Tales of Nevèrÿon

Return to Nevèrÿon #1

by Samuel R. Delany

In his four-volume series Return to Nevèrÿon, Hugo and Nebula award-winner Samuel R. Delany appropriated the conceits of sword-and-sorcery fantasy to explore his characteristic themes of language, power, gender, and the nature of civilization. Wesleyan University Press has reissued the long-unavailable Nevèrÿon volumes in trade paperback. The eleven stories, novellas, and novels in Return to Nevèrÿon's four volumes chronicle a long-ago land on civilization's brink, perhaps in Asia or Africa, or even on the Mediterranean. Taken slave in childhood, Gorgik gains his freedom, leads a slave revolt, and becomes a minister of state, finally abolishing slavery. Ironically, however, he is sexually aroused by the iron slave collars of servitude. Does this contaminate his mission - or intensify it? Presumably elaborated from an ancient text of unknown geographical origin, the stories are sunk in translators' and commentators' introductions and appendices, forming a richly comic frame.

Genres: Fantasy, Fiction, Science Fiction, Short Stories, Queer, Sword and Sorcery, Speculative Fiction

264 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1979

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]

In the middle of nowhere in the ages unknown there was a fabulous realm of Nevèrÿon inhabited by doers and thinkers… There were powerful lords and miserable slaves…

He was learning that power – the great power that shattered lives and twisted the course of the nation – was like a fog over a meadow at evening. From any distance, it seemed to have a shape, a substance, a color, an edge. Yet, as you approached it, it seemed to recede before you. Finally, when common sense said you were at its very center, it still seemed just as far away, only by this time it was on all sides, obscuring any vision of the world beyond it. He lay on damp fur and remembered walking through such a foggy field in a line with other slaves, chains heavy from his neck before and behind.

There were divine myths and miraculous legends… There were brave adventurers and ravenous dragons…

‘Did you see the dragons, earlier tonight, flying against the moon? I climbed up on the rocks to the corrals, to watch the riders go through their full-moon maneuvers. You know the fabled flying dragons are cousins to the tiny night lizards that scurry about the rocks on spring evenings. There’s a trainer there who showed me how the great flying beasts and the little night crawlers have the same pattern of scales in black and green on the undersides of their hind claws.’

The unchartered exotic shores always promise priceless prizes.

[Algernon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Delightful! Now for news! Gossip! Tales of travel! Romance! We will have tall tales and religious chatter, and - who knows - perhaps some deep and lasting insight into the workings of the soul.

The opening quote is from a monk in an isolated monastery greeting a party of visitors from Neveryon, the main city in the imaginary world created by Samuel R Delany for this opening volume of his sword & sorcery series. It is also a concise resume of the ambitions the author had about the project. This particular sub-genre has been long derided by critics as a poor relative of speculative fiction, and the usual cover of a naked babe clutching the biceps of a fierce eyed barbarian holding a huge axe dripping with blood is not exactly helping promote discussions about a higher purpose and deep meaning. This is where Delany steps in and demonstrates that it is possible to write a metaphysical sword & sorcery book to compete with the classical tales of Robert E Howard or Edgar Rice Burroughs, to rival in imagination the worlds of Fritz Leiber or Jack Vance, to create characters more introspective and analytical than Michael Moorcock.

There are five novellas in the first collection, all set in a mythical world of dragons and competing cultures, all with a parallel timeline and recurring characters. By the end of the book, the separate threads come together into a singular and coherent larger story arc where each the earlier episodes are revealed as the opening moves in the master game of the author:

"The justification of such abbreviation of method is that the sequence of images coincides and concentrates into one intense impression of barbaric civilization. The reader has to allow the images to fall into his memory successively without questioning the reasonableness of each at the moment; so that in the end, a total effect is produced.

So we only see glimpses, snapshots of the world through the eyes of the main characters, but the information accumulates until the larger tapestry takes shape and general themes are identified. It is more demanding on the reader than simple yelling at the top of your lungs and bashing in the heads of hordes of brutal savages, but the satisfaction of figuring out the gems hidden by the author early in the text works better for me than plain escapism.

The Tale of Gorgik introduces what I understand will be the central character here and for the next four Neveryon novels. We start with his childhood in a poor dockside neighborhood of the main imperial city, followed by hard years as a slave after a palace coup, rescued as a sex slave to a courtier, then an interlude at the palace, and later a new career as a professional soldier. The plot details are secondary to the investigation of the ways power is used, on a personal level and on a national level.

He was learning that power - the great power that shattered lives and twisted the course of nations - was like a fog over a meadow at evening. From a distance, it seemed to have a shape, a substance, a color, an edge, yet as you approached it, it seemed to recede before you. Finally, when common sense said you were at its very center, it still seemed just as far away, only by this time it was on all sides, obscuring any vision of the world beyond it.

Gorgik has to either use his muscles to survive in the slave mine pits or his wits to gain the favours of his jaded new mistress through sexual favours coupled with entertaining stories told every night, like a hairy and brawny Sheherezade - a reversal of gender roles that will play a great role in most of the other stories in the book. Almost as a throwaway discussion, I identified in Gorgik's story a sub-theme of painful significance for the third millenium, that of government surveillance and it's implications:

If you can write down a woman's or a man's name, you can write down all sorts of things next to that name, about the amount of work they do, the time it takes for them to do it, about their methods, their attitudes, and you can compare all this very carefully with what you have written about others. If you do this, you can maneuver your own dealings with them in ways that will soon control them; and very soon you will have the control over your fellows that is slavery. Civilized people are very careful about who they let write down their names, and who they do not.

Another theme introduced by Gorgik that will be better investigated in the second novella is the difference between civilization and barbarism. The Tale of Old Venn introduces an old woman from an isolated tribe who, after travelling all over the known world and inventing a number of useful contraptions to make fishing or harvesting easier, is now tutoring young children. A teacher POV is very useful to the author as a tool of philosophical debate, as a way to shape the discourse towards more lofty ideas like the nature of reality, the structure of language, the family dynamics as shaped by economic forces, in particular the transition from bartering (barbarians) to money (civilization). Venn's lessons deal with logic and self-awareness, ethics and abstract thinking, using mirrors to illustrate a form of dialectics in which each concept can only be understood by considering its opposite.

It's like a reflection of a reflection. It doesn't reverse values. It makes new values that the whole tribe benefits from.

From observation to narration to analysis, the children are led to discover the danger of making easy assumptions and not following up on the implications of one idea or another. Racial and gender discriminiation in particular is used to illustrate the danger of applying general concepts to subjects they were not intended for (think of Darwinism applied to social studies or Kant used to justify Arianism)

And of course that is the problem with all truly powerful ideas. And what we have been talking is certainly that. What it produces is illuminated by it. But applied where it does not pertain, it produces distortions as terrifying as the idea was powerful. And it doesn't help that we cannot express the idea itself, but only give examples - situations which can evoke the idea in some strong way.

I may give the impression here than nothing happens in the novella but dry theoretical discussions, but Delany proves that 'We are never out of metaphysics, even when we think we are critiquing someone else's. Venn's village is visited by a strange ship in which all the sailors are women while only the captain is male (a return to the theme of gender roles in ancient tribes). The locals feel threatened by the Barbarians, by the Unknown, and they resort to violence in order to maintain the status quo.

