Aye, and Gomorrah

by Samuel R. Delany

A father must come to terms with his son's death in the war. In Venice an architecture student commits a crime of passion. A white southern airport loader tries to do a favor for a black northern child. The ordinary stuff of ordinary fiction--but with a difference! These tales take place twenty-five, fifty, a hundred-fifty years from now, when men and women have been given gills to labor under the sea. Huge repair stations patrol the cables carrying power to the ends of the earth. Telepathic and precocious children so passionately yearn to visit distant galaxies that they'll kill to go. Brilliantly crafted, beautifully written, these are Samuel Delany's award-winning stories, like no others before or since.

Genres: Short Stories, Science Fiction, Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Queer, Fantasy, LGBT

383 pages, Paperback

First published April 8, 2003

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

[Rob · Rating 5 out of 5]

...The way Delany uses loneliness, the desire for companionship and sexual fetishes in this story make it groundbreaking. It is one of those stories you really should read to understand the development of the genre. If Ellison was looking for controversy, then that is exactly what he got with this story. I'm not surprised at all he made it the parting shot of the anthology. It is, there is no other way to put it, a brilliant piece of work.

Full Random Comments review

[Dan'l Danehy-Oakes · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have read better than 90% of the contents of this book before, in collections entitled Driftglass and Distant Stars. Most of it, though, not in a far too long time.

Delany is, without any reasonable question, the living writer I admire most. His works always engage me (even as, in some of his more extreme pornography, they repel me). The structure of his stories, from the plot down to the individual sentences,is inevitably crystal-beautiful, the very prism, mirror, lens that he writes about in Dhalgren and elsewhere. He is a novelist; a critic social, literary, and other; a teacher; a memoirist (if that's a word); and more. And, once in a great while, he has written a short story or two.

This is probably the most complete collection of Delany's short SFF that is likely to appear in the foreseeable future. I know there are several stories not included herein, and hope to hunt them down someday.

Meanwhile, this collection.

The four best -- or, at least, the four I enjoyed most on rereading -- are all longer stories, which may say something about why Delany has mainly written at novel length: "The Star Pit", "We, in Some Strange Power's Employ, Move on a Rigorous Line"; "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones"; and "Prismatica". One of these won the Hugo and Nebula. Two more are homages (to Roger Zelanzy and James Thurber). The last was adapted for a radio play that ran annually on a public-radio station for several years. All four made deep impressions on me on first reading, and have only grown on me with repeated readings.

Two of the shorter stories, on the other hand, though I've read them several times each, I had no memory of whatsoever!

The two stories completely new to me are "Tapestry" and "Among the Blobs". The former is good, but slight. The latter ... well, I shall simply have to reread it to figure it out.

"Yes," I hear someone say, "but what are the stories about?"

In roughly the order in which these things appear in the book, but not correspondiong one-to-one with the stories: Loneliness. The feeling of being trapped. The downside of being a powerful telepath. An allegory on sexuality that isn't vanilla heterosex. A techno-merman who can't mer anymore. A particularly terrible prison. Going native on Mars. A criminal underworld and the law-enforcement agencies who coexist with it in various ways. Holographic memory. Ice cream. The power of power. I don't know. The missing bits of the Unicorn Tapestry. The happiest day of a man's life. Criss-cross, cross, and double-cross. A thief who may or may not escape a dead god's temple. A goddess who may not be dead after all. The Greek islands. Making irresponsibly and unmaking selfishly.

Yeah, the covers ... a little bit of it. There's lots more. This is a book to be savored and reread, especially those four longer stories.

