Auden, and James Baldwin, some of the innocuous walk-on characters who appear in his memoir alongside a memorable cast of artists and lovers.
Or bumping into the likes of Bob Dylan, Stokely Carmichael, W. Or exploring the burgeoning art scene of the '60s. Their marriage was open and complicated (both authors now identify as gay), and when Delany wasn't writing, he was cruising around Manhattan for sex. "Following my superstition, immediately (within minutes? hours?) I started writing the opening chapter of 'City of a Thousand Suns.'"ĭelany had also got married straight out of high school, to the poet Marilyn Hacker. Slowing down or stopping was a terrifying prospect. Whenever he finished a project, he plunged directly into the next one. Suddenly, however, I put it aside-and by sheer will forced myself through the handwritten draft of the concluding three chapters of 'The Towers of Toron.'" My twenty-frst was on me.I'd progressed several hundred pages in 'Voyage, Orestes!' and had told Cade and Bobs I had perhaps another six months of work to do till completion.
"Birthdays have always pushed me to work harder. Each birthday spurred him on to write more and write faster. By the age of 22, he had published four novels (and written five). Delany, $19.26, Amazonĭelany, you see, started writing straight out of high school. It's a time capsule, a portrait of the American '50s as they actually were-not just milkshakes and poodle skirts, but police raids and experimental theatre and crossing state lines to obtain an interracial marriage certificate.Īnd it's a must read for every young artist out there. This is a book about Delany coming to terms with himself as a young, black, gay science fiction author in the late '50s and early '60s, when that intersection of identities was all too rare. To a modern reader, it looks more like a Tinder photo than a book cover, but it sets the stage well. That, and the cover: a grainy photo of a young, shirtless Delany, holding a guitar, with a rainbow gradient filter layered on top. I think it was the subtitle that hooked me. Delany before I picked up a battered, third-hand copy of his memoir, The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village. I wish I could say that I've been reading his books for years, or that I've always given him due credit as one of the fathers of modern speculative fiction, or that I've been lobbying for an HBO adaptation of Dhalgren.But the truth is, I'd barely heard of Samuel R. Delany as a book-hungry teen, like I did with so many of the other sci-fi legends. I wish I could say that I discovered Samuel R.
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