The Tale of Small Sarg presents a different tribe of so called 'savages' , another look at the definition of civilization, another aspect of the institution of slavery, with the added bonus of the return of Gorgik, who challenges us this time to reflect on sexual emancipation or same-sex couples. It is a bridging piece, shorter in length, a transition to the second part of the novel where instead of branching out, the threads are brought closer together. On the world building level, we are presented here with the 'sorcery' part of the genre, namely with the dragons that are the sole example so far of magic in the realm. These dragons are another mirror reflection of the regular fantasy tropes: instead of being powerful, fire breathing, intelligent lords of the sky, they are an almost extinct species of wings-equiped lizards that can barely hop and glide from one crag to another.

The Tale of Potters and Dragons starts with economic considerations, moves to political machinations, and ends with a mysterious absence at the end of a long journey by the sea. Two apprentice merchants set out to win a monopoly in rubber toys from a distant province. A third traveller is a 'barbarian' warrior on an assssination mission. My favorite passage here is a cosmogonic myth, a recurrent subject in many fantasy novels, as each author tries to come up with a new origin story for the universe. Delany presents us with a matriarchal version, in which men are created after the women and are responsible for the original sin and for the exile from Paradise:

In the beginning was the act - and the act was within the womb of god. But there was neither flesh nor fiber, neither soil nor stone, neither clear air nor cloudy mists, neither rivers nor rain, to make the act manifest. So god reached into her womb with her own hand and delivered herself of the act, which, outside god's being, became a handful of fire.

Rather than a provocation of the established set of values, I see the myth as an invitation to embrace diversity and freedom of thought:

Praise the sun's warmth on the water in summer and the cold frost on the stones in winter and the difference between them, and you will praise the act [of creation], for the act may only be praised through difference.

The Tale of Dragons and Dreamers is the culmination, the fulcrum of the separate episodes presented previously. All characters take part in an action oriented finale, the dragons representing the past / the establishment, and the dreamers representing change, the will to progress and to develop a new society, to redefine civilization. In this particular volume, it is the fight against slavery and stagnation that Gorgik and his friends are engaged in. This is also the closest the collection comes to the 'Swords' part of the genre, as a castle is under assault.

The last chapter is not a novella set in Neveryon, but a semi-fictional essay on the study of ancient languages using advanced mathemathics and statistical theory, looking at the history and the differences in expression from Assirian, to Egyptian, Greek or Hebrew texts, or, as the author calls it, "a study of linguistic patterns common to comic books, pornography, contemporary poetry, and science fiction."

The phrase can be used to describe the book in its entirety, with its larger than life heroes, its provocative sexual behaviours, its moments of grace and its secondary world setting that tries to embracce as its scope the whole human civilization. It is also an argument that when we choose to write/read about imaginary worlds we are still talking about the real world we are living in, with the added bonus of using a different perspective that gives us a fresh insight into the issues:

You are as much an inventor of fancies as you are an observer of facts - though without a few fancies, I know, the facts never really make sense.

or, put into a more elaborate phrasing:

the world in which images occured was opaque, complete, and closed, though what gave it its weight and meaning was that this was not true of the space of examples, samples, symbols, models, expressions, reasons, representations and the rest - yet that everything and anything could be an image of everything and anything - the true of the false, the imaginary of the real, the useful of the useless, the helpful of the hurtful - was what gave such strength to the particular types of images that went by all those other names; that it was the organized coherence of them all which made distinguishing them possible.

For me the first visit to Neveryon was both a tad dissapointing (not what I expected in terms of pure adventure and fun) and richly rewarding (in the demands it made on my reasoning and figuring out on my own what is going on). I will come back to this land of wonder under the guidance of Mr. Delany.

[Nate D · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's a recurring thread in various Delany stories wherein being provincial (geographically, or socio-economically) may limit one's scope of experience, but should never be confused with intelligence. The experience will come. And so this idea may play into the very form he selected for Neveryon: the genre-provincialism of the barbarian adventure story does not, here, suggest anything simple or intellectually un-developed. In fact, Neveryon is Delany's brink-of-civilization testing ground for ideas about the subtle relationships of power, the societal effects of economics and the advent of currency, how ideas gain a life of their own, and the arbitrary societal basis for gender roles and identities. Given the prominence of isolated "primitive" societies in anthropology class, in Delany's hands, barbarian stories seem like a natural setting for extending these ideas. Sometimes more a theoretical essay than story, but either side is handled excellently, and the whole is very readable. Still, I have to wonder how something so potentially audienceless could possibly have been received. That it made it into several mass market paperback editions before Wesleyan University reissued it in the 90s may suggest that the ready market of the fantasy novel, like that of the sci-fi it bleeds into, may not actually be a bad way to get ideas out after all.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a unique venture into fantasy fiction for me, as I believe it would be for most. In its settings and basest aesthetic themes it is Sword & Sorcery, filled with high adventure, barbaric people and their customs. However in execution this is more a treatise on philosophy and social studies.

The story told in an episodic fashion, introducing each individual character, and slowly intertwining their stories. Each individual story also serves as commentary on societal prejudices, like sexuality, sexism, religion, colonialism, social hierarchy, slavery, labour and trade. It is also filled with symbolism. A recurring theme is mirrors and reflections, which is an apt symbol, as the story itself, though taking place in a fictional world with fictional people, is intended as reflection of our real world modern customs and people. And as interesting as it is to see many of humankind's views twisted and reflected in upon themselves, it is just as interesting to see may of fantasy fiction's tropes and cliches twisted and reflected by Delany just as cleverly.

The format in which it was written, took some getting used to. As it was quite slow in the beginning and I had expected a rollicking sword swinging adventure, despite knowing beforehand some of the themes. Instead I was treated to an inventive form of storytelling with real depth and meaning. It all leads to an ending with clever connections that leaves the reader smirking and satisfied.

Though the story itself is perhaps not overly riveting at times, the big pay off is in the knowledge and wisdom one gains from reading it. It is unfortunate that perhaps the format of the story, being sword & sorcery and being philosophy, will turn away readers from both fields. As would perhaps the subject matter of said philosophies, and the grotesqueries of said genre of fiction. Because I would recommend this work to fans of both, as long as it is read with an open heart and open mind.

For entertainment value, the book would receive a 3.5, if not for an action packed story then for the way each thread of the story is woven into a beautiful whole. However, the depth and insight and moral philosophical implications of this work rate as high as any from famous freethinkers, and in that aspect it would receive a 4.5. Overall, then, I will give it a well deserved 4/5.

[Kara Babcock · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you have read any Samuel R. Delany, you know he is a complex dude, and even his simplest stories are complex in some way. Tales of Nevèrÿon is no exception. Largely branded sword-and-sorcery, it’s actually an attempt to deconstruct this subgenre and provide commentary on the relationship between capitalism and slavery. And, for bonus points, if you read closely enough you start to see patterns and echoes from some of his other work, including Triton and Dhalgren .

I picked up what appear to be first editions, or near enough, of the first three Return to Nevèrÿon books from my used bookstore a year or so ago. This version of Tales of Nevèrÿon lacks the preface by Delany’s fictional K. Leslie Steiner, though I do get the afterword, “Appendix: Some Informal Remarks Toward the Modular Calculus, Part Three by S. L. Kermit” (love the play with the initials there). Apparently later editions/printings have corrected errors? So there’s that. But I love collecting old, used editions of classic SF&F like this, so I will suffer in satisfaction.

Longtime readers of my reviews will know I’m never quite satisfied by short story collections. That being said, Tales of Nevèrÿon fits into the loophole of one story deliberately structured as a series of related shorts. Indeed, the stories in this collection are even more related than most. Characters and settings overlap, with characters from one story reappearing, often older (but not necessarily wiser) and in different capacities than they once did. Each story tends to focus on a particular theme, which Delany might then rebut or reinforce in later stories. Overall, the stories form a kind of tapestry of tales that provide us with an understanding of Nevèrÿon, its cultures, and the changes underway in this empire.

