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In Bo's speech quoted above, Delany is applying his own rule: not naming the passage, not telling you everything they had in the market, just what registered for his protagonist. But as with everything else, he's also intensely self-conscious about what goes on the page. He's an author to whom the initial response is often that his fiction is dense with specifics. This first rule (derived from a letter Delany quotes from Theodore Sturgeon) seems especially important for him. The third is consciously to avoid traditional or clichéd approaches to handling a story. The second is only to write about subjects that evoke a strong and complex response in you, so that your writing doesn't become thin or superficial. The first is not to overwrite, to always restrict oneself to the details in a scene that matter to a character. In an afterword to this collection, Delany describes a couple of rules that he's always tried to follow in his writing. This sort of thing is intoxicating, Delany at his most charismatic it's interesting to know, therefore, that he places limits on its use. It's a market in there, and farther down they got fish, and then a courtyard with oranges and candy and sea urchins and cabbage. Just past all the cheap movies we found a little passage lined with flowers. "Say, last time I was in Istanbul-about a year before I joined up with this platoon-I remember we were coming out of Taksim Square down Istiqal. In "Aye and Gomorrah," one of the Spacers starts reminiscing about earlier times in Istanbul:īo laughed to break up tensions. One of the other characteristic Delany moves is the sudden deluge of exuberantly specifying detail.
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At the end, they and we have a clearer sense of where they stand, but they still have no abiding city. It seems very detached from how they experience their lives.) Anyhow, nothing is "resolved" in the story: the Spacers go up and come down in place after place. (At one point, a female frelk launches into an extended rhapsody about the "glorious, soaring" life of Spacers (p.
The star pit delany series#
The story is a series of vignettes exploring these two linked conditions, from the point of view of the group being objectified. Frelks are unaltered humans who find spacers sexually attractive. (It's impossible not to remember Cordwainer Smith's "Scanners Live in Vain" in this context.) The process deprives them of the ability to have sex, and so Spacers are chosen from children whose sexual responses are "hopelessly retarded at puberty" (p. They have somehow been altered to make their bodies withstand the rigours of space travel. The Spacers' nature becomes apparent as the story progresses. So it's no surprise that, a few pages later, the Spacers "go up" again, and then come down in Houston. His words about the police tell the Spacers where they stand: as "strangers," they will enjoy even less mercy from the police than homosexuals do. (If the Spacer's reaction when the man puts a hand on his arm isn't enough to confirm this, the subsequent dialogue, especially the reference to the police, certainly is.) The blond man is aware of both Spacers and frelks, and quickly clarifies where he stands in relation to these two possible groups. The "very blond man" is clearly a homosexual who uses these toilets for cottaging. The most visible thing about the dialogue, though, is how it places the characters in terms of-for want of a better word-class. Even if the gender of a French noun doesn't always have anything to do with whether we might consider it "culturally" male or female, it's a powerful hint to send out. The same is true of "frelk." It's even more characteristic that the first thing we know about frelk is how it's gendered. 91)įirst of all, it's a characteristic Delany strategy to let us know that the narrator and his friends are Spacers through dialogue, and then to take that term for granted. The police." He nodded across the street where I noticed the gendarmerie for the first time. You look as though you may once have been a man. His eyebrows rose, then he shook his head. After a raucous evening drinking, five of them (including the narrator) run into a four-person pissoir:Ī very blond man put his arm and smiled, "Don't you think, Spacer, that you. A group of people have "come down" in Paris-how they "came down" is at this stage unexplained. Early on in the title story of Aye and Gomorrah, Samuel R Delany has a very Samuel R Delany moment.