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Samuel Ray Delany, Jr. (born April 1, 1942, New York City) is an award-winning American science fiction author. He has written works that have garnered substantial critical acclaim, including the novels Nova, The Einstein Intersection, Hogg, and Dhalgren. Since January 2001 he has been a professor of English and Creative Writing at Temple University in Philadelphia. He is widely known in the academic world as a literary critic.

Biography

Delany was born and raised in Harlem and attended the Dalton School and Bronx High School of Science. Delany and the poet Marilyn Hacker, who met in high school, were married for nineteen years and have a daughter.

Delany was a published science fiction author by the age of 20. He published six well-regarded science fiction novels between 1962 and 1968, as well as several prize-winning short stories (collected in Driftglass). Dhalgren was published in 1974. His main literary project through the late 1970s and 1980s was the Neveryon series.

Delany has published several autobiographical/semi-autobiographical accounts of his life as a black and gay writer, including his Hugo award winning autobiography, The Motion of Light in Water.

In recent years, Delany has been teaching English and creative writing. Delany spent 11 years teaching at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, a year and a half at the University at Buffalo, and moved to the English Department of Temple University in 2001. He has also published several books of criticism, interviews, and other essays.

Themes

Much of Delany's work starting with his 1975 novel Dhalgren deals with sexual themes. Dhalgren and Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand include several sexually explicit passages, and several of his books such as Equinox, The Mad Man, Hogg and Phallos can be considered pornography, a term Delany himself endorses. (He has also published several books of literary criticism, with an emphasis on issues in science fiction and other paraliterary genres, comparative literature, and queer studies.) Novels such as Trouble on Triton and the thousand-plus pages making up the stories and novels in his four-volume Return to Neveryon series explore in detail how sexuality and sexual attitudes relate to the socioeconomic underpinnings of a primitive--or, in Triton's case, futuristic--society. Even in works with no science fiction or fantasy content to speak of, such as Three Tales, The Mad Man, and Hogg, Delany pursues these questions by creating vivid pictures of New York City, now in the Jazz-Age, now in the first decade of the AIDS epidemic, private schools in the 1950s, Greece and Europe in the 1960s, and--in Hogg--generalized small-town America. Delany's most recent fiction, Phallos for example, details the quest by a gay man from the island of Syracuse in the second-century reign of the Emperor Hadrian for happiness and security. Other themes that Delany explores in his fiction in detail include language, memory, and (in his early fiction, till 1968) mythology.

Selected bibliography

Fiction

Novels

Return to Nevèrÿon series

Short story collections
  • Driftglass (1971)
  • Distant Stars (1981), ISBN 055301336X
  • Atlantis: Three Tales (1995), ISBN 0819552836
  • Aye, and Gomorrah (2003), ISBN 0375706712
(Driftglass and Distant Stars include the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones." Aye, and Gomorrah is a compilation of all of Delany's short fiction, excepting the Nevèrÿon tales.)

Nonfiction

Critical works

Memoirs and letters
  • Heavenly Breakfast (1979), ISBN 0553127969
  • The Motion of Light in Water (1988, a memoir of his experiences as a young gay science fiction writer; winner of the Hugo Award), ISBN 0877959471
  • Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999, a discussion of changes in social and sexual interaction in New York's Times Square), ISBN 0814719198
  • Bread & Wine: An Erotic Tale of New York (1999, an autobiographical comic drawn by Mia Wolff with an introduction by Alan Moore), ISBN 1890451029
  • 1984 (2000), ISBN 0966599810

Other facts

  • Delany's name is one of the most misspelt in science fiction, with over 60 different spellings in reviews. His publisher Doubleday even misspelt his name on the title page of his book Driftglass as did the organizers of the 16th Balticon where Delany was guest of honour.
  • Delany is dyslexic.
  • The Library of Congress incorrectly recorded his nationality as English.
  • Delany's aunts were Sadie and Bessie Delany, known as the Delany sisters. They both lived to be over 100 years old, and published Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters' First 100 Years. Delany retells some of their adventures in his book Atlantis: Three Tales.
  • Among Delany's more unusual credits is that he wrote two issues of the comic book Wonder Woman in 1972, during a controversial period in the publication's history when the lead character abandoned her superpowers and became a secret agent. Delany scripted issues #202 and #203 of the series.
  • Delany's story Aye, and Gomorrah was included in Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions. Ellison gave a short introduction that ironically pointed out how Delany was one of the last straight science fiction authors.
  • Since he was ten years old, most of his friends and acquaintances have called him by the nickname Chip

See also

External links

References

  • Robert S. Bravard; Michael W. Peplow, Through a Glass Darkly: Bibliographing Samuel R. Delany in Black American Literature Forum, Vol. 18, No. 2.

1942 births | African American writers | American novelists | American science fiction writers | Bisexual writers | Gay writers | Hugo Award winning authors | Living people | Nebula Award winning authors | Postmodernists | Queer theory | University at Buffalo alumni | Science fiction writers | Science Fiction Hall of Fame | Wonder Woman writers

Самюъл Дилейни | Samuel R. Delany | Samuel Delany | Samuel R. Delany | サミュエル・R・ディレーニイ | Дилэни, Сэмюэль | Samuel R. Delany | Samuel R. Delany

 

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