[fonz · Rating 2 out of 5]

Soy muy fan de Delany pero esta antología me ha resultado decepcionante, a pesar de que, en general, se trata de relatos muy bien escritos y sorprende lo bien que aguantan el paso del tiempo. No sé exactamente cuál ha sido el problema, a ratos me parecía que los cuentos eran demasiado "convencionales" respecto a sus novelas, a ratos parecen meros ejercicios de estilo ("Cage of Brass" o "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-precious Stones", un pastiche de Bester que se me ha atragantado cosa mala), y a ratos me aburría muchísimo. Salvaría "The Star Pit", una compleja reflexión sobre la masculinidad, la paternidad, el talento artístico y la identidad racial, "We, in Some Strange Power's Employ, Move on a Rigorous Line", un relato que parece profético sobre la globalización y acaba derivando en masculinidades chungas y machos alfa, "Among the Blobs", cuento experimental burroughsiano sobre sexo homosexual en los baños públicos del metro de NY y extraterrestres primordiales, una mezcla temática que me ha molao bastante, y finalmente, el sublime "Aye, and Gomorrah", cuento con el que ya flipé hace muchos años al leerlo en el "Dangerous Visions" de Harlan Ellison. Un evocador relato extraordinariamente escrito que en un principio se puede interpretar como una bella metáfora sobre el sexo de pago encarnada por una banda de chaperos hippies del espacio y que acaba deviniendo en una maravillosa, sórdida y tristísima reflexión acerca del sexo, el deseo y el amor, sobre el sentimiento de inferioridad y desesperación, de sentir que no valemos nada ante el inalcanzable objeto de nuestros deseos, hundiéndonos en la miseria del desamor mientras sus ojos están en otra parte, llenos de estrellas.

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

*Read in the Dangerous Visions collection. (short story)

A story about relationships, desires, sexual fetishes. A story about spacers. What are spacers? I’m not sure. They used to be humans, but they’ve been modified for space travel. That means, I think, no genitals, and no sexual urges. So they’re eunuchs in space? And they have a dedicated sect of space eunuch groupies called Frelks. Weird. Interesting. Neat.

[Keith · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm just reviewing the title story here and...um, ok? I don't Bible, so the title was kind of lost on me, and Wikipedia is refusing to help in a short and manageable way. The structure is pretty oldschool, with a couple of characters thrown together randomly, expositing highfalutin sci fi concepts all over each other, which is fine for when it was written. There's a cool in medias res opening that sets the story up to be a little more complex than it actually is, and there's a more interesting subtext in which the eunuch-spaceman is trying to get the fetishizing terrestrian lady to pay him for...something that eunuch-spacemen typically get paid for in this world, probably weird spaceman sex, although he describes himself as "sexually retarded," so I don't know exactly how that all works. Anyway, that sort of loose-ends weirdness modernises and complicates the whole thing a little further than the main concept allows for, which is okay. Also Delany wrote an afterword in my version which just made everything more confusing and worse. Probably I'm just dumb, but I'm okay with that.

[Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

Strange and wonderful, like all Delany's writing. Some of the later stories don't seem to fit with the earlier ones as well, which is why I'm giving four stars instead of five, although I immensely enjoyed all of them. Favorites include: The Star Pit, Driftglass, We, in some strange power's employ, high weir, corona.

[Nancy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I only listened to "Driftglass" on LeVar Burton Reads, I did not read the entire collection. In this particular story, an amphiman (surgery has been developed that gives humans gills) who was hurt in a deep-sea explosion in his youth now lives by the seaside in a village of fisherman. Life goes on around him, and he is an integral part of village life, as dangerous work continues in the ocean trenches and he is worried about how it will affect his loved ones. I view this story as speculative fiction, for although it reads like magical realism now, it was written in 1967 so the author was speculating on what he thought might happen in the future, yet it has a timeless feel.

[Mel E · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rly loved these stories

[Fifi Nono · Rating 4 out of 5]

Delany just kills it.

