Dry Ice Factory

I was young when I first learned that, while the incidents that can befall a man or a woman are as numberless as sunlit flashes flickering on the sea, what the same man or woman can say of them is as limited as the repertoire on the platform of some particularly uninventive mummers' troupe. Indeed, it is that repertoire. (Delany, "The Game of Time and Pain")

The final volume of Delany's Nevèrÿon series (which, over all, is also called Return to Nevèrÿon) ends with the same story that begins it, "The Tale of Gorgik". After reading all the intervening stories, returning to "The Tale of Gorgik" is like reading a brand new story. Everything in it, from the glancing views of Noyeed to the curious importance of the astrolabe that Myrgot gives to Gorgik, has been transformed repeatedly over the course of the series in such a way as to become practically unrecognizable. In fact, there was a section early in "The Tale of Gorgik" that connects it beautifully with "The Tale of Rumor and Desire" that I could not for the life of me remember reading when I read the tale in the first volume just last July! So I dutifully pulled out my copy of Tales of Nevèrÿon, and sure enough, that section of the story wasn't in the earlier version. This is a master stroke by Delany, "returning" us to a tale that is no longer the same as the original. The impossibility of recovering origins is one of the main themes of the series, and Delany embodies it beautifully in his anti-narrative.

But this raises questions about how the series was structured, because the final appendix of the third volume, Flight from Nevèrÿon, made it clear that it was intended to be the final volume of the series. Return is thus an excess volume of sorts, which again fits Delany's theme. But was it planned that way? In the appendix/preface to Return K. Leslie Steiner (a fictional scholar) tells us that the second story in the book, "The Tale of Rumor and Desire", was originally written to serve as a bridge (of lost desire?) between "The Tale of Dragons and Dreamers" and "The Tale of Fog and Granite" in a proposed collection of the shorter works in the series, excluding the long novel, Neveryóna, which "The Tale of Rumor and Desire" would replace in the sequence. The collection never happened, leaving "The Tale of Rumor and Desire" stranded. But what of the first story in Return, "The Game of Time and Pain"? Chronologically, this would be the final story in the series, showing us as it does the final success of Gorgik's efforts to free all the slaves in Nevèrÿon. Was it the lack of this closure in Flight from Nevèrÿon (in which Gorgik himself turns into an offstage rumor or legend in the end) that begged the question that is Return? Yet Delany uses this "closure" as a way to bring us back to a beginning that opens a whole new can of worms.

We are warned at the very beginning that we may want to read the book in reverse order, presumably starting with Steiner's appendix/preface, which comments on the entire series. The stories run in reverse chronological order, but it's easy enough to read "The Tale of Rumor and Desire" as a thematic comment on "The Game of Time and Pain", which is also very much about desire, and as mentioned above, "The Tale of Gorgik" has been revised to connect to "The Tale of Rumor and Desire," thus making it follow very nicely even though it is chronologically earlier. Complicating all this is the fact that "The Game of Time and Pain" tells us the final fate of Clodon, who is the protagonist of "The Tale of Rumor and Desire", but who is also a nameless character -- and impersonator of Gorgik -- in "The Tale of Fog and Granite" in the previous volume. The flow of chronology and causality and commentary in these tales is intricate and elaborate -- a tapestry as complex as any woven by the characters in this world, where the loom and spindle have only just been invented.

I've commented a lot on structure here, perhaps because it's easier for me to talk about than some of the more difficult thematic material. Another piece of structure: In "The Game of Time and Pain", we start with characters outside an abandoned castle arguing about whether someone is lurking in it. We move to Gorgik, bedding down alone in the castle for the night and then discovering another camper there and telling him a long story about how he found and lost himself, as a slave and as a liberator of slaves. Gorgik falls asleep and dreams of his dying old aristocratic mentor, Myrgot, who meditates on Gorgik's final visit with her, which intersects with a number of other characters introduced in the first book. Gorgik wakes up alone in the castle again. Finally we return to the characters outside the castle arguing again, this time comically, about whether anyone had been lurking in the castle the previous night. The frames of the tale are thus completely symmetrical, except for the dream of Myrgot, who represents a point of view that cannot be accounted for by strict narrative logic -- an intrusion of fantasy? (Even calling it a dream is an interpretation only barely suggested by the text itself.)