This might be one of those rare situations where briefly looking at each story would genuinely be helpful!

“The Tale of Gorgik” is the first and pivotal story, since Gorgik goes on to play important roles in most of the subsequent stories (and, I am given to understand, later books in the series). Gorgik is a light-skinned man in a land ruled by darker-skinned people. He becomes a slave and works in the mines until a high-ranking government bureaucrat pulls him up out of that position to use as her sex buddy. He lives on her sufferance at the imperial residence for a while, then she gives him an army commission and sends him packing. Eventually, Gorgik strikes off on his own, becoming a kind of adventurer. Yet his experiences have left him with a taste for freedom and a distaste for slavery, and we’ll see that later. All in all, “The Tale of Gorgik” is mostly a reflection on how one’s fortunes are often out of one’s control and depend upon the will and power of other players.

“The Tale of Old Venn” takes us across the land to an archipelago off the coast of Nevèrÿon proper. The peoples of these islands trade with Nevèrÿon but otherwise exist outside its influence. That is changing, however, because money is making its way through the land. Although comprising several stories told by the eponymous Venn, the protagonist of the frame story is actually Norema, who will later emigrate to Nevèrÿon and one day meet Gorgik. Through Venn’s stories, Norema is exposed to the potential problems with the introduction of money, as well as different ideas about gender roles. This story might be one of the most confusing to follow, simply owing to its structure.

“The Tale of Small Sarg” concerns a young man, little more than a boy, who is kidnapped from his people and sold into slavery (are you sensing a theme yet?). Sarg was revered as a prince among his people, which seems to mean he wasn’t responsible for doing all that much, because in his society women had most of the responsibility. As a slave, Sarg gets sold to Gorgik. The relationship between these two forms the core of this story, as they navigate complicated matters of sexuality, kink, and the power dynamics of master/slave—which might not be what you would expect, not that I want to spoil it. Basically, if you are familiar with Delany you shouldn’t be surprised that so many of his characters are super queer, and this is book no exception. This story advances Gorgik’s character development, setting him on the path on which we encounter him in subsequent books.

“The Tale of Potters and Dragons” returns once more to this idea that money could be a saviour of society or the root of all evil. A potter educates his apprentice in the virtues of money before sending him to conclude a business deal. On the voyage, the apprentice meets Norema, also dispatched by her mistress to secure the same contract he is after. Unfortunately for both, they never reach their destination, falling victim instead to a much more massive and older deception. Norema meets Raven, a woman from the matriarchal society of the Western Crevasse, who tells her a very detailed myth about the creation of women (and then ’men). I really like this story for its plot, the craftiness of some of the characters we never meet, and because I get to see Norema again!

“The Tale of Dragons and Dreamers” brings together Norema and Raven with Gorgik and Sarg. The best way I can describe this is that Sarg basically yells, “RAMPAGE!” and runs into a castle and kills as many guards as possible, kind of like Sir Lancelot in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The scenes are literally kind of cinematic in that way. But anyway, this is the story that sees the culmination of the narratives on slavery, power, and economic revolutions. It’s a short but powerful tale amplified by the reader’s awareness of the previous narratives.

Lastly, we have “Appendix: Some Informal Remarks Toward the Modular Calculus, Part Three”. This is where I’ll state the controversial opinion that you could, indeed, just skip this entire part if you wanted. I think it’s possible to enjoy Tales of Nevèrÿon on the strength of the stories alone without worrying too much about what Delany is doing here. However, if you’re into considering the deeper implications of Delany’s work, then it is worthwhile reading and trying to parse this last entry. This is “part three” of these informal remarks; the first two are in Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia (the main story is “part one” and an appendix to that story is “part two”).

So Delany is trying to link his works, trying to create a common thread throughout them. I don’t have the energy or memory to really compare Triton with these stories. But I can see some similarities between Dhalgren and these stories. In both cases, Delany makes much of the deconstruction and semiotic analysis as pioneered by Derrida. Language and symbols have huge significance in Tales of Nevèrÿon: in “The Tale of Gorgik”, Curly lectures Gorgik over the depth and significance of the few words the Child Empress utters to him; in “The Tale of Old Venn”, the rult that Venn describes from her time among the Rulvyn is a potent symbol, and this story also examines the utility of writing; in “The Tale of Small Sarg”, the slave collar that Sarg wears plays an important role in the relationship between Sarg and Gorgik beyond denotation of who is the slave … and so on.

And so, this is how Tales of Nevèrÿon transcends the sword and sorcery genre from which it takes its setting and inspiration. Delany transforms the setting into a meditation on the shape and scope of language, of writing, of money—the intersection of language and economics. It’s a slim volume that should not be underestimated; it reminds me a lot of the anthropological science fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin. I don’t know if this is a good entry point to Delany’s writing, but I’d also argue it isn’t a bad one.

[Bryn Hammond · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is, among other things, historical fiction that looks at inventions and social change: for example, the introduction of money into a barter tribe, and the consequent devaluation of women, and why – as explored within a gorgeous ethnographic tale; attached to which is a satire of Freud’s penis-envy theory, at once funny and seriously mind-warping.

At one point in this book, when the introduction of writing is critiqued, because writing's first uses were to convenience slavery, I thought of a revelatory chapter in The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, ‘Orality, Writing and Texts’ about why peoples might want to hang onto the freedoms of an oral culture and resist writing. I thought, I needn’t have read that, I can read this fantasy fiction instead. I’d been clobbered by that chapter in The Art, but it’s here in Delany, and much more to come…

Slavery is about the most important institution there was in every history up to recent times… this fantasy-history gives slavery its large place. I have ambitions to leaf through Cambridge’s World History of Slavery – but maybe I can just read Delany… Anyway, is the Cambridge going to inspect us on how we can hate coercive power yet want sex games around it? As Gorgik and Small Sarg, the Spartacuses of this world, do.

I’ll avow that I love both Gorgik and Small Sarg: the one a giant noted to be unhandsome, with a brutish but affable face; the other captured from a forest tribe (his tale begins, “In that brutal and barbaric time he was a real barbarian prince – which meant that his mother’s brother wore women’s jewelry and was consulted about animals and sickness.”) Delany loves the ironies he can wring from ‘these barbaric times’ and those adjectives ‘civilized’ and ‘savage’. The anthropology on savage tribes here is wonderful. But neither are the aristocrats in court anything other than human beings first and not to be blamed for where they are.

The other half of the book is Norema and Raven. The women of Norema’s island, thought more or less barbaric, tend to invent things and ideas that civilization runs on. Raven is his woman warrior. Now, she is hard to like, as is her culture. On Norema’s island you can see sailor women who rub along in near-equality, at least an equality of work, but Raven inverts patriarchy and its ills: inverted, you see how horrible it is. Nevertheless these two strike up a friendship.

At the end the four of them meet and talk. Talk like university intellectuals, as often happens in this book. At times I explain that to myself as Delany translating, capturing thoughts they have but cannot possibly express so well; at other times I accuse myself of prejudice and see it as a statement in itself, that even primitive people in this novel can argue Derrida into the ground. Either way, I like this technique. It lives beside an unusual sense of realness… that in part comes from his attention to the underprivileged, in part is the detail with which he pictures people... I'll admit this realness is intermittent. Still astonishing.

