The Jewels of Aptor

by Samuel R. Delany

One of the most universally acclaimed first novels in science fiction--by the man who become one of the most stellar writers in the genre's history. On the orders of Argo, the White Goddess, an itinerant poet and his three companions journey to the island of Aptor. Their mission: to seize a jewel from the dark god Hama and bring it back home. With this precious stone Argo may defeat the malign forces gathered against her and the land of Leptor. But, as the group presses deep into the enigmatic heart of Aptor, easy distinctions between good and evil blur, and somehow the task seems less straightforward. For Argo already owns two of the jewels, and possession of the third would give her unqualified power.
And, as the four friends already know, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Fantasy, Speculative Fiction, Adventure, Post Apocalyptic, Science Fiction Fantasy

175 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1962

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

[Craig · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Jewels of Aptor is famous for being Delany's first published novel, written when he was a teenager. I think it's much more accessible than much of his later work; it's a clear and straight forward story which can be read without trying to decipher hidden truths and messages between the lines to try to figure out what he's -really- saying. It's a nice post-apocalyptic science fiction story with fantasy overtones, but with many of the lyrical passages, poetic descriptions, and visceral themes for which his better known works are renowned. The narrative is a little uneven in spots, but the characters are quite realistic and sympathetic.

[Nate D · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've been reading a lot of fairly abstracted stuff lately, so it was actually totally refreshing to read something composed of pretty much straight narrative by a deft storyteller. Even at age 20, when this debut was published, Delany has a fully satisfying storytelling voice and plot-sense. And though as a kind of fantasy-adventure novel there's some standard journey-through-strange-and-dangerous-lands stuff that's a little hard to get excited about at this point, much of the narrative actual centers around religious schism and how any single umbrella may encompass many opposing viewpoints, though rarely anything so clear as Black & White, Good & Evil. Which subtlety and complexity of experience is sort of the point of the whole book. Subtlety and complexity are arguably undermined somewhat by all the swordfights-with-bat-people and radioactive ameoboic masses that he would later lean much less heavily on, but it's still pretty brisk and well-imagined material, staying clear, at least of the more obvious and annoying cliches of the time and genre.

There's something, also, about that sub-genre of "the last expedition failed horribly, and now it's your turn to go", where the reader gets completely caught in the plot-vise of "what happened before" and "what will happen this time" that can keep those pages turning.

Anyway, a palette cleanser.

[Olethros · Rating 3 out of 5]

-Un gran viaje empieza con un primer paso, por muy dubitativo que sea.-

Género. Ciencia-Ficción (con toques fantásticos, sin la menor duda).

Lo que nos cuenta. En un mundo que hace mucho tiempo sufrió un apocalipsis y en el que de los restos de la civilización ha comenzado a desarrollarse una nueva sociedad y cultura, Geo (joven poeta), Serpiente (un mutante mudo de cuatro brazos) y Ursus (un gigante hedonista), acompañan a una sacerdotisa en un peligroso viaje hacia Argo para hacerse con el resto de una serie de joyas de gran poder y rescatar a la hija de la sacerdotisa.

¿Quiere saber más del libro, sin spoilers? Visite:

http://librosdeolethros.blogspot.com/...

[Nicholas Perez]

Found a copy of this at Half Price Books. Might as well read it someday.

[Olethros · Rating 3 out of 5]

-Un gran viaje empieza con un primer paso, por muy dubitativo que sea.-

Género. Ciencia-Ficción (con toques fantásticos, sin la menor duda).

Lo que nos cuenta. En un mundo que hace mucho tiempo sufrió un apocalipsis y en el que de los restos de la civilización ha comenzado a desarrollarse una nueva sociedad y cultura, Geo (joven poeta), Serpiente (un mutante mudo de cuatro brazos) y Ursus (un gigante hedonista), acompañan a una sacerdotisa en un peligroso viaje hacia Argo para hacerse con el resto de una serie de joyas de gran poder y rescatar a la hija de la sacerdotisa.

¿Quiere saber más del libro, sin spoilers? Visite:

http://librosdeolethros.blogspot.com/...

[Daniel Petersen · Rating 2 out of 5]

(The following review is cross-posted from my blog They Have Pulled Down Deep Heaven On Their Heads.)

To be honest, if it weren't for the fact that the 19-year-old who wrote this novel went on to become an icon of New Wave science fiction, I'm not sure the book would still be remembered. The Jewels of Aptor (1962) shows promise, but I'm not sure how truly distinguished it is in the mountains of 'skiffy' out there. Don't get me wrong, though: I thoroughly enjoyed aspects of this novel and it truly shines in some respects.

The little prologue before chapter 1 is emblematic of the New Wave of science fiction that was starting to get under way about this time. It feels to me that it could have as easily been written by Roger Zelazny or Harlan Ellison as Delany. It sets up an explicitly philosophical and theological discourse the rest of the novel will try (unsuccessfully in my opinion) to embody. As someone who is obsessed with theological SF, I was pretty amazed to see Delany explicitly evoke the Crucifixion of Christ and deliberately juxtapose that image with the Yin-Yang symbol of Chinese philosophy, asking the reader to consider the relation between the two. The opening also sets up in swift strokes the science-fictional premise: a post-nuclear holocaust Earth where super-technology and more ancient ways of seeing the world co-exist exotically. It's a nicely written vignette that makes what follows a little disappointing.

The first few chapters seemed to take a little too long setting the scene of the novel's 'quest' sort of rationale. And, strangely, much of this was by means of the penny detective novel protagonist-putting-clues-together-through-improbable-dialogue trope. (There's lots of painfully bad dialogue and goofy character interaction throughout, I'm afraid, but you almost root for this obviously young author in his infectious enthusiasm for his subject and genre.)