"The Game of Time and Pain" is, from one angle, a story about how Gorgik found himself, or perhaps liberated his own imagination (and thus himself), by realizing that he, a slave, shared a sexual kink (the fetishization of slave collars) with an aristocrat who owned slaves. "The Tale of Rumor and Desire" is about a drunken, dirty thug named Clodon -- a rapist, thief, and fraud whom we have in other stories seen impersonating Gorgik to criminal ends -- who fetishes women's feet and hands and has a tender encounter with the woman of his dreams. In tracing Clodon's history, Delany takes us back to an incident in Kolhari when the young Clodon, then a prostitute on the Bridge of Lost Desire, was talked into wearing a slave collar for a time to see whether he might like the S/M trade, which it turns out he doesn't. The added material in "The Tale of Gorgik" (which also adds a passing reference to the Bridge of Lost Desire that isn't in the original version) involves an even younger, pre-slavery Gorgik observing the young Clodon wearing the slave collar and then taking it off and tossing it into a cistern. It's implied that some of Gorgik's inchoate sexual feelings about slave collars started to take form in this wordless, distant, completely impersonal series of observations.

The series circles around sadomasochism from the very beginning, but it's probably safe to say that the theme of desire and sadomasochism grew richer and deeper over the course of the tales. I'm not the best person to comment on this theme, as my own understanding of desire is not particularly rich or deep itself. Still, I found the growth of Delany's accounting fascinating to watch, and it's also fascinating to consider how his career after this series has delved deep into the realm of pornography. The tales of Nevèrÿon are obsessed with discourse, desire, and power, and sadomasochism is in many ways the ultimate metaphor for all of these. The slave collar becomes one ring to riddle them all. Used as a sexual fetish, the slave collar catches but does not lock, and there you have an image of the incomplete or temporary closure that we see again and again in these stories.

Delany brings secret sexual desire to the center of his tales, and it is no doubt no accident that he incorporates commentary on Freud and Lacan into the stories as well. He insists that the hot, messy realities of sex and desire (which is a kind of fantasy, a kind of imagining) must be dealt with if we are to liberate ourselves, however incompletely or inconclusively, from the nightmare of history and slavery. It's true, while Clodon does achieve his libidinal dream, he's still trapped in a nightmarish life of impulsive misbehavior that will not end well for him. Yet his moment of satori is an ideal we can all aspire to, even as it is quickly lost again in time and pain. In an interview I found somewhere online, Delany talks about how this fourth volume was initially published under the title The Bridge of Lost Desire (which is the version I read) because at that time the series had been blacklisted by the chain bookstore B. Dalton's due to the gay material that had supposedly made the word Nevèrÿon poisonous. The Bridge of Lost Desire is a bridge in Kolhari where male and female prostitutes ply their trade. (Was Delany mocking B. Dalton's by including heterosexual desire and straight sex in "The Tale of Rumor and Desire"?) We cross the bridge again and again in these tales. It isn't named in the first book, but by the last it becomes, if only temporarily, the name of the book itself. The desire (the power, the discourse) lost in the process is -- stop me if I've told you this one before -- hauntingly similar to our lost memories of something that never really happened. Speak yet again!

Addendum in excess of a review: Well, I finally picked up a copy of Return from the uniform edition of the series put out by Wesleyan University Press. This edition adds composition (or completion) dates for the three tales. "The Game of Time and Pain" is given the date October 1985, which was the same year that Flight (the previous volume) was first published. "The Tale of Rumor and Desire" is given the date February 1987, which is the same year Bridge/Return was first published. This makes it seem as though Delany wrote the "closure" story either while or right after the third volume (allegedly the last) was published, but it sat there unpublished until he wrote the bridging story for the unpublished compendium of Nevèrÿon tales. Also interesting is that "The Tale of Gorgik" is given the date October 1976, which is probably its original composition date, despite the fact that it had material added to it after he wrote "The Tale of Rumor and Desire". Thus even this date is at least somewhat fictional. (I'm curious whether the uniform edition of Tales has the original version of "Gorgik" or the revised one, but I haven't had a chance to check that yet.)

