Introduction

Abstract

Samuel Delany, author of more than 40 works of fiction, literary and cultural criticism, comics, and memoir, all of which are equal parts delicious prose, complex meditations on the function of language, frank examinations of the erotic, and perhaps most important, stunningly bold disruptions of largely unspoken notions regarding what constitutes respectable discourse, has established himself as one of the premiere intellectuals of his nation and his generation. After reading Dhalgren (1975), Triton (1976), Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (1984), the Return to Nevèrÿon series, The Mad Man (1994), Dark Reflections (2007), The Motion of Light in Water (1988), Heavenly Breakfast (1979), Times Square Red/Times Square Blue (1999), About Writing (2005), Aye, and Gomorrah and Other Stories (2003), Atlantis: Three Tales (1995), and most recently, Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders (2012), one is left choking on a question stuck at the back of the throat: “Can he say that? Can anyone say that?” More unsettling still, the most sensitive, most generous of Delany's readers might easily find themselves caught off guard by the simple realization that if Delany has found a way to smash through so many long-established, seemingly insurmountable boundaries of stifling (literary) propriety, then perhaps so can we. Thus our encounters with Delany's oeuvre are at once infinitely pleasurable explorations of the ways in which language allows access to ideas, images, and forms of consciousness that break with both social and syntactical norms, while also being exhaustive—and exhausting—examinations of the many strategies we utilize to seal ourselves off from awareness of the full complexity of what it means to be humans inhabiting this planet, reproducing these societies, and speaking these tongues.