But when the sailors (a decently drawn little motley group of misfits, if pretty thoroughly cardboard) get on the island of Aptor, things take off brilliantly. This all-too-short segment of the novel was out and out, no-apologies, pulp fun. I relished it. Monsters and bloody adventure galore! And the wonderfully poetic language that describes sword-wielding winged-and-furred warriors, menacing shapeshifters, and carnivorous apes makes the grotesqueries leap off the page with pictorial zeal. It's like Ray Bradbury if he'd written a Sword and Planet novel. And there's some freshly inventive monstrosity here too with a freakish 'super-amoeba' (all the fabulous creatures I think are given a blanket 'radioactive fallout' sort of justification) which instantaneously forms and operates groups of human-like figures that melt away just as quickly. Not just descriptions of appearances but the action too partakes in the poetry. For example:

Fire leaped from the boy's hands in a double bolt that converged among the dark bodies. Red light cast a jagged wing in silhouette. A high shriek, a stench of burnt fur. Another bolt of fire fell in the dark horde. A wing flamed, waved flame about it. The beast tried to fly, but fell, splashing fire. Sparks sharp on a brown face chiseled it with shadow, caught the terrified red bead of an eye, and laid light along a pair of fangs.

Wings afire withered on the ground; dead leaves sparked now, and whips of flame ran in the clearing. The beasts retreated, and the three men stood against the wall, panting. The last two shadows suddenly dropped from the air toward Snake [...] Snake looked up as wings fell at him, tented him, hid him momentarily. Red flared beneath, and suddenly they fell away, sweeping the leaves - moved by wind or life, Geo couldn't tell. Wings rose on the moon, circled further away, were gone.

Man! How can you not thrill to that? For my money, that's just simple imaginative pleasure. It's the stuff of pulp book and magazine covers, but lyrically narrated, and I have zero problem with that.

(Part of the fun here is the 'cheapness' with which Delany parades one monster and marvel after another before our eyes. But both this aspect as well as the far-future lost-technology SF premise reminded me how utterly masterful Gene Wolfe is at these same sorts of elements in his Solar Cycle series. While Delany here handles these things deftly enough, Wolfe truly elevates such pulp staples to the stature of deep and abiding 'literature'. But I know too that Delany himself will transcend and transmute such pulpisms in his later writing.)

Halfway through the book, however, this fun diminished drastically and what was meant, I think, to be a fairly trippy and profound pilgrimage of sorts just seemed a bit bland and aimless to me. Toward the end we are at least introduced to the only character of the book that seemed like something slightly more than one-and-a-half-dimensional: the teenage girl Argo.

In the last ten or so pages the action returns for a moment to something more engaging and then the theological discourse of the opening pages becomes explicitly articulated again, which was very welcome and very interesting at the level of ideas. It seemed to me that Delany was, roughly, appropriating the Cross of Christian theology as a stepping stone to something more Dualist or Monist (I couldn't quite tell which). He proposes that enduring or witnessing horrors like crosses and holocausts are prerequisites to the personal enlightenment of perceiving and experiencing the underlying unity of existence. The view borders on what is pretty wishy-washy New Age-ism to me, but hints at possibly being something a little more rigorous and genuine and insightful. All this is even discussed in terms of blatant 'religious experience', with full acceptance of such a category as real and meaningful.

This kind of all-unifying enlightenment is what Delany preaches for and what he preaches specifically against is experiencing any kind of 'concrete God' with the attendant desire to 'convert' others with 'evangelical fury' (all these terms are direct quotes from Delany's text). You can see his allegiances on his sleeve, which is fine. But it's interesting to see how this contrasts with the explicit theology expressed in R.A. Lafferty's post-apocalyptic short story 'And Walk Now Gently Through the Fire'. Take the following scathingly sardonic passage, for example, where one of the demonic social engineers of Lafferty's tale is fondly recalling how they won the war of ideas in the minds of a generation:

One smiles to recall that phrase that our fathers accidentally stumbled on and which later came back to us a hundredfold like bread cast upon the waters: "I am all for relevant religion that is free and alive and where the action is, but institutional religion turns me off." Incredible? Yes. A hog, if he could speak, wouldn't make so silly a statement: a blind mole wouldn't. And yet this statement was spoken many millions of times by young human persons of all ages. How lucky that it had been contrived, how mind boggling that it was accepted. It gave us victory without battle and success beyond our dreams.

It was like saying "I love animals, all animals, every part of them: it is only their flesh and their bones that I object to; it is only their living substance that turns me off." For it is essential that religion (that old abomination) if it is to be religion at all (the total psychic experience) must be institutionalized and articulated in organization and service and liturgy and art. That is what religion is. And everything of a structured world, housing and furniture and art and production and transportation and organization and communication and continuity and mutuality is the institutional part of religion. That is what culture is. There can no more be noninstitutional religion than there can be a bodiless body. We abjure the whole business. We're well quit of the old nightmare. [...] To us, there is nothing wrong with the term Son of God. There is not even anything wrong with the term God, so long as it is understood to be meaningless, so long as we take him to be an unstructured God. Our own splendor would have been less if there had not been some huge thing there which we unstructured. This unstructuring of God, which we have accomplished, was the greatest masterwork of man.

Published in a 1973 anthology (alongside the likes of Philip José Farmer and Robert Silverberg), one can't help but wonder if Lafferty had Delany, and others sympathetic to his religious views, directly in his satirical sights. It would be tempting to see Delany as the magnanimous sage here while seeing Lafferty as the narrow crank. But that just assumes Lafferty's critique has no force and gives default preference to Delany's views. Furthermore, Delany seems to be denouncing and 'other-ing' here every bit as much as Lafferty. And it is only fair to note that Lafferty also includes very poignant constructive and hopeful passages in this same story as well as a subtle and powerful overall worldview across his highly unique body of work. Delany was a big fan of Lafferty in the 60s, as were Zelazny and Ellison, but I don't know if Lafferty could honestly proclaim the admiration mutual with any of them, not least because of these philosophical and theological antipathies. It's a rich underlying dialogue of that era that needs to be brought to the surface by historians of SF.

At any rate, I look very forward to eventually getting into Delany's more mature and seminal output, novels like Babel-17, The Einstein Intersection, Nova, Dhalgren, and Triton.