Finally, I should note that in this edition the appendix is a somewhat modified version of Appendix B from the original edition of Flight. The modifications that I noticed were to change references to Flight as the final volume in the series, and to substitute references to Return instead. This reminded me that I had previously ascertained that the appendix/preface by K. Leslie Steiner from The Bridge of Lost Desire was moved to the beginning of the first volume in the uniform edition, where it serves as a preface to the entire series.

I imagine that this kind of convoluted textual history makes Delany cackle with glee. I find it pretty entertaining myself! However, I still noticed a couple of typos/misspellings in the appendix to the Wesleyan Return -- e.g., a reference to C.L. Moore's Jirel [of Joiry] is spelled Jeryl.

I read this novel when it first came out in 1983, but this is the first time I've reread it. I can't remember what I thought of it at the time, but my vague general impression of the Nevèrÿon series is that I really liked the first book and liked each proceeding book less than the one before. Now having read Neveryóna a second time, I have mixed feelings. It's a complex novel, and I'm not sure I understand what it's up to. Perhaps as a consequence of that lack of understanding, I often felt unengaged with it even as I remained intrigued by many of the ideas and scenes and scenarios. Maybe the novel, like Neveryóna itself, "becomes a shining symbol just out of reach."

This is a coming-of-age novel about a young woman named Pryn who leaves her mountain village on the back of a dragon to have some adventures in the wider world. But dragons in Nevèrÿon aren't quite the fabulous beasts of legend, and neither are Pryn's adventures. She arrives in the big city of Kolhari and immediately meets the legendary Gorgik, a former slave now leading a revolutionary anti-slavery movement, but the violence surrounding the revolution soon turns Pryn into an unintentional killer. Fleeing the scene, she falls in with Madame Keyne, a conservative businesswoman seeking to foment counter-revolution while stuck in a paranoid relationship with her mistress and her mistress' mad lover. All of this I found quite interesting, especially as Delany refigures and reconfigures episodes and ideas and items from the previous volume in the series, Tales of Nevèrÿon.

At this juncture, however, Delany does something pretty radical and has Pryn leave the city in the company of some smugglers and then, when she becomes convinced that one of them has impregnated her, stumble off to the small town of Enoch, where she falls in with a struggling working class family. This is an entirely more naturalistic section of the novel, and I confess I started to lose interest a bit as the tone and concerns shifted to an apparently much smaller, less mythical scale. On the other hand, I suspect that the deflation is intentional, because Delany signals both at the beginning and at the end of it that this is a different type of story that he might have told.

The final part of the novel moves to the southern part of Nevèrÿon, which is where the barbarians (and thus most of the slaves) are from. Pryn takes a job at a brewery, which gives us yet a different view of the world of business and capital, and she's invited to a party at the estate of a local nobleman, which is our first point of contact with the aristocracy that still rules this civilization. Pryn's notions of power and meaning are reconfigured yet again, and so, perhaps, are the reader's. The lost city of Neveryona and the mythical dragon Gauine have made ambiguous symbolic appearances and disappearances, and in the end Pryn is returning to Kolhari, befitting a book called "A Tale of Signs and Cities". But if my head was spinning a bit at this point, Pryn seems able to go with the flow.

Pryn's adventures encompass the whole range of class in Nevèrÿon, from slave to working class to lumpen proletariat, from merchant to aristocrat, from smuggler to class warrior. In that way her experience mirrors that of Gorgik in "The Tale of Gorgik," as they both become exemplars of civilization through their exposure to the fullness of what civilization has to offer, both low and high. However, the initial account of Gorgik is an explanation for how he became so powerful, where Pryn's tale is more modest. She rides a dragon, kills a man, and frees a slave, but she herself remains a figure outside of legend, if not outside of story. This makes Pryn a bit elusive, which is perhaps another reason I found the novel itself elusive.

Again, the difficulty of the novel seems intentional. Delany is constantly disrupting the pleasures of story with thorny outbursts of Theory. If that makes the novel elusive as a novel, I imagine that's the goal. He wants us to question everything, including the story and our identification with the characters. Everything is problematized, questioned, transformed, re-imagined. It's hard work, and it can be a slog. I often felt that I was in over my head, and I think that was a feeling I had more patience for when I was younger.