[Phoenixfalls · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a substantial work. It consists of five stories of varying lengths, a preface, and an appendix. The preface and the appendix profess to be authored by a K. Leslie Steiner and a S.L. Kermit respectively, but it is fairly clear that these people are characters in the metafictional work, as is Delany himself. The appendix is titled "Some Informal Remarks Towards the Modular Calculus, Part Three," indicating its place as the third entry in another series of Delany's which starts with Trouble on Triton, a science fiction novel that is also (thematically at least, though maybe also through some bending of space and time; I have not read that work so I couldn't say for sure) a preface to the Nevèrÿon tales. And the structure gets no easier within the tales themselves; they follow Gorgik and Norema alternately, but as narrative is an important theme (THE theme, really) of the work, there are threads of other peoples' stories weaving throughout Gorgik and Norema's sections.

I think that reading Catherynne M. Valente (In the Night Garden) and Octavia E. Butler (Wild Seed) earlier this year prepared me well for this work; if you have bounced off of either of those authors because you found them boring or confusing, I doubt this is for you. Delany sacrifices story to philosophy far more than either of them did, as is fitting for a work of metafiction, but the bits that made my brain hurt are my favorites, so overall I loved this work. I don't exactly know where it's going yet, but I'm positive I want to be along for the ride.

"Return. . . a preface by K. Leslie Steiner" -- This is a demanding piece to start the volume off with. It's very much the sort of preface an academic would write - as it should be, as K. Leslie Steiner is "your average black American female academic, working in the largely white preserves of a sprawling midwestern university, unable, as a seventies graduate student, to make up her mind between mathematics and German literature." Steiner is relevant to the story at hand because she is the translator of the Culhar' fragment ("a narrative fragment of approximately nine hundred words" which may be "the oldest writing known. . . by a human hand")which is the supposed inspiration for Delany's Nevèrÿon tales. I didn't quite know what to make of the preface on first reading, but that's okay -- it's mainly there to indicate to the casual reader that this is no standard sword-and-sorcery epic.

"The Tale of Gorgik" -- This first tale is a much easier entry into the volume, as it hews most closely to sword-and-sorcery tropes. A young boy is born into poverty, ends up enslaved, rises out of slavery through the strength of his character and a hefty dose of luck, and ends up with a respected position heading a garrison of soldiers after a brief stint at court. Of course, in this culture the civilized are dark-skinned and the barbarians (who usually become enslaved) are light-skinned; Gorgik's main duties at court are as catamite to a noblewoman AND her eunuch steward; most of the nobles have been slaves at some point due to dramatic shifts in political fortune (though not all have developed an aversion to slavery as a result); and so on, as Delany plays with the ideas of power and race and class and gender and sexuality. Still, this tale can be read pretty much straight, as the tale of Gorgik's development into the person that stands at the center of these tales. It also serves to introduce us to Nevèrÿon, the titular city on the brink of civilization, which has been playing with the idea of coined money for three generations and has had writing for a bit longer even than that. It is interesting to note that very early on the Child Empress (whose ascension to power resulted in Gorgik's enslavement) changes the city's name to Kolhari, and Kolhari it remains through the end of the volume (and likely further).

"The Tale of Old Venn" -- This second tale is the one where Delany makes his theme of narrative explicit; though it serves as a tale of Norema's childhood the same way "The Tale of Gorgik" is the tale of Gorgik's childhood, it is mainly there for the conversations between Norema and the wise woman Old Venn. This was my favorite tale, as I was fascinated by the way Old Venn explained the central concept and the various examples she used. Those examples also give us a picture of some of the "barbarian" cultures, the ones that are still skeptical of the idea of writing though they seem to have embraced coined money quite well, despite the way it has completely upended the way their societies function.

"The Tale of Small Sarg" -- This third tale was a bit of a letdown for me. Small Sarg comes from an even more barbaric culture than Norema, one without writing or coined money at all. He is a prince in his land, but a slave in Nevèrÿon. A middle-aged Gorgik purchases him and beds him; he has a conversation with a young girl, and the story ends. It felt like a necessary placeholder, and while it too addresses the issues of slavery, gender roles, and sexuality, it just didn't quite satisfy after "The Tale of Old Venn."

"The Tale of Potters and Dragons" -- This fourth tale returns to Norema, now a secretary in Nevèrÿon. She embarks on a business trip for her employer and encounters Raven, a traveler from an Amazonian culture who is by turns amused and apalled at the odd gender roles she has encountered in Nevèrÿon. Norema has a run-in with politics and sees some of the concepts she discussed with Old Venn in action. There's a hefty dose of irony about this tale, and I would not have minded if it had been twice as long.

"The Tale of Dragons and Dreamers" -- This fifth and final tale is where Gorgik and Norema's paths finally cross. Gorgik and Small Sarg have been getting into trouble; Raven and Norema have been mostly staying out of trouble, and the men stumble onto the women's campsite and share a meal. Much is revealed to the reader, rather less is revealed to the characters, and again, the tone is ironic. There is actually some action in this tale, and again, Delany packs a whallop thematically into not very many pages.

"Appendix: Some Informal Remarks Towards the Modular Calculus, Part Three by S.L. Kermit" -- In this final segment we jump back out to the world of academia, where Kermit gives the history of the Culhar' fragment and makes Steiner's role in its translation more explicit. This section brings the theme as laid out in "The Tale of Old Venn" back to the forefront and wraps it all up with an appeal to Derrida. It didn't have any emotional impact, but it did its job well and (just as all the other sections) left me wanting more.

[Bill Hsu · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was a huge fan of Delany's science fiction, but not so enthusiastic with the Neveryon books. On this reread almost 40 years later, it's easy to see why. The older me can handle the leisurely pace, the thoughtful observations of people and societies (not all the interpretations are convincing, but most are interesting), and the lack of fantastic elements beyond the very occasional mentions of dragons, witches, etc

It's probably been noted that "gorgi" in "The Tale of Old Venn" is a tribal term for non-gender-specific genitalia, while the main recurring character through most of the series is named Gorgik? Hmmm.

[Kaiju Reviews · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probably most contemporary readers know enough about Delany to not just pick up one of his books with a dragon on the cover and expect something like Brandon Sanderson, but back when this was published, I feel sorry for someone like myself as a very young man in 1979, wandering into Century Bookstore, browsing the racks and finding this dragon about to eat a scantily clad woman along with her topless companion, and cart it home, carefully hiding it from mom and dad, and then digging into it via flashlight under tented sheets, to read the opening epigraph from an introduction to On Grammatology by Jaque Derrida, who I wouldn't encounter again for many years until a college linguistics course. Probably, a well-read shopkeeper would've steered me away. (Unlike today's shopkeepers: in a recent Barnes and Noble trip I overheard a customer asking about Tarzan, and the woman shelving showed no recognition at all! She said she'd have to look him up, and how do you spell Tarzan!?)

Neveryon consists of related Tales that are better read together, like in a novel, than as regular novellas or stories. In some instances, like in the Tale of Small Sarg, I'd argue that the tale doesn't fully stand on its own at all, but with others, like the Tale of Old Venn, they are very enjoyable without any other Neveryon exposure. That said, these tales are more about characters than plot, and even more about sociology, history, philosophy, and even language. Magically (the book is otherwise without magic), Delany doesn't allow the characters to become too archetypal or too allegorical. In many ways, they are all very clearly allegorical, as is Neveryon, as is 'the message' but you don't need to read between the lines to enjoy them; they are excellent in and of themselves; reading between the lines only adds to the enjoyment, for those that wish to do so.