[W Freeman]

Fascinating to chart Delany’s evolution from decent genre writer (at the shockingly young age of 18) to outright genius by his late-twenties — and even his worst is generally interesting (save a few pretty dreck fantasy selection that leaden the end of this collection). I was surprised to learn this relatively short gathering is the entirety of Delany’s published short genre work from around ‘61 - 80 (after which he has published very few works strictly in this category). My favorite piece here is the title story which is all sorts of strange, beautiful, sad, expansive; vividly and yet abstractly queer- and so brief! The queerness of Delany’s more accomplished work is less present throughout (for pretty obvious personal as well time and circumstantial and publicational related reasons) but there is an amazingly odd little story in the back half that cuts between a restroom hookup and a sort of space marine fighting a blob which is a great bit of fun haha. Also even when not outright specific there’s some pretty obvious coding that’s fun if you’re more familiar with his later stuff (lots of big guys with chewed nails). Fascinating story in here that presents lots of concerns of Delany in a super digestible manner (We in Some Strange Powers Employ, I believe) — I didn’t like it too much as I was reading but it would serve as a good intro, though perhaps as it was purportedly in Zelazny’s style is why I felt it lacking (not for hate on Zelazny but rather the absence of the more Delany). Anyways I want to wrap it up but I was amused by the leather biker gang that symbolizes disorder anarchy freedom etc. I could go on but I gotta grab my Dunkin!

[Nick Stavros · Rating 5 out of 5]

Inventive and unusual stories abound in this collection! I enjoyed the variety, with some classic sci-fi set in far corners of the universe, but it’s all about an ant farm somehow… and something like a folk myth emerging from the author’s time on the island of Mykonos. Ah, and a playful tale that tips its hat to Thurber’s Thirteen Clocks.

I don’t usually go back to the beginning of a book and start reading again before getting to the end. But I did with this one. The first story was such an enigma I had to go back into it.

[*✧･ﾟn *✧･ﾟ]

for my sci-fi class

[Amanda Cerioli · Rating 3 out of 5]

Leitura do conto: Aye, and Gomorrah. EITA!! Muitos pensamentos pensantes 😅

[Caelan · Rating 3 out of 5]

weird af

[Abby · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty good, but too science-fictiony for me, which is silly because sci-fi people critique this for being too literary? WELP! But genuinely yeah I really liked it & it is SO, SO insane that it was written in 1966. Covers a lot of ground regarding sexuality & enforces that identity is genuinely constructed by society and is not determined by the things you deem as important.. Anyways Desire&Identity class on top

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a collection of mostly fairly early stories by one of my favorite authors, none of which I had read before now. The quality varies a bit, but overall is quite high, and each of them gives some insight into larger projects that would be developed later. One or two even seem to be set in Universes he would explore in more detail in full-length novels, but more frequently we see motifs, tropes, and devices in common. I give brief discussions of each story below.

The most interesting part of the first story, “The Star Pit” is how it plays with, but doesn’t quite admit to, gender identity and sexuality. The big reveal at the end, that a rival mechanic is actually in love with our narrator, also a mechanic, is somewhat undermined by the simultaneous revelation that the rival is actually female (no pronoun is ever use to describe them, so it works as a surprise). On the one hand, what’s great about this is that it forces the reader to recognize that they have simply assumed that all mechanics are male, but there was never any reason to do so (fifty years later, it still works, at least for someone of my generation). I call it disappointing, however, because throughout the story there has been established that families are now formed by multiple consenting adults of both (or all/any) genders, and therefore Delany could have used this as an opportunity for a gay love to be revealed, but either he, or his editors, weren’t ready to go there. The rest of the story, though, is about how we are all confined in some way, and you have to be more or less anti-social and psychotic to even escape a part of that confinement. Rather a discouraging theme for 1967, and it may speak to how frustrating Delany found it to be gay and Black in America. He throws in an interesting bit about the n-word and how it relates to his future psychotics toward the end as well.

“Corona” is a story about suicidal children, couched in telepathy and its psychological effects. A small child is terrorized by the thoughts that come crashing unbidden into her brain and tries self-harm when she is left unguarded, resulting in being imprisoned in a mental institution, where she befriends a violent criminal who likes the same pop singer she does. Despite the gloomy premise, it manages to say something positive about the importance of empathy and role models.

The title story is an attempt to tell sci fi fans about the gay cruising scene. He makes it acceptable by making it about “spacers,” or men and women who have to undergo neutering surgery in order to work in the high-radiation environment of outer space. They visit Earth in packs, cruising for “frelks” or non-surgically-altered humans who fetishize the spacers. After several false starts, the protagonist meets such a frelk and goes home with her, where they both muse about the pointlessness of their desires.

