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Voyage, Orestes!
Fiction. VOYAGE, ORESTES! is a survivor. The original manuscript, completed the day before JFK's assassination, was 1000+ pages. Much of this autobiographical novel was lost when a building was pulled down on top of it. The episodes here, which stand on their own very well, tell the story of Jimmy Calvin, some of his travels, his dealing with family struggles and having adventures with his friend Geo, a poet, in the company of musicians, street people, thieves and more.
- GenresFiction
229 pages, Paperback
Published April 19, 2019
1 person is currently reading
51 people want to read
About the author
Samuel R. Delany
289 books2,239 followersSamuel Ray Delany, also known as "Chip," is an award-winning American science fiction author. He was born to a prominent black family on April 1, 1942, and raised in Harlem. His mother, Margaret Carey Boyd Delany, was a library clerk in the New York Public Library system. His father, Samuel Ray Delany, Senior, ran a successful Harlem undertaking establishment, Levy & Delany Funeral Home, on 7th Avenue, between 1938 and his death in 1960. The family lived in the top two floors of the three-story private house between five- and six-story Harlem apartment buildings. Delany's aunts were Sadie and Bessie Delany; Delany used some of their adventures as the basis for the adventures of his characters Elsie and Corry in the opening novella Atlantis: Model 1924 in his book of largely autobiographical stories Atlantis: Three Tales.
Delany attended the Dalton School and the Bronx High School of Science, during which he was selected to attend Camp Rising Sun, the Louis August Jonas Foundation's international summer scholarship program. Delany and poet Marilyn Hacker met in high school, and were married in 1961. Their marriage lasted nineteen years. They had a daughter, Iva Hacker-Delany (b. 1974), who spent a decade working in theater in New York City.
Delany was a published science fiction author by the age of 20. He published nine well-regarded science fiction novels between 1962 and 1968, as well as several prize-winning short stories (collected in Driftglass [1971] and more recently in Aye, and Gomorrah, and other stories [2002]). His eleventh and most popular novel, Dhalgren, was published in 1975. His main literary project through the late 1970s and 1980s was the Return to Nevèrÿon series, the overall title of the four volumes and also the title of the fourth and final book.
Delany has published several autobiographical/semi-autobiographical accounts of his life as a black, gay, and highly dyslexic writer, including his Hugo award winning autobiography, The Motion of Light in Water.
Since 1988, Delany has been a professor at several universities. This includes eleven years as a professor of comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, a year and a half as an English professor at the University at Buffalo. He then moved to the English Department of Temple University in 2001, where he has been teaching since. He has had several visiting guest professorships before and during these same years. He has also published several books of criticism, interviews, and essays. In one of his non-fiction books, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999), he draws on personal experience to examine the relationship between the effort to redevelop Times Square and the public sex lives of working-class men, gay and straight, in New York City.
In 2007, Delany was the subject of a documentary film, The Polymath, or, The Life and Opinions of Samuel R. Delany, Gentleman. The film debuted on April 25 at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival.
Delany attended the Dalton School and the Bronx High School of Science, during which he was selected to attend Camp Rising Sun, the Louis August Jonas Foundation's international summer scholarship program. Delany and poet Marilyn Hacker met in high school, and were married in 1961. Their marriage lasted nineteen years. They had a daughter, Iva Hacker-Delany (b. 1974), who spent a decade working in theater in New York City.
Delany was a published science fiction author by the age of 20. He published nine well-regarded science fiction novels between 1962 and 1968, as well as several prize-winning short stories (collected in Driftglass [1971] and more recently in Aye, and Gomorrah, and other stories [2002]). His eleventh and most popular novel, Dhalgren, was published in 1975. His main literary project through the late 1970s and 1980s was the Return to Nevèrÿon series, the overall title of the four volumes and also the title of the fourth and final book.
Delany has published several autobiographical/semi-autobiographical accounts of his life as a black, gay, and highly dyslexic writer, including his Hugo award winning autobiography, The Motion of Light in Water.
Since 1988, Delany has been a professor at several universities. This includes eleven years as a professor of comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, a year and a half as an English professor at the University at Buffalo. He then moved to the English Department of Temple University in 2001, where he has been teaching since. He has had several visiting guest professorships before and during these same years. He has also published several books of criticism, interviews, and essays. In one of his non-fiction books, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999), he draws on personal experience to examine the relationship between the effort to redevelop Times Square and the public sex lives of working-class men, gay and straight, in New York City.