[Marijan Šiško · Rating 4 out of 5]

Čak i u svom prvom romanu (napisanom s 19 godina!) Delany nas voli malo vući za nos i zapravo nam nikada ne ispričati cijelu priču. Majstor.

[Jim Kuenzli · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not even sure what I just read, but that's a good thing. Delaney wrote this book as a teen. Published in the very early 1960's when he was 20, it has more of a late 60's early 70's feel. Which, I guess, means it was ahead of its time. The novel takes place in a post-apocalyptic setting after "The Great Fire." It's basically a science fantasy where a group sets off on a ship to an "Island" called Aptor. Aptor had recreated another advanced society after the first apocalypse and managed to destroy themselves again. A group of believable characters are sent inland to find the third Jewel (a creation of Aptor's scientists) and bring back a young priestess. The group goes through a collective of somewhat discombobulated adventures consisting of everything but the kitchen sink. I'm not going to give the plot away, but you have to really remember each passage, because the ending explains some things, and others are open to interpretation. It kind of makes sense that Delaney, as a teen, wrote this book. It is wonderfully imaginative, really thought provoking, yet somewhat of a weird mess. It's all over the place but has a lot of deep meaning in each chapter. I would probably have to read it a couple of more times to gain additional insight. This is a book for lovers of weird science fiction fantasy blend, post-apocalyptic stuff, weird fantasy, and those who understand books written in the early 60's aren't like modern fluff. Recommend!

[Bill · Rating 3 out of 5]

The novel describes a post-apocalyptic civilization a number of centuries after an atomic "big fire". The action occurs on two islands or continents, one with a dark age civilization. Leptar, where the highest technology are sailing ships and swords; the other the radioactive island Aptor populated by mutant flora and fauna as well as humanoid 'scientist' populations who have kept or rediscovered the old knowledge and technology, two opposing groups forming priesthood like enclaves, keepers of tech and science. The Jewels of Aptor are high tech devices that give absolute power to their wielders. The story involves a group of fantasy like adventurers from Leptar tasked with collecting the jewels and figuring out what to do with them.

The theme of the novel is summed up, "And that's what we saw, or the experience we had when we looked at the beach from the ship this morning; chaos caught in order, the order defining chaos." The experience being a religious experience. The novel is a simplistic, brief exploration of Western dualistic thinking: dark vs light; knowledge vs innocence; good vs evil, order vs chaos, baji-naji, etc. The last few pages, explain this. The action tries to illustrate it.

Knowing other Delany work's, I certainly have a compulsion to read between the lines looking for secrets, deep meanings and meta-fictional ideas. I don't think they are to be found in this immature, 1st Delany novel.

It's an easy read. The prose flows and in places is remarkable for an inexperienced writer. Be sure to read a later edition like this which is include much that Ace editors had cut and is revised by Delany.

[Rhys · Rating 4 out of 5]

Delany is one of my favourite living writers, one of my favourite writers full stop in fact. This is his first novel and was published when he was only twenty. Although it’s probably the weakest of his books, it’s still an enthralling and engaging work of fiction. I first read it when I was about 17 years old and for some reason didn’t like it. I found the story confusing. But after this re-reading I am baffled as to why I thought that. Analog described it in a review as ‘gorgeously implausible’ and that’s exactly what it is. Implausible isn’t the same as confusing, not at all.

The novel begins in an affecting way, a lyrical opening that had the same impact on me as the start of Melville’s *Moby Dick*. Somehow Delany contrives to fill the reader with a real sense of excitement about a forthcoming voyage on a ship to a distant island. Another scene later in the book has similar force: the main characters explore the city of New Hope on elevated roads in a passage that reminded me acutely of Cordwainer Smith’s ‘Alpha Ralpha Boulevard’ (one of my favourite stories by one of my favourite SF writers) and yet I doubt that Delany was influenced by Smith, as the two pieces were published at roughly the same time.

[Fred · Rating 2 out of 5]

An interesting first novel, but clearly the work of an apprentice in the craft. Delany was that rare author with the brilliant idea to marry an editor, thus helping to grease the wheels for this novel written at age 19. It is not a great novel, but the willingness to jump in and grapple with philosophical ideas foreshadows Delany's later work. In this piece the narrative is clunky, and the characters motivations unclear. There is a lot of psionics, always a turnoff, and goofy aliens. The battle between Aptor and Leptar, and who spies for whom, is fairly unreadable. All of that being said, the novel still delivers in ideas, vocabulary, and general weirdness enough to make readable. I liked this more than Dan Simmons' first novel, Song of Kali, but not nearly as much as Malzberg's triumphant debut, Oracle of a Thousand Hands. Worth reading as an introduction to authorial concerns and to document a young writers growth.

[Olethros · Rating 3 out of 5]

-Un gran viaje empieza con un primer paso, por muy dubitativo que sea.-

Género. Ciencia-Ficción (con toques fantásticos, sin la menor duda).

Lo que nos cuenta. En un mundo que hace mucho tiempo sufrió un apocalipsis y en el que de los restos de la civilización ha comenzado a desarrollarse una nueva sociedad y cultura, Geo (joven poeta), Serpiente (un mutante mudo de cuatro brazos) y Ursus (un gigante hedonista), acompañan a una sacerdotisa en un peligroso viaje hacia Argo para hacerse con el resto de una serie de joyas de gran poder y rescatar a la hija de la sacerdotisa.

¿Quiere saber más del libro, sin spoilers? Visite:

http://librosdeolethros.blogspot.com/...

[Hannah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm reminded yet again of ye olde favorite essay "Body Ritual among the Nacirema", where things that are likely common and ordinary to the reader are described from a removed outsider's perspective and makes us think of things in a new light, e.g. the characters' awe in encountering lost ancient technologies (such as TV screens, electricity, and headphones). Looooove whatever that is.
Really enjoyed this writing style. There's some vivid, randomly awesome descriptions, such as this non-spoiler banger:

"Light flickered on the wet rocks as they entered the largest cave. Their eyes focused once more. Foam washed back and forth over the sandy floor, and black chains of weeds caught in crevices on the stone, twisted on the sand with the inrush of water"

I love sci-fi

[Jenne · Rating 2 out of 5]

First line: "Afterwards, she was taken down to the sea."