“We, in the Some Strange Power’s Employ” foreshadows many of Delany’s favorite tropes from Dhalgren. There’s bikers (here called Angels instead of Scorpions) and there are orchids, for example. But, in this case the tale is of civilization triumphant, and tragic barbarians doomed, rather than the opposite. The protagonist is a “Devil” (recently promoted from being a “Demon”) aboard a land-craft called “Gila Monster” that brings power lines to backward areas, including “Haven” where the Angels fly their “broomsticks” – flying motorcycles. Delany is more interested in the Angels than in the Devils, though he is convinced that the Devils must win. The protagonist seems to prefer bunking with men, though sex between male roommates is not discussed.

“Cage of Brass” is another story where Delany shows his interest in those who break with social moral codes, here through the lens of three convicted criminals in a futuristic prison. They have neither sight nor feel, being locked inside of life-sustaining coffins, but like real prisoners, they live for stories of life on the outside, which Delany paints beautifully, whether describing exotic planets or the streets of Venice. The three murderers depict three very different types – one who kills from ignorance, another from brutality, and one for misguided love.

“High Weir” is an atypical Delany story, being concerned with space exploration, rather than the social conditions of an already interplanetary society. It reminded me a bit of H.P. Lovecraft’s one foray into SF as well, being about how a space explorer is trapped into madness by an ancient and dead (or sleeping) civilization’s technology. Again, the descriptions of the alien civilization are poetic and fascinating.

“Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones” seems to take place in the same universe as Delany’s novel “Triton,” though it is mostly located on Earth and may be set some years earlier. The interesting aspects of this story are his concept of “singers” – apparently an elite nobility of talented celebrities who act as both inspiration and a kind of shadow government in his future world, and the Special Services police agent who serves as a kind of Oracle to the shape-shifting criminal protagonist.

“Omegahelm” seems to take place in a universe like that described in the novel “Stars in my Pocket Like Grains of Sand.” It is simply a conversation between two women, one young and ambitious, one old and powerful, about motherhood. It turns into something of a horror story as the older woman tells the younger one about her incredibly selfish, narcissistic approach to her child.

“Among the Blobs” is a later story than the others so far, and obviously Delany is much more “out” in his sexuality at this point. About half of the story takes place in a public men’s room-cruising spot, and the other half is in a less well-defined extraterrestrial location. That half seems to express the gay man’s worst fears about heterosexual sex, while the other celebrates gay sex, but in both cases in a detached fashion, without real eroticism. It reminded me a bit of William Burroughs’s experiments with science fiction.

“Tapestry” is an early story (written while he was in his teens!), pretty clearly based on the “unicorn” tapestry display at the Cloisters in New York City. He manages to bring in transgressive sexuality and social commentary, while staying true, on some level, to the fantasy.

Both of the next two stories are fairly early as well and both remind me a bit of Lovecraft (which may tell you more about me than about the stories). The first, “Prismatica,” echoes the Dunsanian Dream-Cycle stories. It is written as a kind of fairy story about a clever lad who signs aboard a cursed vessel in search of the pieces of a magic mirror. He teams with another boy (a prince) who solves most of the magical challenges for him, and together they defeat the Gray Man who runs the ship. The second, “Ruins,” is also set in a seemingly fantasy-type world, but is a darker reflection on an ancient Priestess or vampire and her encounter with a hapless thief, whose undoing is also his salvation.

“Dog in a Fisherman’s Net” is in some ways the most mature of the stories so far (and it is the latest), written while Delany was on Greek island and trying to capture some of the culture in story of people limited by the past and lack of opportunity. It’s hard to know whether to take the “happy” ending, or the heterosexual romantic subplot, terribly seriously.

“Night and the Loves of Joe Dicostanzo” has odd echoes of HPL’s “The Outsider,” but I can’t tell whether this is deliberate or coincidental. It involves two beings of apparently god-like power who share a crumbling tower with their creations and seem to have no referents to the world outside. There’s even a mirror and a party. The true “love” of the eponymous character is his fellow deity, though he distracts himself by creating young girls.

