What do you think?
Rate this book
Return to Nevèrÿon #4
Return to Nevèrÿon
Slavery is outlawed, Nevèrÿon is free, and Gorgik the Liberator must revisit the mines for a final struggle where he himself was once a slaveAlone in a deserted castle in the Nevèrÿon countryside, a great warrior and a young barbarian meet at midnight to tell each other tales from their intersecting lives. But are they really alone? And, if they aren’t, what will it mean for Nevèrÿon . . . ?The three stories in this volume end Samuel R. Delany’s Return to Nevèrÿon saga and cycle. But they are also its beginning—taking us back to the start of Gorgik’s epic—although, from what we’ve learned from the others, even that has become an entirely new story, though not a word in it has been changed . . .This ebook features an illustrated biography of Samuel R. Delany including rare images from his early career.
297 pages, Kindle Edition
First published November 1, 1987
12 people are currently reading
803 people want to read
About the author
Samuel R. Delany
306 books2,265 followersSamuel 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.
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.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 31 reviews
April 8, 2022
We have had so many times, over the years, you and I, for you to tell me your life. What has intrigued me, Gorgik, is that every time you’ve sat down to tell it, it has always come out differently.
It took me almost eight years to read the four volumes gathering the Neveryon stories, which infers that it was a bumpy ride and not your run-of-the mill escapist sword & sorcery adventure. Looking back though, I must admit that, despite the hard work that Delany often requires from the reader, this was one of the most rewarding explorations of myth and symbolism I have ever encountered.
It is in the mirror that the ego is first born as an idea, and it is in the echo of the symbolic voice that it gains its identity: the analytic mirror must displace – ‘subdue’ – these ‘archaic imagos’.
The reason the lecture needs your full attention is the layered structure of the story. There is always subtext in the narrative of the young slave who becomes Gorgik the Liberator in a barbaric country at the dawn of history. Delany the linguist seeks to expose the roots of language and myth. Through this exercise he strives to illuminate the depths of the subconscious mind. The quote from Jacques Lacan that he puts at the start of this final volume is probably intended as the key to unlock the twists and turns in the story of Gorgik.
>>><<<>>><<<
The Game of Time and Pain begins with a scene that should be familiar to readers who grew up reading mythology, or to fans of Neil Gaiman’s ‘Sandman’ comics: in a small village, in the middle of nowhere, three women meet to discuss the rumours of a strange man who came to the abandoned castle nearby. The old crone weaves a complex fabric on her loom, the housewife brings water and gossip from the fountain while the pig girl watches them and dreams of knights and princesses. They must be Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos who cut and measure the lives of men and women, or the Kindly Ones in charge of one’s destiny, or those the Norse named Norns. Many any other cultures who searched for answers to the questions of life will recognize them. But Gorgik is not aware of them sitting in judgement. He is simply looking for a resting place before he follows the funeral of an old adversary.
In the old castle, the introspective Gorgik is startled in the middle of the night by an intruder: a young naked barbarian sleeps in a room below. The image awakens long lost memories and fiery desires. Can they be separated? or are they two sides of the same coin?
Yes, I have such memories. You have, too. We both return to them, now and again, to weave, unweave, and reweave the stories that make our lives comprehensible to us. But whatever fascination, or even partial truth, such memories hold, how useful can they be to someone who wishes to understand how his or her freedom works? How can you define the self from a time when the self was too young to understand definition? Let me speak instead of the stunned, wary, and very frightened boy who, a decade later, was a slave.
The story has probably been already told, by Gorgik or by one of the other players in the Game of Time and Pain, the game of self-awareness though experience. Our story changes with each re-telling, just as we, the narrators, change with time , with our victories and with our defeats in the game.
For Gorgik, the key moment in his journey through life is an accidental encounter with four nobles from the High Court in Kolhari. They camped near the slave mines where a teenage Gorgik was sent after a violent revolution in the capital city and, bored, they asked the overseer to sent three young slaves over for their entertainment.
“I wanted this power, Udrog, I wanted it desperately. And by recognizing that want, I woke to myself: what I wanted was the power to remove the collar from the necks of the oppressed, including my own. But I knew, at least for me, that the power to remove the collar was wholly involved with the freedom to place it there when I wished.”
I will not explain in detail what went on during that evening [death, fear, pleasure, anger, etc]. What is important for Gorgik is that he started to question the events in his life, he started looking for reasons, for cause and effect, for a way to take control of destiny. Accidentally, while his rational mind was awakened, so is his sexual awareness, forever linked from then on with the symbolic gesture of putting on and removing the slave collar, with the game of master and servant, of submission and dominance.
Years later, and many, many lessons later from both political and bedroom teachers, Gorgik will be asked to be a role model for his contemporaries.
“How can I lead you?” And I laughed. “I cannot tell rage, fear, or desire from the love of freedom itself. Nor am I at all sure they aren’t, finally, the same.”
A black man with a shaved head and whip marks on both flanks said from the group’s middle: “But you can grin at the confusions; you can dismiss the distinctions – they do not stop you. You can act. Lead us, Gorgik.”
We can take the analogy one step further: Delany has already told us that fantasy Neveryon is just a mirror of our own, contemporary society. Gorgik is the author, the artist who has freed his mind from misconceptions, the man who has looked into the mirror and has discovered himself, the leader who can show us the way to freedom.
The speculation becomes like a heavy drug when you realize how far language can take you. Delany is in my opinion a playful, sly and subversive narrator, luring us in with a promise of easy escapism into a fantasy land of dragons, barbarians and sexy ladies [and boys] of loose morals, only to turn the tables and force us to consider our own shape in the mirror he created. He believes in the powers of language to define and change our lives.
Your literacy – certainly one of the first things I noticed about you when I decided to buy you from the mines – is not usually what you mention, unless asked. And more than once, my friend, my creation, my mirror, I have thought your suppression of that fact from the general narrative you tell and retell of your life is the sign of its indubitable core import.
>>><<<>>><<<
The Tale of Rumor and Desire changes the timeline and the main actor to another young man named Clodon. After a wild and dissolute youth that ended with his body marked for life by twelve lashes, Clodon runs away from his village to Kolhari, where he ends up as one of the naked vagabonds begging for scraps or selling their bodies on the Bridge of Lost Desire.
