally- cyclic in a number of ways- and on a micro level. The man can write.

The subtitle, at least in my edition, is a better idea of what the book is about- "A Tale of Signs and Cities." Though Neveryona is in the book, that's not what it's about- it's more about letters and language and cities and tales.

[Cécile · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perhaps as puzzling as, but nonetheless more enjoyable than the first volume, if only because there is only one story with a development the reader can follow easily, instead of endless albeit very clever digressions on psychoanalysis, capitalism, gender issues etc. From here it becomes clear that the series is an attempt at defining storytelling in general, not by talking about storytelling, but by weaving a story the telling of which is intended to trigger deeper and deeper thoughts into the reader's mind about exactly what makes him enjoy it, beieve it and follow its course. The various techniques used include mixing th various styles of written and spoken storytelling, referring to our modern world while seemingly erasing the persona of the author, building strong complicity with the reader through a variety of references, especially to the first Neveryon novel... To make it a little bit clearer, the point is more or less the same as with most postmodern books, but the writing saves the relative lack of originality.

This can be read either as a novel or as a literary essay on various postmoderns problematics.

[Macartney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Review is for the series: Set in a long ago time in a forgotten kingdom, Delany explores the structures of civilization in this four novel “sword and sorcery” series comprised of eleven interlinking stories surrounding Gorgik the Slave Liberator. At times privileging academic exercise over pure storytelling, the series nevertheless captivates as much as it elucidates. To be immersed in Delany’s Nevèrÿon is to watch him attempt to name the unnameable magic and spirit that makes humans human. Even when the story creaks and shakes from the weight of Delany’s ideas, it never falls apart and, like a Rube Goldberg machine, its near destruction makes its eventual success all the more fun and awe-inducing. The second book Neveryóna, a stand-alone novel chronicling the adventures of a young girl named Prym, is the most cohesive and successful of them all. A true joy of a character resulting in a story that is a delight to read and so very delicious to think about.

[Micah · Rating 4 out of 5]

"We fought for a vision of society, and yet we lived outside society - like soldiers fighting for a beautiful and wondrous city whose walls they have nevertheless been forbidden to enter."

A swords-and-sorcery book that quotes Braudel and Kristeva, where the "magic" explored is language, power and history.

[Luke Dylan Ramsey · Rating 3 out of 5]

C+/B-

My enjoyment of this book dwindled the longer I read it. The beginning and middle - mostly set in Kolhari, the capital city - are quite interesting. The last 3 or 4 chapters, however, are overly technical, difficult to parse, and just not that interesting. Delany can be too clever for his own good imo.

[molosovsky · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ich hatte die große Ehre & das noch größere Vergnügen, für die überarbeitete Neuausgabe die Übersetzung durchzusehen & zu lektorieren. Soviel für jene, die sich wundern, wie ich im Dezember 2014 bereits ein Buch empfehlen kann, das erst im Frühjahr 2015 erscheinen wird.

Ich erwähne immer wieder mal mein Gedankenspiel, dass die Fantasy sich vor lauter Queste & Epik zu wenig um Alltag & die kleinen menschlichen Dinge kümmert, und eine entsprechende Frischzellenkur durch Schreibtraditionen des (vor allem französischen) Naturalismus a la Flaubert oder Zola gut vertragen könnte. — Delany kommt diesem fiktiven Ideal von mir ziemlich nahe. So gut wie keine Äktschn, dafür aber reichlich Schilderung von Land, Stadt, Leuten und Gesellschaft. Als Leser begleitet man die neugierige Teenagerin Pryn auf ihrer Reise durch das Fantasyland, und erlebt ihre verschiedenen Begegnungen mit gewöhnlichen Menschen, von Bauern, Arbeitern, Sklaven, Schauspielern, Bierbrauern, bis hin zu einigen etwas höherstehenden Spielern im komplexen Spiel um Einfluß & Macht (reichen Handelsdamen, Fürsten, Anführern von Sklavenaufständen).

Delany verhandelt vor allen mit Pryns Beobachtungen von, & ihren Gesprächen mit diesen Leuten die Wechselwirkungen & Reibungen zwischen Zeichen und Bezeichnetem, Schein & Sein, Mythos & Geschichte, Logik & Intuition, zwischen sozialen Lebenswelten, Träumen & Enttäuschungen, und das alles in einem lebendigen Erzählfluss und einer bildreichen Sprache, die das alles andere als langweilig und zäh wirken lässt.

Ich wünschte, der Einfluss dieses Klassiker auf die Genre-Fantasy wäre größer, als er mir scheint.

[Artnoose McMoose · Rating 5 out of 5]

My friend in California gave me this book because it features a female protagonist who makes a long walking journey alone and has to make some tough decisions along the way. I haven't read any of the other books in this same world-space, so I only have the depth of character that one book can provide.

Yes, it's a fantasy novel with dragons and slaves and astrolabes and gold coins. It has a compelling story however, and how often does a fantasy novel feature a quote from Society of the Spectacle as an epigraph? Only one I've ever seen. It also has openly queer characters, and a female lead who travels alone even though it is often dangerous to do so. Even when she's at her most vulnerable, she discovers that sometimes the peril of being alone isn't as bad as the roles she would have to assume in order to remain in a community. And that's why my friend gave me the book.

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thrilling fantasy, if you find long lectures on semiotics, capital and labor, and the fluidity of political power thrilling. (I happen to, most of the time.) Basically a loosely-plotted picaresque, elaborating on the conceptual preoccupations of "Tales of Neveryon" and reexamining some of its characters, with fewer swordfights and a few more dragons and nested stories, and one of Delany's more sympathetic female protagonists, the literate dragonrider Pryn, whose travels through Neveryon and increasingly confident attempts at cognitive mapping structure the novel.

[Katie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Self-referentially clever but not obnoxiously so, in fact, brilliantly so: like the first book, it's fantasy storytelling about fantasy storytelling. There's magic and dragons and barbarians, but there are also metafictional discussions about the value of history and fantasy and language all together.

Highly recommended for fantasy fans who like to think they're smarter than most fantasy fans.

[Sam · Rating 5 out of 5]

I want to be depressed in public through a review on goodreads, but I won't do that this time! I finished Neveryona tonight (I read it in ~1 week, mostly on bus/train rides to and from work) and I really enjoyed it. I am going to give it 5 stars. It was a novel told in of 12 chapters, each with an alliterative list of things to come (so so many alliterations!! wound words! fecund phrases packed with power!!), each following the 15 year-old Pryn as she journeyed south from her home in Ellamon to the southern reaches of her continent, Neveryon. On her way she bumps into and has intimate conversations with dozens of people, each from different places, each a member of a different class. Rich, poor, slave, barbarian, man, woman—Pryn gains the trust of the majority of the people that she meets and forms some sort of bond with a good number of them. Maybe it's her character, which is curious and kind; maybe it's her identity—she's a nonthreatening, mature, intelligent fifteen year old girl. But Neveryon is a cruel country, ruled by a crueller government, upheld by the twin suport of entitled and cruel aristocrats and noble yet greedy merchants. A lot of the people she gets close to are still suspicious that she is a spy, her kindness, however honest, cannot be blindly trusted. Some people pay her no mind, others take a great interest in her. The two that she spends the most time with are Gorgik and Madame Keynes, who were protagonists of their own stories in the first volume, Tales of Neveryon. It's interesting to see them through a different lens, in a different mirror. They come ready-made, already filled in by the narratives that preceded this one. It makes them at once more familiar, but also a bit stranger, as the passage of time between their stories and this novel implies a whole life lived without our knowledge, years lived in darkness. They were the reader's introduction to the world, and now they're Pryn's. Only through them and others do we begin to understand the complex machinations undergird this "strange and terrible" land.

It's an old world, but it's oddly familiar…mirrors figure heavily in Tales, yet they're conspicuously absent from this novel. In Tales they're the subject of a story told by the fabled inventor Venn which was itself a commentary not only on writing and consciousness, but the act of storytelling itself and the magic that is imbued by reflection and reflections of reflections. While mirrors are absent from the world and narrative, storytelling and Venn still figure heavily. Venn is no longer a person, but a character. She exists in the mind of Pryn, Pryn's Aunt, Norema, the Earl, the Earl's children, the people who cross Belham's bridge (even the one's who have no idea what the rock's name means)—this means she can travel the world and transform as facts and fictions are successively added and removed from her being. The craziest thing is that she knows all of this. She sets this entire novel in motion, she is behind the entire movement while somehow also being dead and gone. I am honestly in a kind of daze from how good these 2 books have been. I try to look up more information about them, like interviews and analysis, and there isn't much to pick through. It's like this book doesn't exist! And it is one of the most brilliant pieces of writing I've ever read, fantasy or otherwise. Every aspect of this books composition—the epigraphs, the cyclical narrative, the focus on conversations rather than action (this is why Dune was good too) (also not saying there is an absence of "action" or violence, because there is death and sickness and disease and cruelty throughout the entire story and the stories within the story, BUT it is simply not the focus of the work. I see the focus of this novel being on one level the inequalities and structures of civilization we find ourselves living under in the modern world (not just the modern world either, remember this world is older than old, and we live within hundreds of cycles all moving at once) and finding ways of talking about them directly but in an imaginative way and on another level an experiment in semiotics and the meaning of language (both spoken and written) in the form of a Socratic dialogue between shifting interlocutors that is contained within a sword and sorcery novel.


Both of these are immensely interesting, and Delany explores both to exciting and engaging ends. And of course there's the third and most important layer: NEVERYON. None of this works without an interesting world and "interesting" is an understatement when it comes to this world. It's not relying on innovation. Instead, it opts for imitation and impersonation, taking bits and pieces of ancient and modern cultures and stitching them together to form a believable but new world, similar to our own only in that it's inhabited by humans. The humans think just like we think and they've even started inventing the kinds of things we use—locks and keys, coins, fountains, pi, writing, beer—but those things are so new they still have a sort of mystical character. It's just fun to have the world made strange so that you can gaze on it with new eyes. As Barthes says (paraphrasing): Woe to the reader who does not re-read, for she is bound to read the same story again and again.

[Travis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Can you really mix Conan-style fantasy with high-falutin' theory? Then move the last book into the modern era & the emergence of the AIDS epidemic? Yes.

[Max · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow!

[Stewart Baker · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is not a strong enough word to describe how much I wish we had the newer edition of this, without Gorgik's(?) butt cheeks staring everybody down.

[Elena · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bizarre, and yet also sort of delightful.

[Agnieszka · Rating 3 out of 5]

Parts of this book are complete genius. The scene where the Liberator leads Pryn through the city market and narrates it all as he goes while Pryn observes what happens and it feels like they are in two separate cities at once? Genius. There are bits like that all over. Singular scenes, character sketches, perspective reversals that knock you flat. The uncomfortable and incisive depictions of slavery, and what it might be like to really travel as a woman in a sword and sorcery world are key thematic strengths. But there are also long sections where characters narrate Derrida exegeses or simplified Marxism for pages and some dreadfully repetitive dialogue. I can see this stuff is trying to make a point (perhaps that these people are tiresome), and I just long for more economy in the way the point is made. I think the book might also be making fun of the kind of just-so stories you find in Sword and Sorcery by instead replacing them with just-so stories lifted from critical theory, lifted without transforming them much at all. I can't tell though. The biggest problem I have though is the weak narrative. The book drags at points, hangs together a series of vignettes that don't ultimately seem to come together even though it's supposedly all about one character in a continuous story, and ultimately sets up some incomprehensible situations which don't seem to come to a point leaving me as a reader just as confused as our naive main character. Tales of Nevèrÿon, with multiple separate tales about different characters held together better, and did more to transform the key ideas both books lift from Derrida about the nature of language and the concept of difference.

It's an interesting experiment, and really fun in places. I'm glad I read it but I couldn't recommend it wholeheartedly, unless you're really interested in experimental sword and sorcery.

[Martin Keith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Neveryóna, or: The Tale of Signs and Cities is a great second instalment in Samuel R. Delany's Return to Nevèrÿon series. It follows fifteen-year old Pryn - a literate, dragon-riding mountain girl - who is driven to adventure after hearing a story of a sunken city laden with a dragon's treasure. It documents the people she meets when she travels to Nevèrÿon's capital, Kolhari, and beyond on her journey.

More obviously than the first book, Neveryóna deals heavily with the construction of stories and the importance of signs in helping us interpret these stories. Each of the characters Pryn meets interprets these signs differently and her quest sees her learning to interpret them for herself. She sees first-hand how people's beliefs and actions are constructed by signs and stories (reinforced by language and writing) - and how each story allows for different ideas of freedom. Regardless, Pryn learns that escape and resistance to these stories is possible.

Like the first book, Neveryóna's dense and goes out of its way to subvert its pulpy "sword and sorcery" trappings by eliminating action almost entirely. Nevertheless, it's an intriguing story and a unique Bildungsroman that I will need to reread (and not just because a quote in the book tells me to!).

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

While I've rated this just a tick below book #1, it's only because I felt it could do with a bit more action, though of course I know what I'm getting into when reading a Delany book and that I'll be thinking a bit more than a "normal" F&SF selection. But as far as the good points go, we get even further into some of the points developed in the first book, more closely examining here the beginnings of writing, of commerce, of cities, engineering and mathematics, and of course, how those affect the power various elements of society can wield. A good guide for this kind of journey is a young adolescent, eager to find out about the world, moving through it and listening to discourses by our old friends Norema, Gorgik, and Madame Keyne, as well as some other new characters. I also got a great guffaw from the appendix, which contains a real letter written in response to the first novel's appendix from an actual professor who (while being fully aware of the fictitious nature of the writer) sought to correct some of "S. L. Kermit"'s more egregious errors. Kermit writes a hilarious response and a good time was had by all. Looking forward to #3 after a break.

[Tina · Rating 4 out of 5]

I can’t hope to write a review of this novel that could explain the depths of Delaney’s ability as a writer. He is able to concoct an interesting story about a young girl on a journey of self-discovery while also exploring societal evolution, economy and language (among others!). The cyclical nature of his themes, story and characters are intertwined and reflected against one another – which is also, I would argue, a critique of our society (how could it not be, when the chapters start with quotes from “real life” philosophers?). His strong female characters and openness regarding sexuality suggest he’s playing with the politics of the day and suggesting that a “barbaric” culture is somewhat more enlightened than ours (our society of 30 years ago, and, I would argue, today). He’s also able to create characters you care about and feel for, and a plot that keeps you reading.

Whenever I read Delaney I know there are levels to his writing that I’m missing, but that’s why I enjoy his work so much.

Oh, and I have the pleasure of owning the amazing 80's cover. Go man-butt, go!