All of this is followed with an Afterword in which Delany gives advice on writing, which he seems to approach half-jokingly, before delving into the really interesting question of whether the writer’s constant self-doubt and self-criticism is actually an important part of the writing process rather than a problem to be overcome. A feature not a bug, as we might say today.

[Kyle Muntz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some thoughts on rereading the individual stories. I've put a * next to stories that I think are unique in Delany's body of work; mostly these are the highlights of the collection, though in a few cases it was great just to see him try something so different.

*The Star Pit: 4/5
I remember this being one of my favorites, and it's still good with lots of interesting ideas and nice character, but a bit obvious. Still amazing though for a first published story.

Corona: 2.5/5
I still don't like this much, but even without being remarkable it still shows Delany's early excellent control of tone, and focus on racial/working class issues back when nobody wrote that kind of SF. (Though this approach is developed much better in the other stories.)

*Aye and Gomorrah: 4.5/5
Beautiful language, fascinating ideas.

*Driftglass: 5/5
Genuinely great. Compact, beautiful, and intensely sad.

*We, in Some Strange Power's Employ, Move on a Rigorous Line: 5/5
A masterpiece. The centerpiece of the collection in a lot of ways.

Cage of Brass: 2/5
Sort of a gothic experiment. It's interesting but I'm not sure the tone or form entirely work.

High Weir: 2/5
Delany's take on the classic "astronauts on mars" premise. Lots of potential and ideas that would have been great with some development, but this one just didn't work for me. One of the only times I got the sense of him writing a story that just didn't suit his style.

Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-precious Stones: 1.5/5
Ambitious, but something about this one is just sort of... thin.

Omegahelm: 2.5/5
Great language and ideas, but ultimately more like part of a story than something interesting in itself.

Among the Blobs: 3/5
Experimental fiction that ruptures the tone of the collection so far and verges into Delany's later lgbt work.

Tapestry: 3/5
A grotesque inversion of a fairy tale. Hints at Delany's later more theoretical writing.

*Prismatica: 3/5
An early fairy tale that also shows Delany's ability to inhabit any linguistic register. Fascinatingly different, though the resolution is so hetero and easy it just feels weird in Delany.

Ruins: 1/5
One of the worst things Delany has written. The last few pages show an indication of his later concern (in Neveryon) with how developing societies function, but otherwise this one is kind of just pulp trash.

*Dog in a Fisterman's Net: 4.5/5
A realist story set in Greece, deeply tragic and powerfully felt. Another of the best stories in the collection, and Delany really hasn't written anything like this since.

*Night and the Love of Joe Dicostanza: 4/5
An abrupt leap into very Freudian surrealism.

[Ben Woore · Rating 2 out of 5]

I appreciate the themes this story tries to tackle, and the character interactions were generally fine, but the style of writing here was a major turn-off.

While the conversations the protagonist has with the Frelk benefit from leaving things unsaid, the rest of the story gains little from applying the same tactics. The story begins seemingly mid-sentence and plows right on ahead, switching location and time in a matter of short sentences, all while playing its cards very close to its chest. This makes it difficult to get into right off the bat and even harder to follow.

There is almost no info-dumping here, which would be pleasant if the information was easy to glean from the rest of the text, but the degree to which I found myself rereading lines and dialogue just to understand what was going on was frustrating and ruined whatever flow might have been gained by writing with so little exposition to slow it down.

I don’t mind having to put the pieces of a story together myself — Catherynne Valente’s Radiance, which I’m reading now and enjoying, asks just that sort of active engagement of the reader — but when a story is so incomprehensible, giving so little information without forcing me to work for it, the experience is unfulfilling to say the least.

If I seem overly harsh, it’s because I really wanted to like this story but simply couldn’t force myself to. The themes are interesting and the world a fascinating one, but in the end that wasn’t enough to make the experience of reading the story enjoyable. It felt like starting about the fourth chapter into a fast-paced SF novel, except without the ability to start from chapter one and make sense of it all, and without the payoff that would come later in such a story.