I decided to actually start reading some of my collection of pulp novels (which I mostly collect for the covers).
I didn't realize this was his first novel, but it makes sense--he certainly came a long way in the 22 years between this one (1962) and Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (1984).
The tone of the story is kind of a combination of H. Rider Haggard and Motel of the Mysteries: part gruesome adventure story and part archaeology of the present in the far future. It seems to be meant as a cautionary tale about nuclear war as well as organized religion.
It has a lot of the usual "Golden Age of SF" problems--the As You Know Bob exposition, characters that are mainly placeholders, rather awkward writing, etc. But you can still see the awesome Delaney of the future here, mainly in the totally cracked-out weirdness, and also in the surprisingly cool female characters, especially for being written in 1962.

Unfortunately, it ends up being fairly boring. I wouldn't really recommend it--it's more interesting as an artifact than as an actual book.

[Thom · Rating 3 out of 5]

After the characters are introduced, the chapters feel very episodic - mostly self contained, but adding a little more information to the world. The last two chapters shatter this in a finale that brings all the knowledge together. With a few caveats, this would make a good sci-fi TV series.

Those caveats? This is post apocalyptic (atomic "big fire" war 1500 years previous) and some civilization has recovered. A certain elite group has some electronics - left over? Not well described. Without spoilers, I can say that the final reveal rubs me the wrong way.

This is Samuel R. Delaney's first novel. Geo (the poet) is likely his alter-ego here, and it is through his experience that much of the novel takes place. 3 1/3 stars (closer to "liked" than "really liked").

[Derek · Rating 4 out of 5]

You come away from the book, and especially its ending, feeling like the author is starting to grapple with themes and ideas which he apparently develops through subsequent novels. Here the repeated themes of duality eventually wind up coming out of the characters' mouths, which made it all very chatty with explanations and discussion.

Still, I thoroughly enjoyed the writing and devoured the whole thing trying to figure out what was going on and how it all connected together.

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sure it was Delany's first published book (at the age of 20), but even then he was showing great promise as a highly original writer. This book blends classic quest fantasy with post-apocalyptic fiction, with an engaging set of characters, a fun adventure, and some really intriguing ideas towards the end. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

[Marie · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's Delany's first book so I have to forgive it being a little uneven. It's biggest fault is in moving too quickly, leaving things for the reader to catch up to. But in its best moments it has that Delaney magic, great setting-descriptions and poetic thoughts. This one bogs down a bit in conveying its central point, but thrills with its images of a post-apocalyptic ruin on a tropical island.

As I read all the Delaney I can I'm starting to notice he has a thing for putting a big guy, a nerdy guy, and a kid together as a trio. ;D

[Cheryl · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really two and a half stars.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Delany's first novel isn't his best, but there's definitely some good work in it. It's interesting to see how his fascination with jewels, reflections, etc. has evolved through his work.

Re-read in 2018
Last time I read this I remember being a lot less invested in the story by the final chapter, so I read it more closely and carefully this time. It's a minor shame that the last chapter and a half or so are so stylistically different from the rest of the book. But not really: we're about talking Delany here.

My first impression of this book was also that, because it's an early work, the style and themes that appear in Delany's later works had not yet appeared in The Jewels of Aptor. Not so. This time around, I was surprised by just how many Delanyisms there are in this book: Urson chewing his fingernails and the repeated references to Urson's bare feet and Snake's dirty hands. Sure, there's obvious symbolism in the jewels as the 'grail' at the end of the characters' quest. But for a devout reader of Delany's work, there's interesting symbolism, I think, in the characters' tendencies and motivations: for example, in the similarities between Urson and Hogg or, maybe, George or Tak from Dhalgren; or between Geo and Kid/the kid/Kidd, or even Rydra.

Changing my rating from 3 to 4 stars.

[17CECO · Rating 5 out of 5]

"You think of a bird singing and you think thoughts that men have been thinking for thousands upon thousands of years. Poets have written of it in every language, Catullus in Latin, Keats in English, Li Po in Chinese, Darnel 2X4 in New English." Fuck yeah.
Why do a poet, a giant sailor, and a 4 armed thief board a ship to a dangerous continent? That's just how this science fiction works--and allegory. So many passages seem to operate on dream logic. Even what's supposed to be starchy exposition, moving the blocks of the plot, suddenly leaps.
The back cover of my 1977 reprint reads "A MILLENNIUM AFTER ATOMIC WAR!"
Yeah, I know its Delaney's first novel but I'm not gonna use that to give it hedged praise. I'm gonna say reading this is a shitload of fun. The book relishes plunging from strange thing to strange thing in its mix of fantasy and post-apocalyptic salvaged/preserved tech: necrophages, super amoebas, long expositions on duality. It shouldn't work and it almost doesn't (partly b/c the ideas at play aren't as richly layered as later works and the characters are a bit...thin). But, I dunno, my favorite Delaney book is Trouble on Triton, which is a character study in a utopian setting, this is a pulpy adventure yarn spiked with philosophy. What kept me engaged were Delaney's descriptions, which could be captivating as ever, not just in painting a mind picture but in communicating a way of seeing the world. I mean check out the arc of this paragraph:
"Geo flung his eyes up and tried in one moment to envelop whatever he saw, whatever it would be. Beneath the water's roar was a still tide of quiet. Th pale sand along the naked crescent was dull at some depressions, mirror bright at certain rises. At the jungle's edge, leaves and fronds sped multi-textured green rippling along the foliage-heavy limbs. Each single fragment in that green tapestry hung up in the sun was one leaf, he reflected, with two sides, an entire system of skeleton and veins, as his arm had been. And maybe one day would drop off, too. He looked from rock to rock now. Each one was different, shaped and lined distinctly, but losing detail. That one there was like a bull's head half submerged; those two flat ones together on the sand looked like the stretched wings of eagles. And the waves, measured and magnificent, followed one another onto the sand, like the varying, never duplicated rhythm of a good poem: yet peaceful, ordered, and calm. He tried to pour the chaos of Urson drowning from his mind onto the water. It flowed into each glass-green trough that rode up to the still beach. He tried to spread the pain in his own body over the web of foam and shimmering green. And was surprised because it fit so easily, hung there well. Somewhere, a very real understanding was beginning to effloresce with the sea's water, under the heightening sun."
I've learned to prepare myself to be captivated --

