The Novels of Samuel R. Delany Volume One: Babel-17, Nova, and Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand

by Samuel R. Delany

Three groundbreaking novels from the multiple Hugo and Nebula Award–winning Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Famer and SFWA Grand Master. Rydra Wong is the most popular poet in the five settled galaxies, capturing the mood of mankind after two decades of war. Now, a new weapon has been unleashed against humanity. Random attacks strike without warning, tied together by broadcast strings of sound. In that gibberish, Rydra recognizes a coherent language. To save her people, she must master this strange tongue, but the more she learns, the more she is tempted to join the other side, in this Nebula Award–winning novel.   The year is 3172. Two political families—the Earth-based galactic conglomerate Draco and the Pleiades Federation of the Von Ray Clan—vie for ultimate power. Both want to control the market for Illyrion, the element that makes interstellar travel possible. When a star implodes, tons of the priceless fuel is discovered floating in the wreckage. Now, in a race to claim it, Lorq Von Ray leads a crew of ragtag misfits into the heart of a dangerous nova . . .  Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Subjected to the Radical Anxiety Termination procedure, Korga is transformed into a dim-witted slave. Now known as Rat, Korga serves many masters—until the Cultural Fugue, a critical mass of shared knowledge, destroys his homeworld. Marq Dyeth is an “industrial diplomat,” who travels between worlds solving problems that come with the spread of “General Information.” Brought together by the organization known as the Web, Rat and Marq find themselves manipulated by an entity determined to control the flow of information.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction

830 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 3, 2017

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

[Silvana · Rating 2 out of 5]

Rating only applies to Babel-17.
Which was confusing.
I enjoyed some of the worldbuilding with the tripled marriage for navigation sake, discorporate crew members, and the 'language = thought' premise, but the writing is too messy and jumbled for me. At least it is a short one.

[J Endress · Rating 4 out of 5]

2 out of 3 ain’t bad.

Babel and Nova are rightly enshrined in Sci-Fi canon. They’re an absolute treat, with elements of Fantasy and the Golden Age of Piracy along with some solid Poe vibes. Comics like VS. and sprawling games like Dungeons and Dragons were made possible by great writers of genre-bending like Delany. Stars starts out compelling, and yes, predicted the internet in essentially its current form a decade before it was even a binary code in its creators’ eyes. But after the intro, it descends into a Victorian-like meditation on society, communication and cultural differences. It’s a slog, with dozens of awesome ideas and facets, but overall, a slog. Still, even a slog from Delany absolutely crushes most modern pop culture Sci-Fi. I put Artemis down ten pages in, Delany still held me through fussy interactions between disparate dignitary families. If you love Babel and Nova, you’ll probably stick around as well.

[jboyg · Rating 1 out of 5]

I don't know why--maybe because I am too dumb or too lazy--but I just can't read Delany. What is wrong with me? Anybody else have this problem? And I LOVE SF. PS: ignore my star rating, I didn't read these and don't know how to delete did reviews.

[Luke Dylan Ramsey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Babel-17 video review: https://youtu.be/Fj2-fvQOuv0