In 2007, Delany was the subject of a documentary film, The Polymath, or, The Life and Opinions of Samuel R. Delany, Gentleman. The film debuted on April 25 at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
April 26, 2019
During his late teen, early 20ish years, in which Samuel R. Delany wrote and published his first few science fiction novels, he also wrote several "mainstream" (mimetic, bourgeois) novels, which have, for better or for worse, been lost to posterity.
Except for this bit.
The hundred eighty pages of text published here for the first time represent a section from towards the beginning of a massive (_Dhalgren_-sized at 1056 ms pages) novel whose genesis is described in some detail, but in no really full form, in _In Search of Silence_ (the first published volume of Delany's journals) and _The Motion of Light in Water_ (a memoir of those years). Despite the destruction of both the carbon (in a buried file cabinet) and the top copy (in a box lost during the relocation of Delany's agent), this chunk turned up many years later in the posession of a friend-and-mentor of Delany's, Bernard Kay.
Those previously-published notes gave me no real sense of the novel's overall shape. Nor does this fragment, though I suspect that, armed with it I could return to the journals and figure out more than I know now. What we have, then, is an almost pure artifact of words and sentences - always Delany's great strength as a writer - from which emerge some characters, some incidents.
In the fragment, the narrator - Jimmy Calvin - returns from a solo trip to New England he took to escape from the pressures of his family. His father, an undertaker, is dying of lung cancer, and in fact dies shortly after Jimmy's return. Over the course of a few days, Jimmy meets up with some old friends, makes a few new ones, and (off-page) attends his father's funeral.Then, with some of these friends, is just setting out for Harvard, for a "hootenanny", when the fragment comes abruptly to an end,
Well, it _is_ a fragment.
A few things fascinate this longtime follower of Delany's work.
1) The near-autobiographical similarity of Jimmy Calvin to the young Chip Delany. There are major differences, but this is definitely a case of "write what you know best."
2) What I can only call _sideshadowing_ of Delany's simultaneously-written (and more commercially-successful) science fiction works. The source of the title "The Fall of the Towers" is rehearsed here, as the inspiration for a poem-cycle by Jimmy's friend Geo Keller. Names like Geo and Jimmy (= Iimmi) and especially Snake, a young man whose tongue has been cut out, resonate from _The Jewels of Aptor_. And many smaller details surface that resonate with details from those early books.
3) One thing I _did_ successfully gather from the journals, which this fragment reinforces, is how heavily architected the novel would have been had it survived, in the manner of _Fall of the Towers_ (and, to a lesser extent, of _Dhalgren_). Characters come and go in patterns, incidents reflect one another both synchronically and diachronically, words pick up charges of "meaning" ("significance") and then lend those charges to their later reappearances.
In a way we have, here, a glimpse of an "alternate" Delany.
At the end of _Motion_, Delany ponders on the question of where his life is taking him. Is he going to pursue writing (perforce science fiction, since that's where he's finding success)? Commit full time to folk music (where he had had some moderate success in the Village coffeehouses)?
In an only slightly alternate world, _Voyage, Orestes!_ would have been published by a major house in 1964 or so, and our hypothetical Delany would have had a third career direction to consider seriously. That third choice followed would have led to a very different Delany of today indeed; one whose early SF novels would be considered juvenilia, and _Voyage_ would be considered his first "serious" work. Such a Delany might have produced some mighty fine novels - but even in the realm of mimesis, I doubt very much that we would have anything to match _Dark Reflections_ or _Atlantis: Three Tales_.
None of which matters, of course. What happened, happened, and the world, whatever other books we may be poorer by, is richer by the few dozen books the real Delany really wrote and published.
And, yes, by this fragment.
Except for this bit.
The hundred eighty pages of text published here for the first time represent a section from towards the beginning of a massive (_Dhalgren_-sized at 1056 ms pages) novel whose genesis is described in some detail, but in no really full form, in _In Search of Silence_ (the first published volume of Delany's journals) and _The Motion of Light in Water_ (a memoir of those years). Despite the destruction of both the carbon (in a buried file cabinet) and the top copy (in a box lost during the relocation of Delany's agent), this chunk turned up many years later in the posession of a friend-and-mentor of Delany's, Bernard Kay.
Those previously-published notes gave me no real sense of the novel's overall shape. Nor does this fragment, though I suspect that, armed with it I could return to the journals and figure out more than I know now. What we have, then, is an almost pure artifact of words and sentences - always Delany's great strength as a writer - from which emerge some characters, some incidents.