[Skjam! · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the first novel by Samuel R. Delaney, published in 1967. He was one of the first successful African-American science fiction authors, as well as one of the first openly gay SF writers, and certainly the most successful person so far to be both. He’s associated with the New Wave movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, although this particular novel is closer to the old model of SF.

Geo, a poet, his sailor friend Urson, and a Strange One thief nicknamed Snake are recruited by the White Goddess Argo to travel to the semi-mythical island of Aptor and steal a jewel from the Dark God Hama. Along the way they are joined by another sailor, the “Negro” Iimmi who has been to Aptor before. Soon they are dealing with monsters, cults and ruined cities. And of course, the quartet has not been told the entire truth about just why Argo wants those jewels.

While the setting looks at first glance like fantasy, it is indeed science fiction, as is made clear by a ruined city with a cracked nuclear reactor in it. Some things don’t quite make sense in the history timeline, and that’s a plot point.

Some points in the novel are suggestive if one knows the author’s history; “Black Dude Dies First” is inverted, with the first person on the voyage to die being a pale-skinned man named “Whitey.” Iimmi turns out to be well-educated for a sailor, being on sabbatical from his college studies. And there’s a distinct lack of the kind of perfunctory hetero romance subplot that often got shoved into science fiction stories of the period.

Oh, there’s a pretty damsel, but by the time our heroes finally meet her, she’s in the middle of her own escape, not very much in distress at all. Much more time is spent on the men’s strong friendships. Still, most of the time it’s a fairly conventional fantastic adventure story. (You can even see traces of The Lord of the Rings.)

A confusing prologue is referred back to at the end, with a bit of the changes in thinking caused by paradigm shifts that would become a major theme of Mr. Delany’s work.

Like many first novels, it’s not quite up to the standards of the author’s later work, but it’s good of its kind and well worth looking up at your library.

[Jade · Rating 4 out of 5]

Let’s try this... a group of four need to recover magical stones that could destroy or save the world, and rescue a young goddess while they are at it... ok stones, end of world, not familiar to us at the moment at all, let’s go to the next description...
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After the Great Fire (read atomic bomb) there are two nations Leptar and Aptor. Leptar is known for worshipping the Goddess Argo and Aptor is inhospitable island harbouring the dark god Hama. Goddess Argo has been attempting to go to the island but after ten men and their limbs failed to get very far, she has resorted to blackmail and manipulative means to recruit a poet, the muscle, a four armed psychic and unbeknownst to her, a Black sailor who survived the first time, on a quest to hunt down the stones she craves and save the daughter she doesn’t seem to care about as much as the corrupting power of the stones.
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Ok, better, more descriptive but does it capture everything? No? Ok...
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On an island named Aptor, amidst vampiric birds, werewolves, corpse eating ape like creatures and an atomic blob zombie thing, and an ocean with ‘helpers’ that could be good or evil who can tell, an unlikely group has to hunt down a stone, they have two in their possession already but the four armed mind reader thief Snake, may or may not be a spy and he also happens to be the only one who can operate the magic contained in the stones, well except for that Goddess Argo but she doesn’t seem entirely good... also this weird contingent of Argo worshippers on Aptor seem very very evil indeed...and the goddess Argo daughter? Well she already has plans to rescue herself, thank you very much...also is anyone else picking up on the vibes between the two male ‘friends’ the poet Geo and the muscled sailor Urson? Oh and this Iimmi guy who conveniently washed up on shore and was one of the only survivors from the last voyage Argo tried to make, not suss at all...

This was Mr Delany's debut novel that he wrote as a teenager and if you can't tell by the above, I really enjoyed the reading experience. 4 stars

[Ştefan Tiron · Rating 4 out of 5]

SAMUEL R. DELANY'S FIRST NOVEL

I had the great chance to find this book at a hostel we were staying at during the summer trip to Connemara were you could pay an euro for any book or piece of clothing. It is nice to think of The Jewels of Aptor as book written by a barely 20-year-old writer who would become one of the giants of SF and in my view of English literature in general. Of course, it is much more readable than his later work. It was very, very good to hold in my hand an old pulp edition with a magnificent cover by Mick Posen with the distant gigantic shapes Aptor/City of Hope (looking something like Mega City One) in the middle of a forest and a gigantic figure of the God of Hama, and the white priestess or goddess looking in the distance with flattering hair.
As a Prelude to Delaney's œuvre - this book still emanates a precocious air of stylistic bravura, erotic charge, and a knack for unusual and highly refined turns of phrase, poems, as well as plenty of eerie and excellent otherworldly descriptions. The role of thd poet and storyteller is fundamental. The Jewels of Aptor is a cross-genre SFF that defies the usual strict Suvinian fantasy/SF definitions ( Metamorphoses of science fiction: On the poetics and history of a literary genre altough Darko Suvin has himself amended and relented with the years) and is a pulp postapocalyptic sea adventure of sorts maybe better described as a science fantasy. It is a world after the "Great Fire" where various monsters and mutants roam the land (telepathy, mind control, and what I would call "hivemindfullness" are major concerns of the book,) a landscape dotted by monasteries, crumbling temples, and various bizarre cults (former electrical plants - where Edison Company inscription are still visible) - pockmarked by uneven and combined development.
I found it similar to the worlds explored by Dying Earth or dying sun narratives (especially the magnificent The Book of the New Sun universe The Shadow of the Torturer and the later oeuvre of Gene Wolf, were incomprehensible high technology blends with magick. Tech in a distant future that is so sophisticated that it became undistinguishable from magic coexists with societies that seem ancient or premodern.