This is only my second book by Delany to read, the first being Dhalgren, which blew me away, and now this much gentler book has also blown me away. The fictional (fictional in that it's written by Delany (Kermit) and about Delany (Steiner)) essay at the end of the book left me giddy with joy as it perfectly indicates without seeming smug or self-important what the tales are also doing. In a way, the essay says, "hey, did you consider the subtext, cause it's there if you're interested and want to take another look."

And yet, this book needs the right audience. Like I kind of pointed out in the opening paragraph, expectations will play a huge role in whether a reader enjoys this or not. Having read Dhalgren, I was naturally ready for this to be challenging, and I was also ready to read deeply. For your average fantasy goer, I'd say take a pass unless those expectations have been adjusted; this barely qualifies as fantasy for me.

Excellent book.

[Bryn Hammond · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is, among other things, historical fiction that looks at inventions and social change: for example, the introduction of money into a barter tribe, and the consequent devaluation of women, and why – as explored within a gorgeous ethnographic tale; attached to which is a satire of Freud’s penis-envy theory, at once funny and seriously mind-warping.

At one point in this book, when the introduction of writing is critiqued, because writing's first uses were to convenience slavery, I thought of a revelatory chapter in The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, ‘Orality, Writing and Texts’ about why peoples might want to hang onto the freedoms of an oral culture and resist writing. I thought, I needn’t have read that, I can read this fantasy fiction instead. I’d been clobbered by that chapter in The Art, but it’s here in Delany, and much more to come…

Slavery is about the most important institution there was in every history up to recent times… this fantasy-history gives slavery its large place. I have ambitions to leaf through Cambridge’s World History of Slavery – but maybe I can just read Delany… Anyway, is the Cambridge going to inspect us on how we can hate coercive power yet want sex games around it? As Gorgik and Small Sarg, the Spartacuses of this world, do.

I’ll avow that I love both Gorgik and Small Sarg: the one a giant noted to be unhandsome, with a brutish but affable face; the other captured from a forest tribe (his tale begins, “In that brutal and barbaric time he was a real barbarian prince – which meant that his mother’s brother wore women’s jewelry and was consulted about animals and sickness.”) Delany loves the ironies he can wring from ‘these barbaric times’ and those adjectives ‘civilized’ and ‘savage’. The anthropology on savage tribes here is wonderful. But neither are the aristocrats in court anything other than human beings first and not to be blamed for where they are.

The other half of the book is Norema and Raven. The women of Norema’s island, thought more or less barbaric, tend to invent things and ideas that civilization runs on. Raven is his woman warrior. Now, she is hard to like, as is her culture. On Norema’s island you can see sailor women who rub along in near-equality, at least an equality of work, but Raven inverts patriarchy and its ills: inverted, you see how horrible it is. Nevertheless these two strike up a friendship.

At the end the four of them meet and talk. Talk like university intellectuals, as often happens in this book. At times I explain that to myself as Delany translating, capturing thoughts they have but cannot possibly express so well; at other times I accuse myself of prejudice and see it as a statement in itself, that even primitive people in this novel can argue Derrida into the ground. Either way, I like this technique. It lives beside an unusual sense of realness… that in part comes from his attention to the underprivileged, in part is the detail with which he pictures people... I'll admit this realness is intermittent. Still astonishing.

[inciminci · Rating 5 out of 5]

Were I to describe Tales of Nevèrÿon in two words, they would probably be “dawdling movement”: meanings shifting; myths, expectations and prototypes reversing, turning upside down and inside out; hierarchies being turned around and pulled apart; even the authors of story, preface and appendix switching places and identities; everything becoming a shadow of something else… Like children who don’t like the neat Lego structure their parents have presented them, Delany removes, pushes, warps, twists, turns and relocates one Lego brick at a time to create his own thing. Mighty dragons? Brave warrior men? Eve seducing Adam? Civilization as we know it? Forget all about it - Delany changes everything and the attentive reader will soon find themselves pondering concepts like power, gender, culture, language, relationships and even economics. This is not your average sword and sorcery fantasy.
Additionally, Delany manages to create a consummate universe without giving much detail, inviting the reader to participate. This is something few authors can do as cunningly impactful as him, most authors usually try to describe their worlds in a most detailed way. It is not unusual to read hundreds of pages of description because the writer wanted to make sure the readers imagine the setting just as they intend to. Not so Delany! Apart from a very vague idea of a possible geographical area in the preface (which, as well as the appendix, should definitely be read, as they reveal a further level of ingenuity on Delany’s part) and some sparse descriptions of locations, pretty much everything is left to the reader’s imagination.
Starting off with Gorgik, a boy who throughout the course of his life, is enslaved, bought by a noblewoman for his sexual services, is freed by her and later becomes a soldier, the chapters switch between the stories of the other three main figures Norema, Raven and Sarg; ending with them meeting and talking.
In between, other, more or less “minor” characters who add to the richness and heterogeneity of the stories are introduced: Norema’s mentor Old Venn, Gorgik’s mistress Vizerine Myrgot, her servant Janoh, the potter’s boy Bayle etc. It may be intentional that the minor characters aren’t really minor in the sense that some of them contribute to the flow of the book even more than the main characters. Take, for instance, Old Venn, whose highly allegorical stories on language, relationships, money, society, culture (anything you can think of, really) have their own chapter which I genuinely enjoyed.
There are characters of lesser importance, who would, in a conventional narrative, have the stuff to shine out. For example Bayle, who as a young, heterosexual male, would be the ideal cast for any such storyline; in the course of events, he just disappears somehow. Or the little girl Small Sarg talks to and who wants to become a dragon rider. These are not their tales.
Themes, topics or tropes that would be of great importance in traditional sword and sorcery are only incidentally mentioned; such as dragons, who are depicted as frail, weak creatures who barely have the energy to fly.
There is some palace intrigue, but again – only en passant.
And yet again: Delany is a master of an author who can pull this off. While reading, not once did I have the feeling that he was insecure or unclear, but it was exactly what he wanted to do with his tales.
Let’s not forget that Tales of Nevèrÿon is the first book of the four-volume Return to Nevèrÿon -series. Since I haven’t read the remaining books and I don’t know what to expect, I might have to draw back some of my commentaries such as minor characters disappearing, or even the fact that I called them “minor” since Delany’s allocation doesn’t really allow such categorization. Let’s see what awaits me!

[X]

DNFing for now at 49%, having read through The Tale of Small Sarg. This has been interesting to date but it’s more a collection of novellas set in the same world, and it’s just not the pace I’m looking for right now. Will pick it up and continue the future, I’m sure.

So far:

The Tale of Gorgik: This is the most Delany-esque one so far, definitely exactly what I was expecting when I read the premise of this book. The ending was fantastic - really thoughtful, and really set the tone for this fantasy world setting.

The Tale of Old Venn: This one started slow - and then the ending hit really really hard out of nowhere, like I started tearing up as I was finishing it in the Uber on the way to a date hard lol. I had to start the whole date off by explaining I was teary-eyed because I just read a really moving novella which was maybe a wild move from me!

The Tale of Small Sarg: I mean…. Okay bud. Sure. Love when it happens that way. Delany does age-gap slave romance. That said, the twist killed me!! As I am writing this I remembered it and damn!! Yeah, a good one.

I would love to know more about the red rubber balls and the ships from across the sea - look forward to learning more when I am in the right mood to read the last two novellas here! But for the time being, back to the library this goes…

[Qiana · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have a love/hate relationship with Delany. He is utterly unappreciated by African-American critics, mainly because he rarely chooses to discuss race explicitly, but his explorations of power and desire are vivid, creative, and insightful. Although I can't seem to digest any of his "cyberpunk" writings, this sword-and-sorcery series Return to Neveryon is my kind of fantasy read. The masters are dark-skinned and the slaves are white (heh) and as the people of Neveryon discover the value of currency, literacy, and sexual freedom, you start to think...hey, Delany may not be writing about some prehistoric past...