Like Gorgik in the previous tale, Clodon is awakened to self by mixed revelations about his sexuality and about the power other men have over him. What finally turned Clodon from an impulsive, chaotic hell raiser and drifter is another name for the Game of Life and Pain, this time anchored in the dichotomy between lust and desire.
For – let me repeat it – we have been writing about the power of desire.
What? You thought it was lust? No.
Before the Bridge of Lost Desire, Clodon was all about Lust and he went along stealing, seducing and brawling without a care for the future. Then he sees a young woman washing clothes under the bridge.
He’d never known eyes could have that effect because, he realized, in order to have it, the face about them had to be smiling.
Or laughing.
[...] He smiled because if someone smiles at you, and you want them to go on smiling, you smile back; otherwise, they will frown, or look dour, or shake their head and turn away; and Clodon wanted this woman, kneeling on the rock, water on her face and forearms, to go on smiling at him till the nameless gods balled up the desert with the sea and the mountains among them, in preparation for the recrafting of the world.
The revealing mirror is the awareness of your face, of your actions in another person’s eyes / mind. It’s different than the lust to posses, to dominate, to satisfy your most basic needs. And the understanding of the difference is the first step on the road to freedom. A road that will take Clodon all across Neveryon for the next four decades, without ever seeing those smiling eyes again. But it doesn’t really matter, the catalyst has worked its magic.
The voice said: ‘Lust has made me a slave. But desire has set me free.’
The voice said: ‘Freedom has let me lust. But I am a slave to desire.’
The tale of Clodon is linked with the tale of Gorgik by another slave collar, one offered to the young ruffian by a wealthy patron as an invitation to join a group of BDSM pleasure seekers. Clodon is tempted, especially when he notices how his collar is a form of power he can exercise over men driven by lust. But now Clodon can balance this power with the lure of the smiling eyes and he, like Gorgik, suddenly realizes that the freedom to put and to remove the symbolic collar rests in his hands alone.
Decades later, Clodon is still an outcast marked by the lash, a drunkard and a vagabond. His story has more pain than freedom in it, a lot more lust than realised dreams in it. But he is a man who can recognize desire and follow it, even if it comes from a different pair of smiling eyes.
‘The ones who see themselves clear; who can look in a mirror and see who they are. They’re lucky. And yet, when you do see what it is you want, it seems so ...’
‘Simple?’ she asked.
He laughed a little without opening his mouth. ‘Lucky ... that’s all!’
I hope that these quotes can show why I consider Delany a true magician who uses words and symbols to create his illusions, tricks and metaphors that at first baffle you only to make you want to applaud when he pulls the rabbit out of the hat. Don’t be afraid of metaphysical dragons and pay no heed to warnings about how difficult a writer he is. Take the plunge!
‘There really isn’t much to be afraid of with dragons. Up close, they’re all noise and bad smell. And there’s not that many left.’
‘Now you see?’ she said, ‘That’s something, somewhere in your travels, you’ve actually learned. It’s very valuable knowledge, too.’
>>><<<>>><<<
The Tale of Gorgik is a recapitulation and a re-examination of the whole series. It is the closest to the sword & sorcery original expectations I had from the series and it keeps the metaphysics and the deconstruction to a minimum. But the reader is already prompted to search between the lines, to look for context and, in case he has forgotten how, there’s another quote from Edward Said to lead the way into the story:
Because we must deal with the unknown, whose nature is by definition speculative and outside the flowing chain of language, whatever we make of it will be no more than probability and no less than error.
The subconscious might be ultimately unknowable, but that’s no reason to give up. Gorgik became the Liberator not through psychoanalysis, but because he had not let his doubts and insecurities stop him from acting on his desire for freedom.
In the first story he witnessed lords abusing their power, being in turn slaves of lust. After he is freed from the slave mines by another royal princess looking for a rough tumble in bed with a smelly barbarian, Gorgik is taken to the court in Kolhari, where he sees the Game of Freedom and Slavery played at the highest level in Neveryon.
For it is precisely at its center that one loses the clear vision of what surrounds, what controls and contours every utterance, decides and develops every action, as the bird has no clear concept of air, though it support her every turn, or the fish no true vision of water, though it blur all she sees.
So, in order to take control of his own life, Gorgik needs to move away from the center of power. His patron allows him to be trained as an army officer and after this, Gorgik goes through numerous career changes that will eventually complete his journey of self-discovery.
The basic education of Gorgik had been laid ... all of these [jobs] merely developed motifs we have already sounded. Gorgik, at thirty-six, was tall and great-muscled, with rough, thinning hair and a face (with its great scar) that looked no more than half a dozen years older than it had at twenty-one, a man comfortable with horse and sword, at home with slaves, thieves, soldiers, prostitutes, merchants, counts, and princesses; a man who was – in his way and for his epoch – the optimum product of his civilization.
The challenge of the author to the reader is finally spelled out: look for a mirror, know thyself, and act on that knowledge if you want to become an ‘optimum product of your civilization’.
>>><<<>>><<<
Closures and Openings
Where do we go from Neveryon? The magician is kindly offering us a glimpse behind the curtain, he reveals some of the literary tricks he used in the series, some of the names that opened his own eyes, some of his preferred interpretations of the text.
I more or less thought of these stories as a Child’s Garden of Semiotics.
... for Barthes, semiology was ‘the labor that collects the impurities of language, the wastes of linguistics, the immediate corruption of any message: nothing less than the desires, fears, expressions, intimidations, advances, blandishments, protests, excuses, aggressions, and melodies of which active language is made.’
The unconscious is structured, declared Lacan so famously in ‘Ecrits’, as a language.
So, it might be the stories of Robert E Howard, Fritz Leiber, Michael Moorcock, Joanna Russ [?] who are mentioned as early influences on Delany that made him choose a sword & sorcery setting.
Or, it might be the academic studies of Barthes, Lacan, Said, Eco, Guy Davenport who explore the structure of language and the meaning of signs.
Or, the most probable for me, another of Samuel Delany’s provocative, difficult, unorthodox speculative fictions.
It took me almost eight years to read the four volumes gathering the Neveryon stories, which infers that it was a bumpy ride and not your run-of-the mill escapist sword & sorcery adventure. Looking back though, I must admit that, despite the hard work that Delany often requires from the reader, this was one of the most rewarding explorations of myth and symbolism I have ever encountered.