But there was much that I really liked as well, including things I wasn't sure I understood. The one thing I did remember from my first reading was a scene where Madame Keyne shows Pryn a kind of fountain in which gouges in a clay bowl at the top of the fountain are apparently copied exactly in sand in a lower bowl, as though the flowing water holds the memory or shape of the bowl it comes from. This is, as far as I can tell, the one piece of "magic" or inexplicable, anti-naturalistic phenomena in the novel, yet it's presented as fact, with an explanatory, learned discourse by Madame Keyne about how it all works. I do believe it's a kind of straight-faced joke, in contrast with the several other points in which this or that perfectly natural phenomenon is described as magic.

The other bit I just loved was the appendix, which is comprised of an exchange of letters between Charles Hoekstra, who is apparently an actual scholar of the ancient world, and S.L. Kermit, who appears to be a character created by Delany to write scholarly essays about the ancient Culhar fragment that's supposed to be the basis of all these tales. Hoekstra takes Kermit's scholarship to task, and Kermit's reply is a masterpiece of intellectual slapstick that even manages to incorporate a reference to mimeographed fanzines. After the difficult challenges of digesting the novel itself, this bit of comedy was a welcome dose of brandy.

I'm barely scratching the surface of this complex book, with its multiple meditations on economics, relationships, slavery, urbanity, invention, language, story, and sign. If it does soar on the wings of a dragon, it is the wings of the strange dragons of this world that can only fly from a high ledge down to the earth below and then have to climb laboriously back up to the higher vantage. It is, in fact, an ugly sort of flight, and yet what you see on its downward course gives you much ugly, elusive truth to think about.

I recommend, once again, Sylvia Kelso's essay about the whole Nevèrÿon series, '"Across Never": Postmodern Theory and Narrative Praxis in Samuel R. Delany’s NEVÈRŸON Cycle'.

The Fantasy of Origins and Identities

Tales of Nevèrÿon was first released in September 1979, which probably makes it the first book of Delany's that I read when it was new. (I became a Delany fan sometime after my first encounter with Seattle science fiction fandom in March 1979. Seattle was rife with Delanyites in those legendary days.) Over the years I've settled on Trouble on Triton, which was Delany's previous novel, as his greatest work of fiction, but having now read this one for at least the third time, I'd say it has a claim to that title as well. I believe ron_drummond would argue for Neveryóna, which is the next work of fiction Delany published, but I've never re-read it -- or any of the other books in the Nevèrÿon series -- a fact that I intend to redress in the coming months.

It's remarkable to think this book came out over thirty years ago, since my personal history with it makes me think of it as "one of the new ones". I would've been around nineteen when I first read it, and to read the five tales contained within its pages is to delve into the archaeology of my old selves. It's hard to remember what I thought of it back then, although I remember being fascinated from the start. Is this where I first encountered the concept of sadomasochism? It was still a few years before I got to know any practitioners, and by then I was reading other theoreticians of S/M like Pat Califia and trying to imitate Delany's analysis of S/M and slavery in my own paltry fiction. In the archaeology of my old selves I rediscover early ambitions that have now been long abandoned, like the old ruins explored and inhabited by the characters in the book.



Tales of Nevèrÿon is Delany's deconstruction of the sword-and-sorcery subgenre. It's Robert E. Howard's Conan by way of Joanna Russ' Alyx and Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology. (Delany's critical writing about the Alyx stories, which incorporated his take on Howard, fed directly into these tales.) It takes place in a metafictional neolithic past where we can see the origins of civilization -- of things like writing and money -- and where all binaries -- black and white, barbarian and civilized, slavery and freedom, male and female, straight and gay, truth and fiction -- are reversed, refracted, and exploded. They are stories about the problem of knowledge. You might say they are agnostic stories -- about the absence of final or total knowledge. They are stories haunted and informed by absence. Tales of nowhere and nowhen.

We are first introduced to Gorgik, who is a slave in a mine who is taken up for a sexual dalliance by the noblewoman Myrgot. Gorgik's experience at the royal court, where Myrgot soon loses interest in him, gives him the basis to embark on a varied career that exposes him to every level of society, high and low, making him a unique embodiment of the civilized world. In the next tale we're introduced to Norema, an island girl who is taught by an aged female scientist named Venn. Norema's conventional life is disrupted by catastrophe as she reaches majority, and she leaves the island for the mainland. In the third tale we meet Small Sarg, a barbarian prince who is enslaved and purchased by Gorgik to become his lover, much as Myrgot had done with Gorgik earlier, but to far different effect. In the fourth tale Norema goes on a trade mission representing a businesswoman, and she meets a masked woman warrior named Raven whose mission is to assassinate the nobleman that Norema is supposed to do business with. In the fifth and final tale we discover Gorgik and Small Sarg conducting a war to liberate the slaves, and they encounter Norema and Raven in the forest for an inconclusive conversation.