In the fragment, the narrator - Jimmy Calvin - returns from a solo trip to New England he took to escape from the pressures of his family. His father, an undertaker, is dying of lung cancer, and in fact dies shortly after Jimmy's return. Over the course of a few days, Jimmy meets up with some old friends, makes a few new ones, and (off-page) attends his father's funeral.Then, with some of these friends, is just setting out for Harvard, for a "hootenanny", when the fragment comes abruptly to an end,
Well, it _is_ a fragment.
A few things fascinate this longtime follower of Delany's work.
1) The near-autobiographical similarity of Jimmy Calvin to the young Chip Delany. There are major differences, but this is definitely a case of "write what you know best."
2) What I can only call _sideshadowing_ of Delany's simultaneously-written (and more commercially-successful) science fiction works. The source of the title "The Fall of the Towers" is rehearsed here, as the inspiration for a poem-cycle by Jimmy's friend Geo Keller. Names like Geo and Jimmy (= Iimmi) and especially Snake, a young man whose tongue has been cut out, resonate from _The Jewels of Aptor_. And many smaller details surface that resonate with details from those early books.
3) One thing I _did_ successfully gather from the journals, which this fragment reinforces, is how heavily architected the novel would have been had it survived, in the manner of _Fall of the Towers_ (and, to a lesser extent, of _Dhalgren_). Characters come and go in patterns, incidents reflect one another both synchronically and diachronically, words pick up charges of "meaning" ("significance") and then lend those charges to their later reappearances.
In a way we have, here, a glimpse of an "alternate" Delany.
At the end of _Motion_, Delany ponders on the question of where his life is taking him. Is he going to pursue writing (perforce science fiction, since that's where he's finding success)? Commit full time to folk music (where he had had some moderate success in the Village coffeehouses)?
In an only slightly alternate world, _Voyage, Orestes!_ would have been published by a major house in 1964 or so, and our hypothetical Delany would have had a third career direction to consider seriously. That third choice followed would have led to a very different Delany of today indeed; one whose early SF novels would be considered juvenilia, and _Voyage_ would be considered his first "serious" work. Such a Delany might have produced some mighty fine novels - but even in the realm of mimesis, I doubt very much that we would have anything to match _Dark Reflections_ or _Atlantis: Three Tales_.
None of which matters, of course. What happened, happened, and the world, whatever other books we may be poorer by, is richer by the few dozen books the real Delany really wrote and published.
And, yes, by this fragment.
Currently reading
May 8, 2021This book has been in my Amazon shopping cart for a long time. Delany is one of my favorite writers and this novel fragment is from very early on in his career when he was winning lots of SF awards. It is mundane fiction, though. But in all fairness, nothing Delany could write would be considered mundane in the popular sense of the word. I'm glad I finally ordered it. When I received it last night, the first thing I noticed is the long introduction by Kenneth R. James taking up about 1/5 of the book. I don't know what it is about introductions for me, but when I get a book with an introduction I have a tendency to read it, even if I have no intention of reading the rest of the book right then. James is the editor of Delany's collected journals, the first volume of which came out in 2017. This gives him the unenviable task of referencing himself throughout the introduction in the footnotes.
Anyway, I wondered what fueled such a long introduction to a novel fragment and dove right in, thinking, as usual, I might just read it and maybe even only just a few pages, given the length of it. But I immediately got hooked. James does a wonderful job of putting the fragment into context with the rest of Delany's work from the time period (his 1st four novels), what was going on at the time and what came directly after (The Civil Rights Act [1960 and 1964- the novel was completed just before the 2nd], women's lib, the civil rights movement, and the Stonewall riots at the end of the decade. The novel takes place in NYC and "takes a young man, 19, through a series of interlocking adventures the subject of which is the conflict between the myths of society concerning Negroes, Artists and Women." (p. 14) And so, we learn just how much was lost when the two existing manuscripts of this novel were lost. I can't imagine I will put this down until I've read the fragment as well, so I can get a glimpse of what this novel might have contained. I'll complete this review when I finish the book.
From the introduction, it's pretty clear this novel was close to the level of Dhalgren. It was longer. Given its subject matter, that makes it an incredible loss. We can only hope someday one of the manuscripts resurfaces, as this fragment did. I think it would very much speak to the things we are facing today with George Floyd and anti-racism.