It is in the mirror that the ego is first born as an idea, and it is in the echo of the symbolic voice that it gains its identity: the analytic mirror must displace – ‘subdue’ – these ‘archaic imagos’.
The reason the lecture needs your full attention is the layered structure of the story. There is always subtext in the narrative of the young slave who becomes Gorgik the Liberator in a barbaric country at the dawn of history. Delany the linguist seeks to expose the roots of language and myth. Through this exercise he strives to illuminate the depths of the subconscious mind. The quote from Jacques Lacan that he puts at the start of this final volume is probably intended as the key to unlock the twists and turns in the story of Gorgik.
>>><<<>>><<<
The Game of Time and Pain begins with a scene that should be familiar to readers who grew up reading mythology, or to fans of Neil Gaiman’s ‘Sandman’ comics: in a small village, in the middle of nowhere, three women meet to discuss the rumours of a strange man who came to the abandoned castle nearby. The old crone weaves a complex fabric on her loom, the housewife brings water and gossip from the fountain while the pig girl watches them and dreams of knights and princesses. They must be Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos who cut and measure the lives of men and women, or the Kindly Ones in charge of one’s destiny, or those the Norse named Norns. Many any other cultures who searched for answers to the questions of life will recognize them. But Gorgik is not aware of them sitting in judgement. He is simply looking for a resting place before he follows the funeral of an old adversary.
In the old castle, the introspective Gorgik is startled in the middle of the night by an intruder: a young naked barbarian sleeps in a room below. The image awakens long lost memories and fiery desires. Can they be separated? or are they two sides of the same coin?
Yes, I have such memories. You have, too. We both return to them, now and again, to weave, unweave, and reweave the stories that make our lives comprehensible to us. But whatever fascination, or even partial truth, such memories hold, how useful can they be to someone who wishes to understand how his or her freedom works? How can you define the self from a time when the self was too young to understand definition? Let me speak instead of the stunned, wary, and very frightened boy who, a decade later, was a slave.
The story has probably been already told, by Gorgik or by one of the other players in the Game of Time and Pain, the game of self-awareness though experience. Our story changes with each re-telling, just as we, the narrators, change with time , with our victories and with our defeats in the game.
For Gorgik, the key moment in his journey through life is an accidental encounter with four nobles from the High Court in Kolhari. They camped near the slave mines where a teenage Gorgik was sent after a violent revolution in the capital city and, bored, they asked the overseer to sent three young slaves over for their entertainment.
“I wanted this power, Udrog, I wanted it desperately. And by recognizing that want, I woke to myself: what I wanted was the power to remove the collar from the necks of the oppressed, including my own. But I knew, at least for me, that the power to remove the collar was wholly involved with the freedom to place it there when I wished.”
I will not explain in detail what went on during that evening [death, fear, pleasure, anger, etc]. What is important for Gorgik is that he started to question the events in his life, he started looking for reasons, for cause and effect, for a way to take control of destiny. Accidentally, while his rational mind was awakened, so is his sexual awareness, forever linked from then on with the symbolic gesture of putting on and removing the slave collar, with the game of master and servant, of submission and dominance.
Years later, and many, many lessons later from both political and bedroom teachers, Gorgik will be asked to be a role model for his contemporaries.
“How can I lead you?” And I laughed. “I cannot tell rage, fear, or desire from the love of freedom itself. Nor am I at all sure they aren’t, finally, the same.”
A black man with a shaved head and whip marks on both flanks said from the group’s middle: “But you can grin at the confusions; you can dismiss the distinctions – they do not stop you. You can act. Lead us, Gorgik.”
We can take the analogy one step further: Delany has already told us that fantasy Neveryon is just a mirror of our own, contemporary society. Gorgik is the author, the artist who has freed his mind from misconceptions, the man who has looked into the mirror and has discovered himself, the leader who can show us the way to freedom.
The speculation becomes like a heavy drug when you realize how far language can take you. Delany is in my opinion a playful, sly and subversive narrator, luring us in with a promise of easy escapism into a fantasy land of dragons, barbarians and sexy ladies [and boys] of loose morals, only to turn the tables and force us to consider our own shape in the mirror he created. He believes in the powers of language to define and change our lives.
Your literacy – certainly one of the first things I noticed about you when I decided to buy you from the mines – is not usually what you mention, unless asked. And more than once, my friend, my creation, my mirror, I have thought your suppression of that fact from the general narrative you tell and retell of your life is the sign of its indubitable core import.
>>><<<>>><<<
The Tale of Rumor and Desire changes the timeline and the main actor to another young man named Clodon. After a wild and dissolute youth that ended with his body marked for life by twelve lashes, Clodon runs away from his village to Kolhari, where he ends up as one of the naked vagabonds begging for scraps or selling their bodies on the Bridge of Lost Desire.
Like Gorgik in the previous tale, Clodon is awakened to self by mixed revelations about his sexuality and about the power other men have over him. What finally turned Clodon from an impulsive, chaotic hell raiser and drifter is another name for the Game of Life and Pain, this time anchored in the dichotomy between lust and desire.
For – let me repeat it – we have been writing about the power of desire.
What? You thought it was lust? No.
Before the Bridge of Lost Desire, Clodon was all about Lust and he went along stealing, seducing and brawling without a care for the future. Then he sees a young woman washing clothes under the bridge.
He’d never known eyes could have that effect because, he realized, in order to have it, the face about them had to be smiling.
Or laughing.
[...] He smiled because if someone smiles at you, and you want them to go on smiling, you smile back; otherwise, they will frown, or look dour, or shake their head and turn away; and Clodon wanted this woman, kneeling on the rock, water on her face and forearms, to go on smiling at him till the nameless gods balled up the desert with the sea and the mountains among them, in preparation for the recrafting of the world.
The revealing mirror is the awareness of your face, of your actions in another person’s eyes / mind. It’s different than the lust to posses, to dominate, to satisfy your most basic needs. And the understanding of the difference is the first step on the road to freedom. A road that will take Clodon all across Neveryon for the next four decades, without ever seeing those smiling eyes again. But it doesn’t really matter, the catalyst has worked its magic.
The voice said: ‘Lust has made me a slave. But desire has set me free.’
The voice said: ‘Freedom has let me lust. But I am a slave to desire.’