DISARMAMENT, COLD WAR AND CYCLICAL TECHNOLOGICAL ANNIHILATION

The novum of the book - "The Jewels of Aptor" -seems to combine various functions, they are both a weapon offering combustive power like the "fire metal" (uranium) but they also "infect" and give access to the minds of others and finally induce an apparently cyclical civilisational collapse to take place, according to a broken and almost irretrievable history. I say apparently cyclical bc - each time there is an amplification of destructive (and also benefic) power being unleashed akin to the Great Filter, the X-Risk (X-Risk: How Humanity Discovered Its Own Extinction seem to warn us about.
One has to read it a specific SF novel at the height of the Cold War, published in 1962. where often democracy, private propriety and rugged individualism (Irresistible Empire: America's Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe) seemed to co-exist and encourage the built-up of a huge destructive arsenals of ballistic weapons, and 'peaceful' atomic experimentation also involved hundreds of atomic experiments next to fragile anf often native American communities, desert dwellers ("downwinders"). In the shadow of big power rivalry there was no unalignement, everyone had to pitch and serve, or get portrayed either an enemy, a spy (the dreaded communist infiltrator) or a potential recruit for spreading democracy. I found it highly suggestive to read this early work of Delaney at the time when the Doomsday clock had been symbolically getting closer to midnight and when New Cold War fears were starting to dictate current foreign policy and cultural productions in many countries. Delaney was well aware of all these things, reflecting and responding to them. You can even anticipate the social and sensorial intricacies of Dhalgren, the way one can get pleasantly lost (like William Gibson wrote in one of the recent introductions to the book) in there, amidst dangerous and wondrous phenomena and encounters.

POETRY

There is poetic and highly evocative drive animating this whole book, its fragmentary recollections of our contemporary world, but from a future and almost legendary perspective. Don't expect gee-whiz technologies, but expect exellent fragments detailing the new taxonomy and metabolic prolixity of the future:

"As they turned it emerged under the white and flaring lamps. Translucent insides bubble-pocked and quivering, it slopped forward, across the road, toward the skeletons. Impaling itself on the bones, it flowed around them, covered them, molded to them. A final surge, and its shapelessness contracted into arms, head, legs. The naked man-thing pushed itself to its knees and then stood, its flesh now opaque. Eye sockets caved into the face. A mouth ripped low on the skull, and the chest began to move. A wet, steamy sound came from the mouth hole in regular gasps."

It is also a story about camaraderie and fellowship and collective struggle in the midst of a technologically advanced world, and also in a society where religion somehow intertwines, manipulates, and even embraces technological advancement (altough not cosmological advancement - maybe similar to the intrusive magisterium in La Belle Sauvage). We were raised to think that in a world saturated by tech (and Big Tech at that) , we would like have a modernized secularized one and we have ample proof that science that doesn't follow the economic or political imperatives will be instantly demoted and defunded. Throughout the XX c science as an enterprise has been bound to the production of wealth (and one might say concentration and inequality) and projection of power.

[Jason · Rating 3 out of 5]

At the young age of 20, classic science fiction author Samuel R. Delany wrote his first novel. The Jewels of Aptor proved to be an auspicious beginning. Post-apocalypse fiction is nothing new and it probably started as a literary reaction to the Cold War in the years right after the nuclear bombing of Japan at the end of World War II. Fantasy fiction is nothing new either. Who knows when that genre actually began. Was it The Epic of Gilgamesh or the Egyptian Book Of the Dead? It was definitely something ancient. I imagine the fantasy genre as we know it today also took off in popularity during the Cold War as a means of escapism from the perceived threat of nuclear war. The ever-innovative Delany ties the two concepts together in this short debut.

The tone and framing of the story are set in the opening chapter when a female student and her teacher sit on a beach discussing religious concepts of good and evil, the Taoist symbol of yin and yang, and the art of Da Vinci depicting both the ugliness of Christ’s crucifixion and the beauty of the Mona Lisa. The identity of the girl and her teacher and the significance of the beach become more relevant towards the latter parts of the story. The theme of the co-existence and interdependence of good and evil, light and dark, is primed to be its meaning, at least theoretically.

The novel quickly shifts to the wharf of a seaside city named Leptor where we get introduced to the main characters. Geo, a poet and a student, is walking at night with his friend Urson, a large sized man, when a young boy tries to rob them. After that incident. They get hired for a mission on a ship called the Argo which is probably a reference to the Greek mythological poem The Voyage Of the Argos. The young thief, who has an extra set of arms and no tongue, gets hired as their companion after agreeing to work with them instead of against them. The thief, who cannot talk but can communicate with telepathy, is given the name Snake. The priestess who hires the group sends them on to retrieve her daughter, named Argo, supposedly being held captive on Aptor by Hama, a rival religious group. They are also assigned to steal a jewel from the temple where she is being held. The priestess of Argo is in possession of a jewel that comes from a set of three. Another one belongs to Geo, and the third is the one she is after. Possessing all three simultaneously will give her ultimate power. Sound familiar? I’m guessing that Tolkien’s The Lord Of the Rings is a major influence on this novel.

One major line that the story follows is that of solving the mystery of what exactly is going on. Who the priestess and Snake are, why Snake’s tongue was cut out, and why so few people ever return from Aptor alive are used as literary hooks to engage the reader. The other major line the novel follows is that of finding the temple where the daughter and the jewel are kept; from that angle the story is mostly just fantasy, action, and adventure, a lot like the exotic fantasy/sci-fi stories that appeared in pulp magazines during the Golden Age of science fiction. After sailors on the Argo start getting murdered, Geo, Urson, and Snake escape from the ship and land on Aptor where they meet a Black man named Iimmi on the beach. Aside from simply adding another member to the group, it isn’t obvious why Iimmi is included in the story. He doesn’t do anything that couldn’t be done by the others and he doesn’t detract from the story either. He simply just seems to be an extra character. The fact that he is Black doesn’t carry any obvious meaning either as the book isn’t really about racial relations. All I think is that Samuel R. Delany is African-American and wanted to include a Black character for that reason, even if Iimmi is just an arbitrary one. Anyhow, he gets along perfectly well with the other three so maybe that is the whole point.

