Conversations with Samuel R. Delany

by Carl Freedman (Editor), Carl Freedman (Editor)

A key figure in modern science fiction and fantasy, Samuel R. Delany (b. 1942) is also one of the most acclaimed figures in contemporary literary theory and gay/lesbian literature. As a gay African American writer, Delany's cerebral, experimental prose crosses lines of genre, gender, sexuality, and class. Several of his works-- Dhalgren, The Einstein Intersection, Babel-17, Stars in My Pocket like Grains of Sand , and the Nevèrÿon quartet are considered landmarks of "new wave" science fiction. His essays and critical works approach a wide variety of subjects from a perspective that is both resolutely philosophical and deeply provocative. Conversations with Samuel R. Delany collects interviews with the writer from 1980 to 2007. Delany considers the interview an especially fruitful form for the generation of ideas, and he has made it an integral part of his own work. In fact, two of his critical works are collections of interviews and correspondence. He insists that all interviews with him be written correspondence so that he is allowed the time and space to deliberate on each response. As a result, the conversations presented here are as rigorously constructed, elusive, and intellectually stimulating as his essays.

Genres: Nonfiction, LGBT, Philosophy

256 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Scribble Orca]

From the interview with Adam Roberts, 2003, pp117-118:

We love a sentence not so much for what it means so much as the manner and intensity with which it makes its meaning vivid.

People for whom the trick tends not to work are people who are just learning the language and/or have no literary background in any other language before they start...The vividness comes pretty much from a kind of surprise, the surprise from meeting a series of words that, one by one, at first seem to have nothing to do with the topic...some readers will find it will work, whereas others will find it only affected...we find it employed as a technique in the works of Thomas Middleton and Sir Thomas Browne, in Alfred Bester and Theodor Sturgeon, in Katherine McLean and John Updike, in Guy Davenport and Gene Garber, in Charlotte Bacon and Lucius Shephard and Rikki Ducornet.

...Keats is, after all, the master of accuracy and implication among the English Romantic Poets...working toward vivid immediacy...it works enough of the time to preserve it as a valued technique of the literary.

[Ezra · Rating 5 out of 5]

i cannot get enough of SRD. this book is worth it just for the cover. delany has an awesome, almost brutally advanced style of interview - they are all done by mail, and his responses often run to 5k or 10k words, as deep and intricate as any of his published essays. half the time he ends with the interviewer's implicit assumptions (about the roles of literature and paraliterature, politics and sexuality, etc etc etc) lying in tatters on the floor...

[Liquidlasagna · Rating 3 out of 5]

at last, you can read a semi-fascinating train wreck
who ends up getting more mellow and relaxed as time goes on

Jerry Seinfeld: And why is somebody merely holding one shoe?

[Lewis Manalo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really interesting look at racial politics, sexual politics, and the science fiction genre from one of the most entertaining and innovative authors writing today. I don't always agree with what he has to say, but it's always worth reading.

[Mills College Library]

813.54 D3379c 2009