The tale of Clodon is linked with the tale of Gorgik by another slave collar, one offered to the young ruffian by a wealthy patron as an invitation to join a group of BDSM pleasure seekers. Clodon is tempted, especially when he notices how his collar is a form of power he can exercise over men driven by lust. But now Clodon can balance this power with the lure of the smiling eyes and he, like Gorgik, suddenly realizes that the freedom to put and to remove the symbolic collar rests in his hands alone.
Decades later, Clodon is still an outcast marked by the lash, a drunkard and a vagabond. His story has more pain than freedom in it, a lot more lust than realised dreams in it. But he is a man who can recognize desire and follow it, even if it comes from a different pair of smiling eyes.
‘The ones who see themselves clear; who can look in a mirror and see who they are. They’re lucky. And yet, when you do see what it is you want, it seems so ...’
‘Simple?’ she asked.
He laughed a little without opening his mouth. ‘Lucky ... that’s all!’
I hope that these quotes can show why I consider Delany a true magician who uses words and symbols to create his illusions, tricks and metaphors that at first baffle you only to make you want to applaud when he pulls the rabbit out of the hat. Don’t be afraid of metaphysical dragons and pay no heed to warnings about how difficult a writer he is. Take the plunge!
‘There really isn’t much to be afraid of with dragons. Up close, they’re all noise and bad smell. And there’s not that many left.’
‘Now you see?’ she said, ‘That’s something, somewhere in your travels, you’ve actually learned. It’s very valuable knowledge, too.’
>>><<<>>><<<
The Tale of Gorgik is a recapitulation and a re-examination of the whole series. It is the closest to the sword & sorcery original expectations I had from the series and it keeps the metaphysics and the deconstruction to a minimum. But the reader is already prompted to search between the lines, to look for context and, in case he has forgotten how, there’s another quote from Edward Said to lead the way into the story:
Because we must deal with the unknown, whose nature is by definition speculative and outside the flowing chain of language, whatever we make of it will be no more than probability and no less than error.
The subconscious might be ultimately unknowable, but that’s no reason to give up. Gorgik became the Liberator not through psychoanalysis, but because he had not let his doubts and insecurities stop him from acting on his desire for freedom.
In the first story he witnessed lords abusing their power, being in turn slaves of lust. After he is freed from the slave mines by another royal princess looking for a rough tumble in bed with a smelly barbarian, Gorgik is taken to the court in Kolhari, where he sees the Game of Freedom and Slavery played at the highest level in Neveryon.
For it is precisely at its center that one loses the clear vision of what surrounds, what controls and contours every utterance, decides and develops every action, as the bird has no clear concept of air, though it support her every turn, or the fish no true vision of water, though it blur all she sees.
So, in order to take control of his own life, Gorgik needs to move away from the center of power. His patron allows him to be trained as an army officer and after this, Gorgik goes through numerous career changes that will eventually complete his journey of self-discovery.
The basic education of Gorgik had been laid ... all of these [jobs] merely developed motifs we have already sounded. Gorgik, at thirty-six, was tall and great-muscled, with rough, thinning hair and a face (with its great scar) that looked no more than half a dozen years older than it had at twenty-one, a man comfortable with horse and sword, at home with slaves, thieves, soldiers, prostitutes, merchants, counts, and princesses; a man who was – in his way and for his epoch – the optimum product of his civilization.
The challenge of the author to the reader is finally spelled out: look for a mirror, know thyself, and act on that knowledge if you want to become an ‘optimum product of your civilization’.
>>><<<>>><<<
Closures and Openings
Where do we go from Neveryon? The magician is kindly offering us a glimpse behind the curtain, he reveals some of the literary tricks he used in the series, some of the names that opened his own eyes, some of his preferred interpretations of the text.
I more or less thought of these stories as a Child’s Garden of Semiotics.
... for Barthes, semiology was ‘the labor that collects the impurities of language, the wastes of linguistics, the immediate corruption of any message: nothing less than the desires, fears, expressions, intimidations, advances, blandishments, protests, excuses, aggressions, and melodies of which active language is made.’
The unconscious is structured, declared Lacan so famously in ‘Ecrits’, as a language.
So, it might be the stories of Robert E Howard, Fritz Leiber, Michael Moorcock, Joanna Russ [?] who are mentioned as early influences on Delany that made him choose a sword & sorcery setting.
Or, it might be the academic studies of Barthes, Lacan, Said, Eco, Guy Davenport who explore the structure of language and the meaning of signs.
Or, the most probable for me, another of Samuel Delany’s provocative, difficult, unorthodox speculative fictions.
September 7, 2011
A fitting ending, bringing us back to where this all started, literally, by repeating the initial tale in the series.
Again, very concerned with language and power, but so much more.
This series is just beyond brilliant to me. It certainly isn't for everyone, but if you're interested in the way language shapes and constructs and orders civilizations and peoples and where power comes from, the forms it takes, and deep, erudite plunges into the psychology, not only of sex, but of desire, of lust, then this is for you.
The series is a hall of mirrors, infinitely reflecting itself, and, in this way, it is ever-expanding, partly because it doesn't end. While the series very clearly deals with certain characters, it is not so much about those characters as it is about the nature of language and narratives. That's not to say we don't feel connected to the characters. Nothing could be further from the truth, really. It's engrossing, not only for its ideas [which are monumental and numerous], but for the sheer pleasure it takes in telling its stories, in giving us these characters, who are drawn meticulously. These are powerful stories in their own right, but, more than that, they're beautiful. But then when combined with the ideas present: it's similar to Dostoevsky despite being so obviously different from him in every imaginable way. I think the comparison's useful. Dostoevsky was a writer of profound ideas, and that same kind of brilliant mind is behind these stories, though maybe more academic, and certainly more playful and lighter in tone.
The series is a constant critique and exploration of itself, too, with the stories deconstructing one another, commenting on one another, even completely undercutting and subverting each other. And, really, it is a retelling of the world we live in now, and so Neveryon is our mirror that we look into, watching our reflection fragment and deconstruct and reconstruct itself endlessly.
It's truly an amazing literary feat, to do so much philosophically while remaining entertaining. Though, to be fair, these are not the kind of stories that will excite you with action and adventure and daring [though there is that here, too]. More than that, they are very real stories about very real people doing very real things in a world that's almost real but feels, somehow, realer.