What happens throughout the rest of the book is mostly action, pure and simple. The world of this novel is a post-apocalyptic one where civilization had been destroyed leaving only traces of things like crashed airplanes, burned out cities, and nuclear waste, all of which are present on Aptor. Nobody knows precisely what happened although it is suggested it was nuclear war, something that caused surviving people and animals to mutate in all kinds of fantastic directions. So as the band of men hack their way through the lush jungle, they encounter the ruins of that past civilization, fighting off all kinds of monsters and befriending some others.

When they enter a derelict city, they get contaminated by radiation then get rescued by a religious order made up entirely of blind women clothed in white. The females imprison them, but they plan to escape after learning the priestess intends to sacrifice them to their goddess. As interesting as this passage may be, I found a flaw that I couldn’t square with the rest of the story. The women in the temple heal the wounds the men receive after being exposed to radiation and I wonder why they do this considering their ultimate plan is to kill them. Furthermore, Geo and Iimmi are both scholars of the same religion so the temple women allowed them to read the manuscripts they keep in their library. Those two things don’t add up in light of what they intended to do with the men. Is this the yin circle inside the yang, or can it just be written off as short sightedness on the part of the author who was 20 at the time of writing? My guess is that it is the latter.

After escaping, the small band of scholar-adventurers wind up in another temple, this time inhabited entirely by men wearing black robes. Well, almost entirely since there is one female there. And guess who she is. Upon their return to the ship of Argo, all the mysteries are solved, all the questions are answered, and all the meanings are explained. That last aspect is a little weak since the meaning of the whole book is about a religious, mystical insight involving the island of Aptor, but that insight isn’t especially profound. Older, experienced readers won’t be impressed. This novel doesn’t offer anything as mind-blowing as the works of William Blake. If you want to approach that level, I would advise you to check out the later novels of Samuel R. Delany which do go pretty deep.

As juvenile as the whole story may be, this first novel does have a lot to offer. Delany’s ability to describe imaginary places and creatures so vividly is far beyond the ability of most writers of fiction, possibly even genius. Aside from top quality world building, the character development is of a high standard as well. Once the characters are introduced, it is impossible to forget them. But the story does start to drag about the time the group reaches the temple of Hama on Aptor, mostly because there is so much action paired with so little meaning in a novel that starts off promising loads of symbolism and mystical insight, but later becoming obvious that it is unable to deliver on those points. Also the plot hooks are introduced effectively, but lack originality; you can imagine this stylistic element being inspired by Delany reading detective novels while in high school. That’s not necessarily bad; it’s just that it marks the writing out as the work of a naive artist. It almost gives the impression you might get from the plot development of a Scooby Doo episode.

One interesting thing to note is the parallels between this early novel and Delany’s later magnum opus Dhalgren. The poet and group leader Geo easily corresponds to the poet and gang leader Kid in that novel. Urson also bears a strong resemblance to the character Nightmare. The ambiguous identity of Snake is a theme that crops up all over Dhalgren while the student and goddess incarnate Argo, being held in the temple of Hama bears a resemblance to the reanaissance woman Lanya. The three jewels that can be used as both weapons and lights are a little like the strings of jewels worn by some characters in Dhalgren. And the post-apocalyptic city on Aptor is a pre-configuration of Bellona.

Despite its flaws, The Jewels of Aptor is a fun novel to read and fans of Samuel R. Delany’s later works will find it interesting because a few of its elements show up in his later works. It doesn’t embody any profound or meaningful ideas, but the author obviously tried. For a 20 year old, this actually is a major accomplishment. I’ve taught college level writing courses myself and I don’t want to discourage anybody by saying this, but I have never had a student who showed as much promise as an author at that age than Delany did in this novel. He must have been born with a natural talent.

[Eleanor]

Please note that I do not believe it is possible to “spoil” a book that is old enough to have a senior citizens’ bus pass, but the following makes details of the plot explicit.

The Jewels of Aptor is the first published novel of Samuel R. Delany, a Black, openly queer pioneer of science fiction who is still producing work (albeit less sci fi now, more literary criticism and gay pornography). He is a living legend. If you’ve never heard of him, let me strongly recommend this recent New Yorker profile to give you a sense of the man and his writing. I’ve only read one novel by him previously, the slim but packed-full-of-ideas-and-I-really-must-reread-it linguistic space opera Babel-17. The Jewels of Aptor was published when he was still in his teens, but contains within it some extraordinarily beautiful passages of writing, and casually groundbreaking characterisation. That’s one of the fun things about Delany: how he does what he does without signposting it or grandstanding about it. As if it is the most natural thing in the world.

The plot, such as it is, revolves around the titular jewels, which—sort of like another famous fantasy accessory—grant their bearers immense powers of mind control and elemental destructiveness while also corrupting the soul. Poet Geo and his gigantic companion Urson are tasked by the human avatar of the White Goddess Argo to rescue her kidnapped sister from the menacing island-nation Aptor and to steal the final jewel from Aptor’s god, Argo’s opposing force, the Black God Hama. They are joined by a mute, four-armed teenager with telepathic powers, known as Snake, and a black sailor named Iimmi. As they journey across Aptor, they encounter strange creatures—werewolves, murderous bat-people, enigmatically helpful merfolk, and a giant sentient slime-mould—which, it becomes clear to the reader, are mutations created in consequence of nuclear fallout. In Geo and Urson’s home country, Leptar, there are also mutations, although everyone still looks humanoid; mutants are referred to as Strange Ones, and Snake’s four arms mark him as one of them.