The ideas and themes got me thinking, which I like in an SF story, but the writing itself isn’t anything I’d want to put myself through again. It simply asks too much and gives too little to satisfy, personally. I see the appeal of this story and don’t begrudge people for enjoying it, but stylistically this really wasn’t for me.

[Leigh · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wish I could give this 3.5 stars, or maybe even 3.75. It grew on me drastically toward the end. Longer review later, hopefully, but for now:

Favorite story:
--"High Weir" (unsurprisingly: reminiscent of some of my favorite Le Guin stories)

Also a big fan of:
--"Driftglass"
--"Dog in a Fisherman's Net"
(A pairing with interesting resonances.)

Really liked some of the ideas but not all of the execution:
--"Aye, and Gomorrah..."
--"We, in Some Strange Power's Employ, Move on a Rigorous Line"
--"Night and the Loves of Joe Dicostanzo"

Deeply divided on:
--"The Star Pit"
--"Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones"

Neutral/kind of forgettable:
--"Cage of Brass"
--"Omegahelm"
--"Among the Blobs"
--"Ruins"

Slogged to get through:
--"Corona"
--"Tapestry"
--"Prismatica"

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read most of these stories in his earlier collection, Driftglass, and was wowed by the range and intensity of the pieces. The Nebula-winners are the ones that stand out in memory, but all of the stories are terrific and strange and wonderfully wrought.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

short stories by the master sci-fi stylist himself. this book contains some of chip's best-known, award-winning stories. sure those are great, but i especially liked the other ones that i had read for the first time.

[Kate]

I went to a Samuel Delany reading in college. He's like the gay sci-fi Santa! GREAT reading voice.

[Conrad · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ah, this is the Delaney we love to be weirded out by.

[Molly · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved the stories with future merpeople. I loved the story about electricity. I loved the story about the star pit. And the fairy tale about Far Rainbow.

[Liz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Delany is fascinating, I can't believe it took me so long to get to his fiction. He's one of the masters of thoughtful sci fi.

[Tim · Rating 5 out of 5]

So freaking good!!! Read it! you like smart as hell SF that ain't by retrograde warmonger white dude morons, right? READ IT!!!!!

[Big Enk · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5/5

Aye, and Gomorrah and Other Stories collects the vast majority of Delany's short works from the beginning of his career, during which he was mostly focused on speculative fiction. The earliest of these stories was written when Delany was at the spry age of eighteen. Even at that age, he comes across as extremely well-read and referential.

Delany is, first and foremost, an ambitious writer. To accomplish his goals in a shorter format, most of these stories start off like a shotgun blast of details all crowded on top of one another, leaving little room for disengagement from the text. The literal facts of the story are often obfuscated by postmodern prose and descriptions that leave much up to the imagination of the reader.

"Cross an armadillo with a football field. Nurse the offspring on a motherly tank. By puberty: one Gila Monster."

Somehow these stories typically end up greater than the sum of their parts. He doesn't always succeed in his ambitious aspirations, but this doesn't detract from his sheer inventiveness. If nothing else, each work is distinct enough to be memorable (at least on a broad level) at the conclusion of the book, something that cannot be said of most similar collections or anthologies.

This collection primarily focuses on themes of class, sexuality, race, and art - four things that Delany returns to again and again across his work. But there’s also a wealth of other explorations here, including loneliness, being trapped by our circumstances and abilities, existential suffocation, the complex emotions and expectations of adolescence, friendships between adults and children, sexual obsessions and fetishism, gender nonconformity, individual vs collective values, globalism, incompatibility between generations, personal toil vs modern technology, art as a tool for information dissemination, personal legacy, mourning/loss, and the loss of place or home. If this list overwhelms you, rest assured that it does for me as well. Delany is not satisfied until his work is teeming with layered commentary, until it practically splits its own seams.

Delany’s characters sometimes call Gibson’s to mind (particularly when he deals with thieves, layabouts, or prisoners), but he also devotes attention to children and the working class (linemen, mechanics, fishermen). Dialogue between his characters is given pride of place in most of these works, giving a personal and unreliable quality to the descriptions and world building elements. He also has particular interest in describing the scarred and rough hands of the working class, the magnificence of jewels, and the flamboyant colors that populate the worlds he imagines.

Some of my personal favorites include: We, in Some Strange Power’s Employ, Move on a Rigorous Line, The Star Pit, the titular Aye, and Gomorrah that was first published in Dangerous Visions, and Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones, which has one of my favorite titles ever. These four exemplify Delany at his best, balancing his flavorful prose with enough lucidity to make the themes approachable enough. Most of these also function the best as standalone works because of their length, allowing Delany to indulge in world-building tangents without sacrificing space for compelling storytelling.

I have a preference towards Delany when he has at least thirty pages to work with. It doesn't seem that Delany preferred the short form either, considering that compared to his peers he published a lot less of it. I'm not sure his ambitiousness works nearly as well in a hyper-short format due to a lack of space for it. Most of the works that came in at less than ten pages in this collection were messy by comparison to the longer ones.

While each and every story wasn't transcendent, this collection is not filled with bloat or excess. Truly this is an excellent showcase of Delany's progress as a writer and his capabilities of producing captivating speculative fiction. Though his work has a cult following today (his style and sensibilities don't always translate well to a wide audience), I think this collection should be considered even by the uninitiated. It's that good.

[Scott Neigh]

Science fiction. Short stories. I've known Delany's name since I was a sci-fi-devouring teen, and I read and loved a memoir by him almost a decade ago, but this was my first time picking up any of his fiction. It certainly wasn't the case in his writing about his own life, but I'd always had a vague sense – constructed from who-knows-what, since reading things *about* science fiction rather than reading the thing itself wasn't really something I did back them – of his stories and novels as having an imposing and difficult reputation. After reading this collection, I can say that my sense of things was exaggerated, but I can also see where it comes from. Many of these stories are smart and interesting, but don't go out of their way to invite you in. Many are weird, but not in a lush and playful way like, say, some of China Mieville's writing, but are more stark and self-contained. They also, having been written between the '60s and the very early '90s, have a bit of a feel of being from another era, though it isn't always possible to tease out what's about the years and what's about the author's distinctive way of doing things. In a few of the stories, I couldn't tell if he and I just have very different sociological imaginations (i.e. ways of imagining how the social world does and can work) or if he was pointedly prioritizing story over catering to a version of the plausible too attached to the real world. Anyway, I read this collection because an article recommended it as a good place to start before picking up his novels...which I suspect I will do at some point, at least the one or two most famous, but I'm not in a rush. I appreciated these stories, mostly, and I'm glad I read them, mostly, but they were a bit of work.

[Rosamund Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have known of Delany's work for a long time but have never tried it before. This selection of short stories is a good entry point -- they give a sense of the originality of Delany's prose, and the scope of his ideas. Like Le Guin and Tiptree, he doesn't give a lot away, and as a reader you have to concentrate in order to catch everything he's doing. Some of the strongest stories are near the beginning of this book: 'The Star Pit' is a beautiful meditation on grief and loneliness while in deep space, and "Aye, and gomorrah' is a very compelling study of sexuality and gender. Some of the later stories, particularly 'Prismatica', suffered from a lack of compelling characterisations, and I found the latter quarter of the collection didn't grab me so much. I'm really glad I read this, and will seek out more of Delany's work.

[Ana · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a collection of short stories. I've only read the short "Aye, and Gomorrah" specifically, but I love it. It makes me cry every time. It's exceptionally beautiful. Probably one of my favorite sci-fi pieces ever, and I love to come back to it every now and then. I think I first read it in 2013 and although I've always adored sci-fi, this short story really opened me up to all of the ideas and feelings sci-fi can capture. It is so strange and beautiful and wonderful. Nothing in the genre had ever felt so deeply personal and hard to explain before.