Too, these stories, individually, are much less than them combined. So while one story or the other may miss for you, the overall effect is dazzling. It's for this reason that I've refrained from giving the books five stars, individually. Now that I'm finished and the whole shape is in my head [or at least the small amount I'm able to keep there], it becomes so much more. The stories are good by themselves, but, together, man, they're truly just something else entirely. And it's important to count every page of these books together, from the quotes that introduce each story, to the appendices and afterwords and acknowledgements, which are, oddly enough, just as much a part of the overall narrative of the series [which, I mean, even though it's a reflection of our world, it also exists in our world, so the lines really start breaking down to the point that the reflection becomes what the object is, and vice versa: a mirror is a reflection but it is also a mirror] because they all add up, all form a greater whole, something that reaches towards an almost perfect novel, despite, essentially, being a collection of eleven stories over four books.
Highly recommended.
Again, very concerned with language and power, but so much more.
This series is just beyond brilliant to me. It certainly isn't for everyone, but if you're interested in the way language shapes and constructs and orders civilizations and peoples and where power comes from, the forms it takes, and deep, erudite plunges into the psychology, not only of sex, but of desire, of lust, then this is for you.
The series is a hall of mirrors, infinitely reflecting itself, and, in this way, it is ever-expanding, partly because it doesn't end. While the series very clearly deals with certain characters, it is not so much about those characters as it is about the nature of language and narratives. That's not to say we don't feel connected to the characters. Nothing could be further from the truth, really. It's engrossing, not only for its ideas [which are monumental and numerous], but for the sheer pleasure it takes in telling its stories, in giving us these characters, who are drawn meticulously. These are powerful stories in their own right, but, more than that, they're beautiful. But then when combined with the ideas present: it's similar to Dostoevsky despite being so obviously different from him in every imaginable way. I think the comparison's useful. Dostoevsky was a writer of profound ideas, and that same kind of brilliant mind is behind these stories, though maybe more academic, and certainly more playful and lighter in tone.
The series is a constant critique and exploration of itself, too, with the stories deconstructing one another, commenting on one another, even completely undercutting and subverting each other. And, really, it is a retelling of the world we live in now, and so Neveryon is our mirror that we look into, watching our reflection fragment and deconstruct and reconstruct itself endlessly.
It's truly an amazing literary feat, to do so much philosophically while remaining entertaining. Though, to be fair, these are not the kind of stories that will excite you with action and adventure and daring [though there is that here, too]. More than that, they are very real stories about very real people doing very real things in a world that's almost real but feels, somehow, realer.
Too, these stories, individually, are much less than them combined. So while one story or the other may miss for you, the overall effect is dazzling. It's for this reason that I've refrained from giving the books five stars, individually. Now that I'm finished and the whole shape is in my head [or at least the small amount I'm able to keep there], it becomes so much more. The stories are good by themselves, but, together, man, they're truly just something else entirely. And it's important to count every page of these books together, from the quotes that introduce each story, to the appendices and afterwords and acknowledgements, which are, oddly enough, just as much a part of the overall narrative of the series [which, I mean, even though it's a reflection of our world, it also exists in our world, so the lines really start breaking down to the point that the reflection becomes what the object is, and vice versa: a mirror is a reflection but it is also a mirror] because they all add up, all form a greater whole, something that reaches towards an almost perfect novel, despite, essentially, being a collection of eleven stories over four books.
Highly recommended.
October 9, 2009
The circle's closed, and now I can give my definitive impression: Delany is a genius. This series is a masterpiece. I gave a big sigh of reliefs when I reached the last page, but I still find it absolutely awesome, and now I am going to wash my brain off with some Buffy the Vampire Slayer cause if I spend one more second thinking I'm going to burn out.
The only negative thing I could say is, perhaps, if you are just looking for a nice fun book and you don't want to think to much, you may just be bored to death. This is not one of those books like The Lord of the Rings that have a bit of everytthing for everyone, adventure for adventure-lovers, a nice world, and yes, some literature for those who like it. According to the author, it's a very long treaty in semiotics and semiology (and no, I still haven't found out whatever the Modular Calculus was... but I will, one day). I would add on poetry, sociology, history and how to stretch the architecture of a story to its limits. It is all that, and a novel at the same time, although you really have to enjoy thinking on all those things if you don't want to start nodding around chapter 2.
The third volume took the reader back to his own world, with some brutality I must say. The fourth book gently lulls him back to the novellistic illusion. We meet Gorgik the Liberator again, after he has completed his quest, the go back in time to a character we had only glimpsed (indeed, I'm just assuming it's the same character, as it is not explicitly said), and then just when we expect closure, just when we have read an umpteenth version of the Libertor's tale with yet another point of view, and we are expecting something along the lines of "but now our tale is over, so let's just stop talking about it" (in the form of Gorgik's death or anything), we come across an exact repetition of The Tale of Gorgik, the very first part of the first book of the series. After the painful trip between Neveryon and New York in the first volume, this time we are gently dragged back to the beginning of the tale, and we are even spared the pain of seeing it end, while at the same time, Delany makes his point better than ever that it is only a tale (how else can a life go back to its own beginning when it comes to its end?).
For me this is the ultimate demonstration of the power of storytelling. Delany kept telling me for four volumes that this was only a story and I should start thinking of the problems of meaning and signs instead of taking it literally, and still I cared for the story. All right, I did get a little bored at times, espectially at the beginning when I didn't know what to expect, but at the end I was at the same time thinking of all the fine points Delany was making and getting deeply engaged in the story he was telling me. Postmodernists got it wrong, I'm afraid: you cannot prevent people from getting enthralled in fiction, however repeatedly you point out that none of this is real. At least this makes me more than ever optimistic about the future of fantasy. Too bad this series is not more widely read!
The only negative thing I could say is, perhaps, if you are just looking for a nice fun book and you don't want to think to much, you may just be bored to death. This is not one of those books like The Lord of the Rings that have a bit of everytthing for everyone, adventure for adventure-lovers, a nice world, and yes, some literature for those who like it. According to the author, it's a very long treaty in semiotics and semiology (and no, I still haven't found out whatever the Modular Calculus was... but I will, one day). I would add on poetry, sociology, history and how to stretch the architecture of a story to its limits. It is all that, and a novel at the same time, although you really have to enjoy thinking on all those things if you don't want to start nodding around chapter 2.