[Luke · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5/5

But the problem begins with trying to reduce them to all the same measure of coin in the first place: skilled time, unskilled time, the talk of a clever woman, nature's gifts of fish and fruit, the invention of a craftsman, the strength of a laboring woman—one simply cannot measure weight, coldness, the passage of time, and the brightness of fire all on the same scale.

This one was a debacle to rate. Eventually, I gave up the holistic scale and settled on the Delany scale, indicating a number of stars greater than that of the disappointing Babel-17 and lesser than that of the magnificent Dhalgren. THe beginning story/cycle/chapter was the strongest, much as the first film is often the best after being birthed out of the longest gestation period compared to its hasty younger siblings, and while the later bits did fill in various plot holes rather teasingly, there were too many moments of similarly voiced characters and uncharacteristic monologuing near the end for me to engage in this deeper than I would with a particularly unusual thought exercise. As for the tail end pseudo commentary, my recent read of 'The Princess Bride' exhausted me with such finagling contrivances, and it is a thin line that that appendix walks between invigorating contextualization and blowhard pretension. In light of that, will I be reading the rest of this quartet? I'll certainly acquire the next one if I stumble across it, and considering Delany's one of the few reasons I even bother with the Sci Fi/Fantasy sections anymore, so he has a better chance of being indulged in than most. I won't be adding it to my digital shelves just yet, though: irrational fear of commitments and all.

As I said earlier, the beginning of this was definitely the strongest, the bits and pieces of PoMo accentuating rather than conflicting with the fantasy mainframe, playing with conceits of the genre in a tone of satire as well as sincere exploration of themes. Indeed, thinking back, I beginning to better understand the driving motivation where certain philosophies were brought to a barbarian plain, inseminated, and then studied in vivo, from patriarchy to capitalism, radical feminism to Marxism, slavery to freedom (I wouldn't assign relative worth based on my chosen orders and pairings if I were you). The problem, I suppose, is when the chapter epigraphs began weighing too heavily on their respective skeins of narrative and the characters started sounding a bit too much like uniform 20th century mouthpieces, and a flaw that reached its most discordant peak in the final chapter and plays a major part in my decision to not officially add the sequel to my stacks just yet. All in all, this wasn't nearly as lazily harmful as 'Babel-17' in its ideological underpinnings, but that story was admittedly tighter and more deftly balanced in its mixture of plot and dialectic; on the other side of the spectrum, this was nowhere near the grandeur of 'Dhalgren', whose strength often lay in not bothering to explain things and just letting the queer (in all senses of the world) times roll. I also don't like narratives with sexualized children in them, but there're bigger, more mainstream fish to fry on that note (*cough* Disney *cough), so honestly, if you're planning on obsessing over it in this work, you best be prepared to take it on with those who don't engage with it nearly as critically as Delany does.

Did this work start coming apart at the seams at the end? Yes. Do I fear a similar increasing lack of cohesion in the succeeding three volumes? A tad, despite reading an entry excerpt of the sequel provided at the end of this edition. What I'm really hoping to get my hands on is Delany's nonfiction in the form of The Motion Of Light In Water: Sex And Science Fiction Writing In The East Village, as I find nonfiction works better with certain authors when I've had a trend of not so brilliant fictional interactions with them. This strategy's currently working splendidly for Nin, and my reading of Wolf's Cassandra would not have been nearly as worthwhile without the four contextualizing essays included in my edition. So, here's hoping that one shows up soon. I'll still purchase the more fantastical sequel if it comes my way, but I could use a better sense of Delany's directional efforts before I dive back into the results of such.

He was learning that power—was like a fog over a meadow at evening. From any distance, it seemed to have a shape, a substance, a color, an edge, yet as you approached it, it seemed to recede before you. Finally, when common sense said you were at its center, it still seemed just as far away, only by this time it was on all sides, obscuring any vision of the world beyond it.

[Gregory Duke · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5

A kind of indescribable read. It's kind of an exercise in applie cultural/literary theory via the tropes of sword-and-sorcery fiction. The basics of sword and sorcery contorted into a postmodern consideration of semiotics, post-structuralism, and translation theory, historiography, gender theory, Hegelian sexual politics, and many many references (including Sontag, Levi-Strauss, Foucault, Lacan, Derrida, Barthes, etc.). These tales are interconnected short stories that feel tightly woven enough to border on being a loose novel. Delany's voice is playful and somehow both mythic and contemporary. Also somehow simultaneously dense and readable. I feel like I don't know what to write about this. It's barely fantasy (dragons exist and the distant past setting is speculative), and its priorities lie in questions of narrative and language rather than fabulist splendor. Delany bookends it with a preface and appendix in conversation with one another as written by fictional academics with the same letters in their initials. And just really works. I need to read the rest of the series!

[Christopher · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are certain authors I am constantly told how much I would like and lo, despite multiple attempts with, I never do. Michael Moorcock is one of them, Samuel Delany is the other. I remember having the same reaction to Triton years ago. It goes to show how much style and pacing goes into how I react to stories and how merely having the ingredients I like alone does not suffice.

This being said, I liked this collection enough to finish and even enjoy specific parts. But it was really the character of Gorgik that I liked and if it was not for his central role it would not have worked. The parts without him were very difficult for me to get through.

P.S. something weird was going on with the original release cover art and how it depicted him. This modern artist did a much better job:
https://baddytwoshoes.tumblr.com/imag...

[Peter Tillman]

Jo Walton reread this recently and loved it: "Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979) is a wonderful mosaic novel, Delany at his best."
https://www.tor.com/2022/08/16/mentio...
Her extended review is great stuff. Don't miss it!

I can't recall if I've read this actual book, though I've certainly read some of the individual stories.
Delany has been a hit-or-miss author for me. So, maybe?

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like to write about what I call “postmodern” fantasy, a set of books joined very loosely by some philosophical underpinnings I try to read into them. But Delany’s Neveryon series is unambiguously capital-P Postmodern fantasy. Every chapter has an epigraph from Derrida, Foucalt, and their ilk, and the content is shot through with hints of Ideas and Themes. That’s kind of exciting, because postmodernism is great and anyone who holds that worldview is bound to produce fantasy that is at least interesting, if not enjoyable.

I’d been a bit hesitant to read Neveryon because of Delany’s reputation—that he might be doing interesting academic and SJW-approved fantasy, but apparently at the cost of a more direct and engaging narration. My fears on this front were largely dispelled pretty quickly. Perhaps Tales is less arcane than other of Delany’s books, but it is fairly grounded in its world. The narration is very materialistic, lingering on physical culture items like pots, boats, jewelry, and toys, particularly as they relate to characters’ work and its class and gender relations. It’s also pretty tightly connected to its characters, although it approaches them not so much as individuals but rather as cyphers for the cultural contexts they move through. It moves between this case-study level ethnography and more explicit philosophical discourse, but these things never supersede the characters they feature. It’s not a very psychological portrait, but it’s no less valid and fun to read for that.

It’s funny that Delany self-identified this series as coming in the tradition of Conan and Leiber’s Sword and Sorcery. On one hand, it makes total sense. Those books, of course, are very much centered on the dichotomy between civilization and “barbarians,” whether as Conan carries one set of values into the power structure of the other, or as Fafhrd follows his yearning curiosity to understand the strange and exotic world of civilized society.

