Samuel R. Delany Reimagined Sci-Fi, Sex, and the City
Very strange to see this now.  I&#x27;m reading through Dhalgren currently.  Bought it in a second-hand bookshop 15 years ago and never started reading it, and just 3 weeks ago picked it up from my shelf on a whim.  Been reading it during my commutes to&#x2F;from work.<p>A few random thoughts.<p>Wow, I didn&#x27;t know Nova is about to be an Amazon series scripted by Gaiman.  That&#x27;s very impressive.  I listened to it as an audiobook 8 years ago and really liked it.  I hope they wouldn&#x27;t ruin it completely, but I feel the novel has enough good parts that even a maimed and partial interpretation would be good.<p>I&#x27;m not yet finished with Dhalgren, but I&#x27;m very near the end.   Reading the last part has been a slog.  I&#x27;m very impressed with the language and the descriptions and the philosophy and the self-referential nature of the book, and the Delany keeps me reading even when the plot is quite thin and nothing really interesting happens.  But on the whole the actual reading experience is boring, especially towards the end.<p>It kind of reminds me of someone who has just veered&#x2F;discovered a lifestyle which they previously thought was extreme (and&#x2F;or outside societal norms, or rather the societal norms they were raised with), was shocked, culturally and personally, and wants to share his shock with the rest of the world, maybe as a sort of a coping mechanism.   Like some born-again religious tend to be very extreme and devout and proselytize religion.   So does Delany, or at least his authorial voice, tend to go on and on about gay sex, homoeroticism, sexual fantasies and deviancies, abnormal behavior, etc.  Also, self-referential plots, unreliable narrators.  This gets tiring after a while.<p>Dhalgren&#x27;s language has a strange effect on my mind.  After a session of reading parts of it, my brain stays for a while in this strange inner loop where everything I see is described in the same floral, poetic language as the book, where little details in the world around me are important.  It goes away after I talk for a while with people or answer emails, as if my mind is reset back to &quot;normal&quot; discourse.<p>I read Triton back when I was 20.  I feel it had a huge influence on me, but I can&#x27;t point out exactly how.  Like if I&#x27;d never read it, would my life be different somehow?  I don&#x27;t know.  I did pick my username in my very first post to an online message board, back in the mid-90&#x27;s, from Triton.  So there&#x27;s that.<p>I think it&#x27;s a shame that Delany hasn&#x27;t written more science fiction, or fantasy, although after reading this article I understand why.<p>I personally find some of his views and writing to be repulsive.  It should be fairly obvious which ones.  I would never read Hogg or anything in that vain. Although personally I didn&#x27;t find Dhalgren repulsive fwiw.  I think.  I&#x27;m still glad his works were written and are available.  I think that as a society we need them, even if they are repulsive for me personally.  And him, of course.<p>&quot;Black Harlem speech and white Park Avenue speech are very different things&quot; – from the article.  Yes, that&#x27;s very present in Dhalgren.  The language veers between highly literate, erudite English, and street-level language.  And even inside those two there are different variations of regional accents, cultural accents...<p>This is something that also speaks to me, personally.  When I was growing up, I read a lot, and had a stutter.  One of the reasons for it (in addition to some social anxiety) was the cognitive dissonance between my friends&#x27; and family spoken language, and the vocabulary and idioms of the written word.   At times about every second sentence I wanted to utter would be censored immediately by a part of my brain, as being inappropriate and too literary for the person I was talking to.<p>Later in life, I met enough people from different walks of life, listened to them, and I was able to imitate them and their speech enough to be able to move back and forth rather effortlessly between different styles of speech.<p>Strangely enough, I see a similar pattern in my younger son.  He has just started reading a lot of books, after some years of refusing to read much, and his spoken language has suddenly ballooned, has become a lot more erudite and refined.  He doesn&#x27;t seem to have the same problem as me though, he is still able to use the same language level near his friends. None of them read much, if at all.