A Profile of Samuel R. Delany, America’s first prominent Black author of science fiction and a revolutionary chronicler of gay life.
In 1991, Rickett, who struggled with alcoholism, was living on the streets of Manhattan, where he earned a pittance doing magic tricks and custom calligraphy. Mostly, he sold secondhand books out of a box. One day, Delany, who’d forgotten his wallet, bought one on store credit; Rickett was astonished when he actually returned to pay.
Delany is still close with Iva, but wasn’t shy about saying that the episode had soured his final years. “You know the old W. C. Fields joke about Philadelphia?” he asked me. It’s about a contest where the third prize is three weeks in the city and the first prize is only one. “I won some prize that we don’t even know about.” The real issue might be that Delany no longer lives in the city whose singularity makes his own legible.
Somehow, while mired in a fugue that never lifts, the Kid becomes a legend, publishing a book of poetry with the help of an Auden-like visitor and assuming leadership of a multiracial street gang that loots houses and department stores while cloaked in holographic shields.
He also began to synthesize the modernist density and the adult themes of “Dhalgren” with the otherworldliness and brio of his work from the genre’s so-called Golden Age. Just a year after emerging from the heavy haze of Bellona, he dashed off the effervescent “Trouble on Triton” , a space comedy of manners set in a bubble city with more than forty recognized sexes.
The series opens with an imposing metafiction that frames its narrative as an interpretation of an ancient text in Linear B. Yet the tales themselves have a clarity and a stylistic precision that surpassed his previous work, weaving their ideas into the lives of slaves, actors, merchants, and other ordinary denizens of Kolhari.
Reaction was swift, with bookstore chains refusing to stock the new volume and Bantam discontinuing the series. Delany hasn’t published another original work of fiction with a major commercial imprint since. Taking banishment as an opportunity, he began to write almost exclusively about the lives of gay men, starting with his own. “The Motion of Light in Water” was, on the one hand, a beautifully wrought literary origin story, laced with reflections on the chancy enterprise of autobiography.
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