So we’re dealing here with the medieval-feeling-fantasy-world-that-is-actually-post-apocalyptic, a setting that I enjoy enormously (for other instances, see Robert Harris’s The Second Sleep, N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season, Leigh Brackett’s The Long Tomorrow, and Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun, inter alia). Delany’s characters are aware of something they refer to as the Great Fire, a rain of ash and flame that killed most life, but there’s little in the way of culture shock when Geo, Urson and co. reach Aptor and see things like video screens, microphones, and the ruins of a nuclear research facility. They simply fit these phenomena into forms they can understand (uranium is fire metal, the video screens are large slabs of glass that contain moving images) and carry on. This feels like a key to Delany’s project here and as a whole: the astonishing simply absorbed, folded, into the everyday, and the everyday containing the astonishing. Does it not make sense, after all, that people who believe in gods and magic would actually have little difficulty accepting the existence of diodes, broadcast technology, and radiation?

Delany once said something about how plot doesn’t much matter, except as it arises from characters, and indeed the plot here is a bit thin. The characters, however, are quietly revelatory. Geo, for example, is exposed to high levels of radiation while in Aptor and has an arm amputated. His sudden disability is something he adapts to, for which other characters readily make accommodations (Urson helps him when they have to climb a mountain, reminding him that he doesn’t need to push himself to exhaustion; the others will match his pace). There’s a moment near the end where the idea of a “miracle cure” to replace his arm is treated more as an amusing fancy than a definite, desirable goal; Geo will probably have one arm forever, and that will be just fine. Iimmi, meanwhile, is repeatedly described as dark-skinned (as is the avatar of the god Hama, who turns out not to be a villain at all), and is a full member of the group—not a supporting character or a sidekick, but an active decision-maker, a participant, adventurer and game-changer who knows more about the mythology and history they’re dealing with than any of them. Four-armed, tongueless Snake is just as much a comrade: they fight to protect him, and he fights to protect them. When Urson dies, Snake conveys his final thoughts to Geo: they are of love, cementing the homoerotic hints about the nature of Urson’s and Geo’s relationship that have been scattered throughout the novel. Young Argo, the supposedly kidnapped sister, is actually studying electrical engineering in the monastery of Hama, and functionally rescues herself; the novel’s final scene shows her constructing a basic motor. I think a novel published in 2023 that built a team out of queer men, disabled people, people of colour, and young female scientists would be considered fairly progressive. Delany is doing it [checks math] sixty-one years ago, with the utmost casualness.

The Jewels of Aptor is a short, but thoroughly delightful, reading experience. Delany’s writing is simply beautiful, and some of his most poetic passages are scene-setting, though he never lets it go on too long—a paragraph, generally, at most. I’ll leave you with his description of what the group sees when they look down into the crater of a volcano:

Gold dribbled the internal slope. Tongues of red rock lapped the sides, and the swirling white basin belched brown blobs of smoke which rose up the far rocks and spilled over the brim a radion away. Light leapt in wavering pylons of blue flame, then sank back into the pit. Winding trails of light webbed the crater’s walls, and at places ebon cavities jeweled among the light.
chapter IX

“Ebon cavities jeweled”. Just lovely.

Read for the #1962club, run by Kaggsy and Simon.

[Simon · Rating 2 out of 5]

I do not think this was a great introduction to Delany. Reputedly one of the greats of the genre and I've only now gotten around to trying one of his works.

This is one of those far future/post apocalyptic SF stories where knowledge and understanding has declined leaving the populace in a faux medieval condition. Relics of their technological past linger but are indistinguishable from magical artefacts as far as most of the populace are concerned.

There was also quite an emphasis on the philosophical musings of the main characters that is, I guess, indicative of the time in which this novel emerged (late 60's) but for me this came across as largely superfluous to the story, nor did it particularly help develop the characters, or even interest me in its own right. But when you take that out, there's not much left underneath. Just a meandering, baffling adventure story with thin characters traversing and admittedly striking landscape.

I won't let this put me off reading more Delany but I will definitely wait until I find one of his more highly recommended novels.

[Gabriel · Rating 4 out of 5]

In a few ways, this reads like a first novel. In a few ways, this reads like a Delany novel. It's never fully in one camp or the other, and that's part of the charm. It's a fun little adventure with a little theology and brain science thrown in. Very much akin to Babel 17 in that manner, although Babel 17 showed Delany playing with language a little more.

The other comparison point for Delany readers is Nova. both are first and foremost adventure novels. The only difference being that Nova is considered with space travel and Jewels is fantasy. Overall, the genre is not what is important. It's just window dressing.

This, being his first book, is a rather nice entry point to his writing style(s) and the intricacies of plotting he has in his books. It's also nice because it is so traditional in so many ways. Overall, very enjoyable and a great little read. Great to just relax.

[Jon · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not bad for a debut, but hard to get into. It's a straightforward adventure story in the setting of a post-apocalyptic earth, so it feels more fantasy than science fiction for about the first half of the novel. There are some imaginative concepts and the philosophical premise is the duality of man/life, which I suppose is executed well enough.

The characters kept me from enjoying this one more. Their motivations for going on the quest are fairly weak to begin with, but it was their actions and reactions that didn't always make sense. Nothing ever daunted them. One character lost an arm/part of an arm and barely reacted to the news, and outside mentioning the stump a few times, it never seemed to really affect or limit him the rest of the journey.

While I didn't care for this story, there was enough here for me to continue with Delany's work. He's a famous name in the classic science fiction world and I'm looking forward to reading his better writings.

[Rebecca · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was amazing. The setting was beautifully realised and amazingly not dated even though it was written so long ago. I almost want to read it all over again to pick out the nuances I missed the first time. I didn't quite get the ending, but I think on a later reread it'll make more sense. I cannot recommend this book highly enough, and it's a free e-book on Project Gutenberg, so if you have an e-Reader, you have no excuse.