This book is making me realize I grew up in an alternate America from that of a lot others because of what I chose to read. I was in maybe 10th grade when I read Nova. Delany became my favorite writer very quickly after that. I read everything that came before Nova and Triton and Dhalgren in the next couple of years. at the same time as I was doing this, I also recognized how dominant male writers were in Science Fiction and made sure I read a good number of female writers like Ursula Le Guin, Marion Zimmer Bradley and Joanna Russ. So, I was reading a mixture of new wave writers, feminist writers, minority writers, gay writers during the late 70's and early 80's. I also got into the Strugatsky brothers in the beginning of the 80's. It never occurred to me as I was reading Delany's books with Asian, female, transgender, gay and black protagonists that it was unusual, but it mentions in the introduction these were not easy books to get published when they came out. It never occurred to me that my reading list was more diverse than most people's, but it seems it was.
Anyway, I wondered what fueled such a long introduction to a novel fragment and dove right in, thinking, as usual, I might just read it and maybe even only just a few pages, given the length of it. But I immediately got hooked. James does a wonderful job of putting the fragment into context with the rest of Delany's work from the time period (his 1st four novels), what was going on at the time and what came directly after (The Civil Rights Act [1960 and 1964- the novel was completed just before the 2nd], women's lib, the civil rights movement, and the Stonewall riots at the end of the decade. The novel takes place in NYC and "takes a young man, 19, through a series of interlocking adventures the subject of which is the conflict between the myths of society concerning Negroes, Artists and Women." (p. 14) And so, we learn just how much was lost when the two existing manuscripts of this novel were lost. I can't imagine I will put this down until I've read the fragment as well, so I can get a glimpse of what this novel might have contained. I'll complete this review when I finish the book.
From the introduction, it's pretty clear this novel was close to the level of Dhalgren. It was longer. Given its subject matter, that makes it an incredible loss. We can only hope someday one of the manuscripts resurfaces, as this fragment did. I think it would very much speak to the things we are facing today with George Floyd and anti-racism.
This book is making me realize I grew up in an alternate America from that of a lot others because of what I chose to read. I was in maybe 10th grade when I read Nova. Delany became my favorite writer very quickly after that. I read everything that came before Nova and Triton and Dhalgren in the next couple of years. at the same time as I was doing this, I also recognized how dominant male writers were in Science Fiction and made sure I read a good number of female writers like Ursula Le Guin, Marion Zimmer Bradley and Joanna Russ. So, I was reading a mixture of new wave writers, feminist writers, minority writers, gay writers during the late 70's and early 80's. I also got into the Strugatsky brothers in the beginning of the 80's. It never occurred to me as I was reading Delany's books with Asian, female, transgender, gay and black protagonists that it was unusual, but it mentions in the introduction these were not easy books to get published when they came out. It never occurred to me that my reading list was more diverse than most people's, but it seems it was.
November 10, 2024
One of the great what ifs. What if 18 year-old Delany's 1000 page realist novel had been picked up? What if the high literary world had taken seriously a wildly talented queer, black polymath and this drops the same year as novels by Vonnegut, Pynchon, Didion, Sontag, and Ballard? Instead the copies of the MS were lost--one in a building demolition, one misplaced by a publisher during a move.
Instead, what we get is this fragment from a notebook published decades later. Yeah, yeah, some passages need editing and who needs the Delany character complaining about Marilyn's inability to do housework for 2 pages? But in just over a hundred pages VO delivers two memorable arc: Delany's father's slow death: the indignities of his hospitalization, the grief rippling through his family, and the MC's avoidance of it all; the anarchic mob of teens rambling through New York, casually beating up a cop, and wondering through a block of building rubble burning (the visceral reality of 'urban renewal').
Instead, what we get is this fragment from a notebook published decades later. Yeah, yeah, some passages need editing and who needs the Delany character complaining about Marilyn's inability to do housework for 2 pages? But in just over a hundred pages VO delivers two memorable arc: Delany's father's slow death: the indignities of his hospitalization, the grief rippling through his family, and the MC's avoidance of it all; the anarchic mob of teens rambling through New York, casually beating up a cop, and wondering through a block of building rubble burning (the visceral reality of 'urban renewal').
February 19, 2020
Not really a four star. Just because I love Delany, and as a Delany fan, reading these fragments of a long lost book was a treat. And very interesting, given that you can see the similarities to Delany's other books.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews