Quark/4

by Samuel R. Delany (Editor, Foreword), Marilyn Hacker (Editor, Foreword), Thomas M. Disch (Contributor)

• On Speculative Fiction by Samuel R. Delany and Marilyn Hacker
• Basileikon: Summer by Avram Davidson
• Voortrekker by Michael Moorcock
• Brass and Gold by Philip José Farmer
• The Song of Passing by Marco Cacchioni
• Norman Vs. America by Charles Platt
• The True Reason for the Dreadful Death of Mr. Rex Arundel by Helen Adam
• Acid Soap Opera by Gail Madonia
• Bodies by Thomas M. Disch
• Nightsong by Marilyn Hacker
• Cages by Vonda N. McIntyre
• A Man of Letters by Marek Obtulowicz
• The Fourth Profession by Larry Niven

Genres: Science Fiction

240 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 1971

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

[Reader · Rating 2 out of 5]

Here's another PSA for future SF readers - is this book worth reading? Let's check it out...

The intro is a bunch of fancy mathy talk about language and blah blah blah it's not insightful or interesting at all.

Basileikon: Summer by Avram Davidson is the worst thing I've ever read from him so far - usually his work is great! But this is just a bunch of disjointed vignettes loaded with overtly sexual language and depictions of mundanity that he likely intended to be cooler because of the risque language. And it's punctuated with these lame letters to the editor type back and forths that do nothing for the piece. Awful. 1 star.

Voortrekker is obtuse and extremely dense. It's some sort of loose commentary on the Vietnam War and/or revolution, but it's hard to tell. The text is interspersed with song titles and snippets from magazines and other books. It probably felt important at the time. Now it just smacks of irrelevance and meaninglessness. It's really just a meandering nonsensical mess where it's impossible to feel anything for the vague vague characters. 1 star.

Brass and Gold by Philip Jose Farmer is a good story but not really much in the way of SF, Sci Fi or speculative, for that matter. PJF can write incredibly though. There are characters here that one can't help but feel for and a story that's intriguing, but in the end it kind of fizzles out without doing a whole lot. Kind of just a regular short fiction tale. 3 stars.

Next is a random poem not mentioned in the TOC. Unnecessary. 0 stars.

Following this is Norman vs. America which is actually a Choose Your Own Adventure style comic! This was pretty cool, albeit rather dark befitting the time it was written. Your first choice is whether to become a student revolutionary or join the silent majority. If you know your late 60's early 70's history that should give you kind of an idea where this is headed. Even though this was bleak and demented it was pretty fun. 4 stars.

Helen Adam's The True Reason for the Dreadful Death of Mr. Rex Arundel is next and feels like it could have been written by Poe. The writing is a bit dry, but it's well done. It details a couple introverted people who hate the people that bully them and a magic window that allows them to exact revenge. It's more on the fantasy/fiction side of things and it's pretty obvious, but it wasn't bad. Just not really necessary or exciting. 3 stars.

Acid Soap Opera could have been good, but it didn't really cohere into anything substantial. It was written well with great use of language, but it was just a bunch of disjointed fragments. Am I sensing a pattern in what the editors were looking for? 2 stars.

Bodies by Thomas Disch is from his novel which came out the next year (1972) called 334. I remember being disappointed by that novel so I avoided a reread here.

The short poem Nightsong by Marilyn Hacker follows Disch and is unremarkable. It does however, have one phrase I got a kick out of which I will repeat here: "anal gravy." Make of that what you will. 2 stars.

Cages by Vonda N. McIntyre is a spot-on darkly realistic speculative story about a pair of clones. What a doozy! Everything fits in place on this one. Just incredible. So far the only one from this collection I'd ever recommend to anyone. From what I can tell this was her 3rd story ever published! 5 stars.

A Man of Letters by Marek Obtulowicz is an intriguing tale. It concerns a man who is being kept in an apartment for mysterious reasons and it's all very vague. I want to like this one more but in the end it just remains unclear what the purpose of any of it was so it ultimately doesn't pay off. 3 stars.

The last story in this collection is The Fourth Profession by Larry Niven and it's a good one. It centers around a bartender who has taken some pills from an alien who visited his bar. It's highly original and a bit humorous. There's no way to know where this story is going and it's a fun ride to get there. Well done stuff. Niven proves his talent here big time. 4 stars.

Overall, I'd encourage someone to pick this up if they found it cheaply somewhere, but don't go hunting it down for inflated internet prices because most of it is not worth reading.

The best bits are Cages, The Fourth Profession and Norman vs. America. According to isfdb Cages is only collected in this book and does not appear anywhere else, which is a shame because that story blew all the others in this collection out of the water. It should have received more acclaim and I'm not sure why it didn't. Maybe because the rest of this book dragged it down. The only 2 stories worth anything are tucked away at the end! However, because of Cages (and the Niven story) this one will stay on my shelf.