The third volume took the reader back to his own world, with some brutality I must say. The fourth book gently lulls him back to the novellistic illusion. We meet Gorgik the Liberator again, after he has completed his quest, the go back in time to a character we had only glimpsed (indeed, I'm just assuming it's the same character, as it is not explicitly said), and then just when we expect closure, just when we have read an umpteenth version of the Libertor's tale with yet another point of view, and we are expecting something along the lines of "but now our tale is over, so let's just stop talking about it" (in the form of Gorgik's death or anything), we come across an exact repetition of The Tale of Gorgik, the very first part of the first book of the series. After the painful trip between Neveryon and New York in the first volume, this time we are gently dragged back to the beginning of the tale, and we are even spared the pain of seeing it end, while at the same time, Delany makes his point better than ever that it is only a tale (how else can a life go back to its own beginning when it comes to its end?).
For me this is the ultimate demonstration of the power of storytelling. Delany kept telling me for four volumes that this was only a story and I should start thinking of the problems of meaning and signs instead of taking it literally, and still I cared for the story. All right, I did get a little bored at times, espectially at the beginning when I didn't know what to expect, but at the end I was at the same time thinking of all the fine points Delany was making and getting deeply engaged in the story he was telling me. Postmodernists got it wrong, I'm afraid: you cannot prevent people from getting enthralled in fiction, however repeatedly you point out that none of this is real. At least this makes me more than ever optimistic about the future of fantasy. Too bad this series is not more widely read!
June 17, 2023
REVIEW FOR SERIES::
Did you know the novel in the third volume of this series "The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals" was the first piece of American fiction about the AIDS epidemic, published way back in 1984? Did you know its publication in the volume Flight from Nevèrÿon resulted in ALL of Delany's books being banned from Barnes and Noble for a number of years due to the moral cloying that existed at that time around AIDS? This series is downright historical for this piece of trivia alone, and it barely scratches the surface.
This is above and beyond Delany's best and most fully realized work, and I think also his most underread and underrated (I've read most of it, at 6,000+ pages so far). The long and the short: A linear unfolding through stories, novels, and novellas of Sword and Sorcery Fantasy concerning the slave uprising led by one famous former slave across an empire that is on the historical cusp of both writing and the minting of money. Each section begins with an epigraph from a postwar critical theorist, and the writing then begins toward and against these various ideas and thinkers, but it is never as simple as a mere explanation of an idea via narrative, and at times when it seems to be, those explanations are then problematized, warped, and reversed in successive pieces.
It's got all the hallmarks of Delany is known for: genre writing, headiness, weird sex, S&M, experimentalism/metatext, sly humor, lurid anecdotes, brilliant subtlety, blatant didacticism, monologue, dialogue, a consuming interest in what and how writing means, weirdos and outcasts, a true panoply of literary style and form.
Beyond that, it is sentence for sentence word for word his best written book (I say "book" because it really should be published as an omnibus, hint hint Library of America). I will and do forgive Chip a great deal of clumsiness in the minutiae for his larger sense of grace in general (especially in something like Dhalgren), but there is no forgiveness needed for Nevèrÿon, it is, dare I say—perfect? And that is coming in at ~1200 pages of dense philosophy laden fantasy narrative where to be honest not a lot "happens." I was engaged, and impressed, and stunned, and at many moments even emotionally moved, which is just a strange combination for a book like this that, honestly, should not work in the way it does or as well as it does.
I exhort you: read it read it read it READ IT!
And while I'm at it: Just give Delany the Nobel prize already. What are we waiting for?
Did you know the novel in the third volume of this series "The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals" was the first piece of American fiction about the AIDS epidemic, published way back in 1984? Did you know its publication in the volume Flight from Nevèrÿon resulted in ALL of Delany's books being banned from Barnes and Noble for a number of years due to the moral cloying that existed at that time around AIDS? This series is downright historical for this piece of trivia alone, and it barely scratches the surface.
This is above and beyond Delany's best and most fully realized work, and I think also his most underread and underrated (I've read most of it, at 6,000+ pages so far). The long and the short: A linear unfolding through stories, novels, and novellas of Sword and Sorcery Fantasy concerning the slave uprising led by one famous former slave across an empire that is on the historical cusp of both writing and the minting of money. Each section begins with an epigraph from a postwar critical theorist, and the writing then begins toward and against these various ideas and thinkers, but it is never as simple as a mere explanation of an idea via narrative, and at times when it seems to be, those explanations are then problematized, warped, and reversed in successive pieces.
It's got all the hallmarks of Delany is known for: genre writing, headiness, weird sex, S&M, experimentalism/metatext, sly humor, lurid anecdotes, brilliant subtlety, blatant didacticism, monologue, dialogue, a consuming interest in what and how writing means, weirdos and outcasts, a true panoply of literary style and form.
Beyond that, it is sentence for sentence word for word his best written book (I say "book" because it really should be published as an omnibus, hint hint Library of America). I will and do forgive Chip a great deal of clumsiness in the minutiae for his larger sense of grace in general (especially in something like Dhalgren), but there is no forgiveness needed for Nevèrÿon, it is, dare I say—perfect? And that is coming in at ~1200 pages of dense philosophy laden fantasy narrative where to be honest not a lot "happens." I was engaged, and impressed, and stunned, and at many moments even emotionally moved, which is just a strange combination for a book like this that, honestly, should not work in the way it does or as well as it does.
I exhort you: read it read it read it READ IT!
And while I'm at it: Just give Delany the Nobel prize already. What are we waiting for?
June 3, 2025
This whole series is pure genius. Fundamentally changed how I think of semiotics and mimesis. I know I’ll want to return to the appendices in my academic work. I felt like a complete idiot the whole time, but in a good way.
May 24, 2022
Okay, two stars completely respecting that Samuel Delaney is a towering figure in literature and I'm sure the book is an amazing experience in the right hands. Those aren't mine. I had a good time with the bizarre trip through Dhalgren, and have enjoyed various of his short stories. This book was befuddling, and I understood very little of why I was going to the places Delaney took me. Words that I recognized went by my eyes and made sentences that I certainly understood, but any connections beyond that were lost. Venturing through the appendix at the end, it became more obvious why the book gave me difficulty, as all of the notes given about the creation of the stories read like a graduate seminar on literary construction and philosophy. Even though I recognized a name or two, the ideas were two levels of three-dimensional chess away from anything that made sense to me. If I had a professor guiding me through the theories and connections behind the story I can see potentially having a better, more interesting interaction with this book. As it stands, this is the kind of book that makes me think perhaps I shouldn't be reading fiction at all, or just sticking to the kind one can find in the airport book racks.
June 7, 2020
This is easily my favorite book. I have come back to it the most out of any series that I've read. I'm always astonished by its utter brilliance. While the text is dense, it simultaneous can be uproariously funny and deeply scarring, juxtaposing the power sex with the harsh reality of social class. Delany is my favorite author and I would wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone who appreciates an addicting and challenging adventure.
June 25, 2024
A complex series of novellas, I'm proud of myself for finishing this series which challenged and intrigued me. I love Delany's writing always, and it's a treat to read such a winding story which continuously builds on itself. A bit perplexed by literally ending where we began, not sure if that's how it always was printed or not, but it's definitely some kind of choice.
August 6, 2021
Finally finished the series and come full circle - literally (with that last tale).
January 21, 2015
Не започвам в нужната последователност, която според уикипедия е следната:
Tales of Nevèrÿon
Neveryóna, or: The Tale of Signs and Cities
Flight from Nevèrÿon
Return to Nevèrÿon
...но след като изплаках, че ми е трудно да чета Дилейни на английски, открих на български "Играта на време и болка" - една от историите, съставящи Return to Nevèrÿon. Ако преди се бях поизгубила в текста на Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, то сега съм изгубена в превода. Този опит окончателно ме убеди да чета по възможност в оригинал. Така че се стягаме и продължаваме:)
И въпреки посредствения превод, въпреки започване на четенето отзад напред, Играта... ме спечели за каузата Дилейни. Не беше лесно, но се сдобих цялата серия;), и след като приключа - ще видим кой кого:) - със Звездите..., започвам Неверион от самото начало:)
Поставям четири звезди заради първата прочетена история, но нищо чудно да се увеличат.
Tales of Nevèrÿon
Neveryóna, or: The Tale of Signs and Cities
Flight from Nevèrÿon
Return to Nevèrÿon
...но след като изплаках, че ми е трудно да чета Дилейни на английски, открих на български "Играта на време и болка" - една от историите, съставящи Return to Nevèrÿon. Ако преди се бях поизгубила в текста на Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, то сега съм изгубена в превода. Този опит окончателно ме убеди да чета по възможност в оригинал. Така че се стягаме и продължаваме:)
И въпреки посредствения превод, въпреки започване на четенето отзад напред, Играта... ме спечели за каузата Дилейни. Не беше лесно, но се сдобих цялата серия;), и след като приключа - ще видим кой кого:) - със Звездите..., започвам Неверион от самото начало:)
Поставям четири звезди заради първата прочетена история, но нищо чудно да се увеличат.
August 1, 2021
A fitting conclusion, I think, to a series of stories with a common thread running through them (rather than a specifically created 4-book novel). Gorgik's tale is wrapped up in the first story, repeated from the beginning in the last one (which I only had to speedread as I'd really just read it, but I can see how it'd really work if you'd read it many years ago), and in the middle is one more interesting tale in this land, this "child's garden of semiotics". Finally in the postscript SRD talks to us directly, and while a lot of it went over my head, it did so as if the planes flying above me were doing fabulous stunts and loops, and I was at the airshow shouting and smiling. In the end, these books weren't the type of fantasy or sword-and-sorcery I thought they'd be, but they were very enjoyable anyway.
Want to read
September 3, 2015So I own this, and I've read the first three books, but it was years ago (like at least a decade) and I don't remember enough to read this one without rereading the others first.
This wouldn't be a problem because I'm pretty sure I enjoyed them the first time.
But for some reason, this is the only one on my bookshelf.
Where are the others?
If someone borrowed them, wouldn't they have taken them all?
If they were lost in a move, wouldn't they all have been together?
I just can't solve this mystery, and so I cannot read this book.
I'm a bit sad about it.
This wouldn't be a problem because I'm pretty sure I enjoyed them the first time.
But for some reason, this is the only one on my bookshelf.
Where are the others?
If someone borrowed them, wouldn't they have taken them all?
If they were lost in a move, wouldn't they all have been together?
I just can't solve this mystery, and so I cannot read this book.
I'm a bit sad about it.
March 12, 2024
So I have to share an experience I had reading this book. I loved this series (semiotics and swords and sort-of-sorcery? Fictional academic framing device? A feminist and queer take on the barbarian warrior trope? Yeah this is great stuff.)
The fourth book ends, of course, with the beginning: a re-telling of the Tale of Gorgik. Only now we know so much more about his story and his myth, so the re-reading gets deeper.
Only this time the story was slightly different! There was an entire section I did not remember from the first book, where Gorgik (as a kid in Kohlari) becomes fascinated by a slave boy by a cistern. How fascinating! The second reading gives all this additional insight into Gorgik! I checked the first book and it was indeed new material.
But I couldn’t find any mention of this! All the reviews just said that, like Dhalgren, the series loops back on itself. Could I be the first person to notice this?
Then I found a different copy of The Tales of Neveryon online and the truth was revealed: my cheap paperback edition of that book had a shorter version of The Tale of Gorgik! What I thought was a brilliant metatextual move was really just the result of some editor deciding the first book was too long or something.
I think Delany would get a kick out of this.
Now of course I need to replace that paperback with a better edition!
The fourth book ends, of course, with the beginning: a re-telling of the Tale of Gorgik. Only now we know so much more about his story and his myth, so the re-reading gets deeper.
Only this time the story was slightly different! There was an entire section I did not remember from the first book, where Gorgik (as a kid in Kohlari) becomes fascinated by a slave boy by a cistern. How fascinating! The second reading gives all this additional insight into Gorgik! I checked the first book and it was indeed new material.
But I couldn’t find any mention of this! All the reviews just said that, like Dhalgren, the series loops back on itself. Could I be the first person to notice this?
Then I found a different copy of The Tales of Neveryon online and the truth was revealed: my cheap paperback edition of that book had a shorter version of The Tale of Gorgik! What I thought was a brilliant metatextual move was really just the result of some editor deciding the first book was too long or something.