By this point in his career Delany was a master story-teller. He knew exactly what tropes he was playing with and what readerly satisfactions he was denying or delaying in a tantalizing game of striptease, in which the story is slowly laid bare to reveal a mysterious void full of unending plenty. What is so masterful here, too, is how his philosophical and analytical abstractions are continually grounded in the grittiest, sweatiest, meatiest, most sensual physical details you can imagine. This is a world teaming with the complex variety of human experience and history, production and reproduction. It's a world constantly transforming and evolving and reflecting on itself, in which our understanding of what is happening or who the characters are is challenged again and again.

It's a hall of mirrors, infinitely reversing the image of a curious collection of objects: a rusty astrolabe, a rough rubber ball, a metal slave collar, a two-bladed sword, a three-legged clay pot, a great winged lizard. It's a collection of words that doesn't contain the stories after all, but sets them free. They are living still in our own lost civilization, if you know where to look for them.

[For a truly splendid academic analysis of these stories, see Sylvia Kelso, "Across Never": Postmodern Theory and Narrative Praxis in Samuel R. Delany’s NEVÈRŸON Cycle.]

In March 1979 I came to Seattle for my first science fiction convention, Norwescon 3. I was a freshman in college, still absorbing the world at a furious rate, and it was a momentous weekend. Amongst other things, I met Denys for the first time, and we quickly became close friends, talking about all our favorite things as new friends do. Denys was a huge fan of Samuel R. Delany, and he urged me to give Delany another try when I told him that I'd read Babel-17 a few months earlier and hadn't cared for it. So not long after the convention (according to the book log that I started in March 1979) I read The Einstein Intersection, and I was hooked. Delany quickly became my favorite writer.

A few years later, at the Norwescon in 1983, I was hanging out with Sharee in the hallway when either ron_drummond spotted me carrying a copy of Delany's latest novel, Neveryóna, or I spotted Ron carrying his copy, I don't remember which, and the three of us fell into an intense conversation about all things Delany. It seems entirely fitting that my bond with Ron was forged over our mutual love of Delany's writing. Coming right up on 30 years later, our friendship has contained many Delany-related events, projects, parties, and adventures. Thanks almost entirely to Ron, who befriended Chip (as Delany likes to be called), I've had the opportunity over the years to enjoy Chip's company several times, perhaps most memorably in a bar not far from his apartment in Manhattan, where the three of us spent an hour eating oysters and gabbing and laughing about I don't remember what all. It was the moment that was so memorable, meeting Chip in his native environment in a spur of the moment arrangement. I highly recommend eating oysters with your favorite writer if you ever get the chance, even if you, like me, don't care much for oysters!

It was thanks to Ron again that in 2012 Chip's friend Ric Best invited me and Denys to join a host of others in writing some kind of tribute to Samuel R. Delany on the occasion of his 70th birthday. Ric's plan was to compile all the contributions into a little book and give it to Chip and all the contributors as a birthday present. Yesterday my copy of the book arrived. That's the cover image above -- a portrait of Chip painted by Mia Wolff. The book is called All Good Thoughts: A Celebration of Samuel R. Delany's 70th Birthday. There are something like thirty contributions, some of them from well-known folks like Alan Moore, Edmund White, Neil Gaiman, Ellen Datlow, Junot Diaz, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Vonda McIntyre. To find one's own name nestled in amongst the likes of those is, as Denys remarked yesterday, a bit heady. To have the chance to participate in such a beautiful tribute to someone whose writing and thinking I admire so much is just this side of incredible. It's enough to make you look back at how this all came to pass, I tell you!

It's a wonderful life, eh? Thy life's a miracle, in fact. So thanks to Denys for the smart tip, to Chip for a lifetime of beautiful reading, to Ric for a beautiful present, and to Ron for a beautiful friendship. I'm a happy boy.


Ron, Chip, and yours truly at a Clarion West party in 1997