Delany simply takes this as an opportunity to deconstruct that dichotomy as a postmodernist, reframing and exploring it until interesting thoughts emerge. It's not so much a deconstruction of Sword and Sorcery with the barbarian/civilization dichotomy as a central element of its critique as it is a deconstruction of civilization's origins with the genre setting as a convenient framework. I guess I’m a bit of a curmudgeon about this, on one hand, because while that’s an interesting question, I think that if exploring it is one’s goal, it’s better done through more academic means—history, anthropology, literary criticism, etc, (particularly since his sights seem to be more on the historical concept than the way it's framed in literature or the genre's tropes overall). But in this case I think it adds more than it detracts, by making the book feel thoughtful and careful to some extent (which is practically unheard of in S and S in my exploration so far), and more importantly by focusing on mundane events, people from all sorts of class roles.

It avoids the pitfalls of too much plot and action by swinging really far in the opposite direction. Tales is, until the last 20 pages or so, a slice of life book with nary a hint of swords, much less sorcery. I found that really refreshing and would love to see something seated in between (Game of Thrones does this at times, as does The Witcher, but Delany shows how far you can push it without it losing interest). Presumably later entries in the series follow more on that last 20 pages, but either way this first entry shows Delany’s got a pretty enticing set of priorities for a fantasy author. The world still feels pretty amorphous, and what he builds throughout the novel is less a world with political scheming than a cypher about the economic and cultural context of the toy ball trade.

As an SJW, Sword and Sorcery is usually a genre you have to read prepared to sigh and dock everything a star, at least, for racism and sexism, and generally leave with the sense that much of the enjoyment you got came in spite of the book’s true self. But with Delany, this is never really a concern. He’s a fantasy author doing feminism who actually *understands* feminism, on an academic level as well as a social one. It’s not just that female characters in all strata of society get the majority of the screentime, or that a woman (from a matriarchal culture that feels pretty genuinely badass if a bit much) is the most competent fighter in the book or even that it favors women’s work over fighting or political intrigue. Much of the content is explicitly expounding feminist ideas, including a whole creation myth that inverts the gender roles of the Christian story (God beats the second woman until her breasts fall off and her genitals start to fall off and leak pus).

All that not to mention that the main male fighting pair (a la Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser) are not just in a bromance, but literal gay lovers into dominance play—something they’re quite prepare to admit in casual conversation, for some reason. On top of everything else it’s a pretty great fuck-you to the sexual politics of previous Sword and Sorcery novels. Just imagine how Howard would feel about this (and I’m sure there’s a ton of Conan fanfiction that makes this “sullying” of his legacy very explicit).

[Helen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rich and vividly written. I read a Tale from this between every full novel I finished for the last couple of months and loved the experience of it. I cannot believe I ended a book wanting more dragons.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

I seem to read this book about once every fifteen years – the first time being around the age of fifteen, the second sometime in my thirties and the third now. I suppose it would be something of a minor miracle if I read it three more times in my life. With a lot of the books we read as adolescents, there is a tendency to “grow out” of them and find that they have lost something in the interim. With this book, it seems to have taken thirty years for me to “grow into” it. It’s just possible that I’ve finally reached the point where I won’t get much more out of future readings.

It is a fantasy set at a time “when the world was young,” in an indeterminate but temperate region of earth with a few relatively new cities and empires beginning to flourish. Delany takes advantage of the period to turn certain assumptions about the past on their heads: especially male dominance and compulsory heterosexuality, both of which are completely dispensed with. He creates matriarchal cultures and his main character is a gay mining slave turned warrior. He manages to make this seem perfectly normal to all his characters, creating the suggestion that later cultures suppressed the memory of this very different time in the service of creating a history that would endorse their view. A page I marked has a very interesting take on a kind of primitive inversion of penis-envy, which seems to be a deliberate mockery of much of Freud.

At the time he wrote this, Delany, like much of the academic English-studying world, was fascinated by Semiotics and Derrida, which is demonstrated most transparently in the “Appendix” by a scholar claiming to analyze the ancient text on which the novel is based (this is also fiction). If you have little or no interest in how those theories might affect literature, or disagree with them outright, it is possible you will find this novel infuriating. For me, it’s part of what I meant about “growing into” it. Only now am I conversant enough with the theory to really “get” what Delany was doing here. Previously it had a sort of mystical quality, it struck me as brilliant and innovative, but I didn’t fully understand it. Now, it’s a bit more obvious, less mysterious, and falls more into the “clever not brilliant” side of things. I still enjoy it greatly, but it’s easier to imagine sitting down with a cup of tea and talking about it with Delany, as opposed to lying at his feet in adoration.

[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.

[Lucas Chance · Rating 5 out of 5]

I finished this in about a day, but this does not mean it is by any means a lightweight book. It is so rich in theoretical promise and narrative execution. It takes a genre I had written off (the sword and sorcery story) and uses it in a Foucaltesqe manner to show that the differentiation from the mystical past and the present does not truly exist. It talks of Derrida, feminism, agency of oppressed people, and manages to be swashbuckling fun in the mean time. This is a major feat of writing from an author that continuously surprises me. I have not yet read the other books in the series, but they will be very hard-pressed to top or match this book.

I highly recommend this for fantasy fans and anyone who thinks the genre starts and stops with dragons and wizards.

[aja · Rating 4 out of 5]

"come to a far when, a distant once, a land beyond the river -- but a river running no-one-knows-where."

up front: this was nothing at all like what i expected it to be. i enjoyed it a lot, although i will confess i think a larger portion of it than i'd care to admit went right over my head lol. this is another one you really have to sit with & actually think about, & i am definitely going to have to reread at some point. i thoroughly enjoyed the slow introduction & reintroduction of characters throughout the stories, and it was a joy to reach the end when they were all interacting with each other for the first time.

this was an astonishingly thoughtful & thought-provoking collection of interwoven stories. i can't think of a real-world power structure about which this story didn't have something to say, be that capitalism, racial & cultural divides, patriarchy & sexual dynamics, and especially the ways in which power dynamics weave in and out between each other. one of the running themes is the way (& i'm just going to copy this from the wikipedia article) "that when one moves from a content to an image to a reflection, one reverses the form of the content," apparently a bit of mathematical theory delany was particularly fond of.

relatedly, i'm glad i looked the series up on wikipedia, bc it gave a lot of insight into what delany as doing with his writing that i might otherwise have missed or not been able to really grasp in its entirety. a couple other bits of delany's commentary: "Sometimes you’ll rethink things in stories more than one back. But the basic factor is the idea of a continuous, open-ended, self-critical dialogue." & "The series is very flexible. Here’s a short story. Next’s a bulky novel. That can be followed by a novella, or another novel, or another short story... (One good form of criticism comes from asking the question, ‘What, historically, might have caused people to act in a particular way that, when I wrote the last story, I just assumed was unquestioned human nature?’)" so that's something to keep in mind if you want to read this

the other thing i enjoyed was part of the general conceit of this series is that the foreword & appendix are part of the stories themselves, which was not something i realized until i read the wiki page. by which i mean that the foreword was written by a character of the overarching nevèrÿon story, and the appendix was written as a sort of pseudo-academic work about another character from the story, & they each show up in later installments in the series. this is to say that if you do not read through these as well you will be missing part of the story. i thought this, as well as the treatise on the culhar' fragment (fictional, containing the texts of the stories we have just finished reading), were extremely fun.

this was not an easy read, to be clear. my adhd struggled a bit with this one, with its long & often convoluted, circular sentences. but i did genuinely enjoy it, & i look forward to continuing.

to end, two of my favorite quotes:

(from the preface)
"return to nevèrÿon is delany's overall name for his fantasy series - though the publisher, without forbidding me to mention it, has urged me not to stress it, as foreign-sounding words and diacritical markers are thought to be off-putting to the most embarrassing of statistical fictions, the commercial reader (not you, of course; not me), who presumably consumes texts only for story, is assumed to stand deaf to style, and is thought to applaud only the endlessly repeated pornographies of action and passion that, for all their violences, still managed to pander to an astonishingly untroubled acceptance of the personal and political status quo." (you see what i mean about the convoluted sentences. i loved this one tho)

& lastly, from the appendix:
"if some writer were to actually putdown these stories [i.e., the stories in the culhar' fragment], just what sort of reflection might they constitute, either of the modern world or of our own past history? could one consider such an imaginative expansion simply another translation, another reading of the text, another layer of the palimpsest?"

[Shaz · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a mosaic novel consisting of five stories that prismatically reflect and refract upon each other such that by the end they come together in a fuller picture, some bits of which are blurry and some may be optical illusions. The topics and themes are heavy ones about slavery and freedom, but the setting is rich, lush and detailed. The characters feel like real people and we get to see them from different angles through the different tales.

But the moment this truly came together as brilliant for me was in the appendix, which is a fictional explanation of a mathematical discipline applied to translating an ancient language, which is the language of the original version of the tales. there is a fictional introduction so we already know about the appendix, this isn't a surprise reveal, but I found the way it all came full circle rather delightful and very Delany.

[Doubledf99.99 · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought this would be a nice light fantasy read, however I was proven wrong from the get go. Delany creates a ancient world that puts one to thinking, and a world that is starting to civilize, money making an appearance over barter, first writings, new inventions and improved inventions, with all this the world is still most brutal. There are Dragons. And women are at the forefront.

[Jared Roberts · Rating 2 out of 5]

From the moment I saw the epigraphs heading each section were from Derrida, Foucault, and several other academic sources, I wasn't sure what to expect from this book. I knew it wasn't going to be straight-up sword and sorcery. And, as it happens, that's probably for the worst.

The sword and sorcery aspects of the book are fun, like a more reflective, mellow Robert E. Howard. He divides the book into five separate tales in different times and places in the world of Neveryon. Characters from previous tales pop up in later ones. Nothing really resolves. Characters just age and change circumstances. The first 'tale', of Gorgik, a slave taken from the mines by a slutty courtier to the imperial court, is probably the best. It introduces a world of complex political intrigue, sexual appetites, and architecture. It's all downhill from there.

Delany is obviously an intelligent, sophisticated guy. Reading the academic texts he reads is not easy. My degree is in philosophy, so I have first-hand experience. I like to think he really believed the epigraphs chosen relate to the narrative, that he wasn't just showing his erudition, but the epigraphs chosen are very specific to the texts they're taken from and not easily generalized. I can't imagine why he chose them.

This skepticism about Delany carries into the narrative. He spends inordinate amounts of the text on philosophical discussions that have no real significance to the narrative and have no original insight. Several pages are devoted to some barbarians replaying out Freud's penis envy theory in their own culture. One or two paragraphs, this is amusing satire. Several pages of it and the joke's on us for reading it. He also spends many pages on Derrida's deconstructionism and lengthy but dated discussions on the origin of currency. Money is one of the major themes of the novel, so that's consistent at least. He just has nothing of value to say about it. Philosophical digressions in narratives can do wonders, propel a story to heights. These just fall flat and bog down the narrative. Even worse is when characters that had a fixed personality before suddenly become mouthpieces for this pseudo-intellectualizing.

Delany's abusive writing style doesn't help. All of the great philosophers strove for "felicity of expression" in their best texts. Intellectual depth does not require bad writing. Delany, under the influence of the hip continental theoriests of the '70s like Derrida, writes in a deliberately difficult style. Paragraphs that fill whole pages are essentially a short sentence bloated with parenthetical remark after parenthetical remark. It's just terrible prose.

This is my first time reading a Samuel Delany book. I will certainly give him another chance. He can draw interesting characters with rich, compelling thoughts. Maybe I can find something he wrote before his mind was destroyed by Lacan.

[Griffin Alexander · Rating 5 out of 5]

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?

[Edward Rathke · Rating 4 out of 5]

A novel in stories and novellas set in a prehistorical world where life is changing from barter and trade to a monetary system, where slavery is a fact of life, but only provincially, where written systems are developing, but reading and writing are still quite rare.

These stories deal with power, most clearly, from political to social to sexual to academic. It is a reflective novel, where systems of power and stories tend to be commentary on one another, on themselves, on future stories within the cycle. It is a world on the cusp of civilisation, yet the only difference seems to be definitional.

The character Gorgik, who stands at the center of the series, even when he is all but a shadow, only briefly mentioned or appears briefly in the action, is introduced here. We follow him from his adolescence to his slavery [which happens, simply, because the great powers of the country change hands--the former ruling house is replaced by a different one] to his freedom [also accidental].

The fall and rise of Gorgik shows how power is rarely in our hands and, even when we're unaware of its mysteries, it controls, very strictly, who we are and what we are allowed to become. Gorgik, through no fault of his, watches his family murdered and spends years as a slave. His freedom, too, comes through no merit of his own, but simply because a noble takes him as her catamite.

And that is reflected throughout the series, the structure and system of power. Also, of importance here, is the way the world changed because of the introduction of money and how that relates, directly, to power, as power becomes a tangible thing. Stories, too, are at the center here, but, most important, not necessarily to this book, but is to the overall series, is the nature of stories and perspective.

There is, truly, a great deal going on here, and I likely missed some points completely. Stories about stories, systems of power, the way the world changes, the way it doesn't, the mysteries of sexuality, what it means to be controlled, to control, what signs and language mean, how we choose them.

It turns many of the fantasy tropes on its head while remaining firmly amongst them. Very impressive, but certainly not for everyone. The stories are low on action and big on ideas.

[Charlie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a failure, but I love it anyway. A postmodernist attempt to interrogate how the fantasy genre can be used to model our understanding of pre-history, with a speculative interpretation of the transition from a barter to a money economy, of the invention and spread of gender roles through colonialism and cultural osmosis via trade routes, the psychological dynamics of slavery and the political ethics behind BDSM, oh, and don't forget it also has dragons in it.

There is no way this book couldn't be a complete mess. It's just too ambitious for its own good. But as Robert Browning once said:

Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what's a heaven for?
- Robert Browning, Andrea del Sarto (97-98)

Even though this book is unwieldy, it's ideas sometimes laughable, and it's stories dull and plodding for long stretches, the sheer bravura of what it's trying to do is so awesome I can't help but applaud it with an enthusiastic grin. Bring on volume 2!

[Pamster · Rating 5 out of 5]

Okay. God. Incredible fantasy that investigates what fantasy actually is, and makes the homoeroticism of sword & sorcery finally explicit, and deals with race, slavery, rebellion, and s/m, and tons of stuff about gender and relation of gender oppression to money, and the relation of general oppression to money, and a bunch of other shit. Jesus, so brill. And there is more to the series - this collects the first 5 stories and there are other novels and novellas and stuff to follow. Totally thrilling. From the preface that discusses Delany's work in third person but is "written by" a fictional character later in the series, this shit is complex. There were passages I had to read repeatedly, both because they were hard but they also were thrilling and dialectical and felt important. Loved it.