I think Delany would get a kick out of this.
Now of course I need to replace that paperback with a better edition!
February 24, 2018
Neither fiction nor philosophy
As sword and sorcery, this book fails as there’s not much of either. The narrative is slow and ponderous. There is not much that’s going on in any of the stories. That may not be Delaney’s intention. He’s interested in semiotics, In mirrors and reflections. Maybe there are such things here. Whatever there is, isn’t that interesting. If I’m going to get some Lacan concepts, then I’ll read Lacan. At the end, I don’t what the novel is trying to do and I after a while I didn’t care.
As sword and sorcery, this book fails as there’s not much of either. The narrative is slow and ponderous. There is not much that’s going on in any of the stories. That may not be Delaney’s intention. He’s interested in semiotics, In mirrors and reflections. Maybe there are such things here. Whatever there is, isn’t that interesting. If I’m going to get some Lacan concepts, then I’ll read Lacan. At the end, I don’t what the novel is trying to do and I after a while I didn’t care.
February 15, 2023
If you want to enjoy this book, I recommend approaching it as you would a book of short stories. There isn't much cohesion in the narrative of Gorgik or the freeing of the slaves, but there are quite a few tangents on desire and power that are compelling in and of themselves.
Having read some Delany before, I was also anticipating densely constructed paragraphs, but couldn't prepare myself for how dense the language is in Return to Neveryon. The cadence of this world takes some getting used to.
Having read some Delany before, I was also anticipating densely constructed paragraphs, but couldn't prepare myself for how dense the language is in Return to Neveryon. The cadence of this world takes some getting used to.
June 28, 2021
Was unexpectedly happy to see the narrative structure turn in on itself rather than arc to that inevitable, disappointing, and impossible millenarian moment of many fantasy series. Not that that this deep into the series I thought it would, so maybe it's just the extended attention to the arc of characters' lives so peripheral to the plot of the other novels. The psychological portrait of Clodon is quite marvelous.
April 24, 2023
I didn't mind re-reading "The Tale of Gorgik," repeating the original story has a welcome symmetry to it, but I would have preferred one more new appendix to round out "Some Informal Remarks Toward the Modular Calculus," even a very brief one, rather than repeating the one printed in the previous volume.
December 22, 2023
I can't claim to understand all parts of the stories, nor can I boast that I hung on every word, but a wonderful mix of sword-and-sorcery, metafiction, semiotics and deconstruction. I'll be wrapping my head around this series for some time to come.
September 15, 2023
I could not get into the short stories of Gorgik. The writing is very good. Maybe its was just not my kind of book
Want to read
December 4, 2023RK KINDLE
January 1, 2025
Neat because we get more of the future life of Gorgik talking about his past with a random night's assignation and diving more into the BDSM aspects of the series. Also includes a reprint of Gorgik's story, if you'd forgotten. Still a hell of a world.
October 27, 2025
Tales of Nevèrÿon – the book of post-structuralist cultural criticism;
Neveryóna – the book of semiotics; as an aside, at least the Wesleyan edition of Flight… contains an appendix discussing Venn's (or Buffon's) needle and the hydraulic pattern transfer model;
Flight from Nevèrÿon – the gay book (in an otherwise very gay series);
The Bridge of Lost Desire – the book of desire (duh) and the most straightforward narrative in the series, unless read as a commentary on the preceding volumes, as one should.
(image from Thom, Structural Stability and Morphogenesis)
Neveryóna – the book of semiotics; as an aside, at least the Wesleyan edition of Flight… contains an appendix discussing Venn's (or Buffon's) needle and the hydraulic pattern transfer model;
Flight from Nevèrÿon – the gay book (in an otherwise very gay series);
The Bridge of Lost Desire – the book of desire (duh) and the most straightforward narrative in the series, unless read as a commentary on the preceding volumes, as one should.
(image from Thom, Structural Stability and Morphogenesis)
October 18, 2016
Like "They Fly at Çiron," I enjoyed the book but not as much as I wished that I had. In both cases it felt like emotion and personal connection with the characters had been replaced by high-minded but ultimately unsatisfying (and somewhat forced) metaphors that are never fully brought into the light. Bridge of Lost Desire accomplishes more than They Fly at Çiron, while dealing with a few of the same topics (sexuality, the influence of violence and power on the psyche) as well as a more direct reference to slavery. Both make a point of connecting sexuality and violent subjugation. In the case of Bridge of Lost Desire, the connection is made through BDSM, which is shown as a way that the formerly oppressed carry and transform their experiences of servitude and domination. However, no clear narrative emerges to shine a light on the importance or moral implications of this particular kind of alchemy. Several interesting vignettes seem to raise these questions, but ultimately they are unanswered; we're left to think that sexuality and power have something to do with each other, but what that connection means in moral, psychological, or spiritual terms seems unresolved.
January 15, 2016
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.
November 3, 2011
this one was not as immediately pleasurable to read as the others, but as the final volume it puts the series as a whole in new light as the astoundingly meticulously well-constructed world system it is. not that we didn't know that already. the last tale? i don't want to spoil it! chip, you are a sly one.
plus the appendix theorizes the entire series in relation to semiotics, the problem of gender in relation to social-power-relations and language, the history of the novel, and other stuff in mindbogglingly complex yet simple (...when you put it that way!) ways in oh, just twenty pages.
i am enthusiastic.
plus the appendix theorizes the entire series in relation to semiotics, the problem of gender in relation to social-power-relations and language, the history of the novel, and other stuff in mindbogglingly complex yet simple (...when you put it that way!) ways in oh, just twenty pages.
i am enthusiastic.
February 8, 2023
Finished this amazing, provocative, series and I am left with a couple of thoughts amid a confused, erratic, brain buzz: what if Christ were a woman and is there an etymological antonym to the word "fuck"?
June 23, 2008
Smart, dense, yet readable science fiction/fantasy. Samuel Delaney is a total genius.
August 13, 2008
well, i only read half of it actually. i just couldn't get into it, sadly. perhaps i will try some of his others or just be satisfied with his autobiography.
February 4, 2011
This is the fourth and final volume of the Neveryon series. Although characteristically intelligent and well-written, I probably didn't enjoy it as much as I would have if I'd read them in sequence.
August 9, 2013
Delany is a master storyteller!!!
Displaying 1 - 30 of 31 reviews