Dhalgren: Samuel Delany, afrofuturism, & black SF @samueldelany - Tumblr Blog

Volume 2 of 5, published last year.

Published at dezeen.com in 2019.

"Architects should embrace ideas of cruising and sex in public places in their designs, say the curators of an exhibition at ArkDes in Stockholm.

Cruising – the practice of looking for casual and anonymous sex in semi-public places – can be relevant to architecture if architects can be less squeamish about it, said Pierre-Alexandre Mateos, Rasmus Myrup, Octave Perrault and Charles Teyssou, the curators of Cruising Pavilion: Architecture, Gay sex and Cruising Culture.

"It's very enriching for architecture. Cruising is one aspect of a much larger sexual architectural revolution that needs to happen," Perrault told Dezeen.

"Sex, sexuality, desire and gender remains very untapped in the architectural discourse...

"Cruising is a really accurate thermometer of a city being democratic," Teyssou said.'

chthonic-cassandra

hello! i have a somewhat nebulous rec request, if you so desire. recently i’ve read and enjoyed a lot of samuel delany’s scifi, which i’ve also seen you talk about. do you have any recs for other books/authors that remind you of delany (in any way)? thank you!

This is a wonderful request and also a difficult one - there's no one out there quite like Delany! But I gave it some thought (and brainstormed with my partner) and have some suggestions, from different angles.

Going to be bold and start out saying that I think Delany is very much in dialogue with James Joyce, particularly Ulysses.

In a related vein, Herman Melville was my partner's suggestion, and though that didn't occur to me initially I think he's right

Going back to the world of SFF, C. J. Cherryh is pretty opposite to Delany stylistically, but shares his engagement with the question of the space proletariat. I think they are often approaching related material from opposite directions

Gene Wolfe is an author I have an ambivalent relationship with myself, but he's definitely in dialogue with Delany in a certain kind of density of narrating perception? Not sure how to better articulate this. He does not, however, share Delany's luminously clear ethical frame in his fiction

Michael Swanwick has a certain kind of whimsy which is not Delany, but there's something that feels related especially to Delany's earliest SFF novels

Vonda McIntyre's Dreamsnake bears some clear marks of Delany's influence as a teacher and is also delightful

some of Angela Carter's earlier work (Several Perceptions, Shadow Dance, Heroes and Villains) feels connected on a sort of a tangent

Marlon James is one of the few contemporary novelists working now who has much as stylistic control and audacity as Delany and I will stand by that statement

Indra Das' The Devourers is a novel which could only have been written in a world in which Delany's fiction already existed!

Seth Dickinson's Masquerade series (The Traitor Baru Cormorant and following) could in some ways be described as an exegesis of what happens when you pull on the thread of a certain economic question in Delany's Nevérÿon series, though in many ways the books are nothing like any of Delany's

Rosemary Kirstein's Steerswoman series is even less like Delany's work in other ways but she also does the incredible thing which Delany does so well of just straight up stopping the plot to let a character think, and have a revelation about thought itself

people who like Delany should probably read Tiptree but that's not really because of the work being similar

julytrees

Nina Simone performing at the Beacon Theater in 1974.

"Nobody who has spent as much time in used bookstores as I have can fail to realize how normal this used to be. Dhalgren, one of the most difficult (and great) novels of the 1970s, debuted as a paperback and, though nobody remembers this, maybe outsold Gravity’s Rainbow, a much easier book. As Samuel Delany points out..., the postwar “paperback revolution” created an environment in which science fiction publishers could count on such a loyal audience that they could constantly test that readership’s loyalty with strange new writers like Ursula LeGuin, Joanna Russ, R.A. Lafferty, Gene Wolfe, and the early Roger Zelazny (before he started with that Nine Princes in Amber shit) and get away with it. What? You didn’t like the book? You’re out a dollar and tomorrow night you can go back to Heinlein, you big baby."

-Phil Christman

FOR THE WHITE PERSON WHO WANTS TO KNOW HOW TO BE MY FRIEND

by Pat Parker

The first thing you do is to forget that I'm black. Second, you must never forget that I'm black.

You should be able to dig Aretha, but don't play her every time I come over. And if you decide to play Beethoven -- don't tell me his life story. They make us take music appreciation, too.

Eat soul food if you like it, but don't expect me to locate your restaurants or cook it for you.

And if some Black person insults you, mugs you, rapes your sister, rapes you, rips your house or is just being an ass -- please, do not apologize to me for wanting to do them bodily harm. It makes me wonder if you're foolish.

And even if you really believe Blacks are better lovers than whites -- don't tell me. I start thinking of charging stud fees.

In other words -- if you really want to be my friend -- don't make a labor of it. I'm lazy. Remember.

"Survivor is a science fiction novel by American writer Octavia E. Butler. First published in 1978 as part of Butler's "Patternist series", Survivor is the only one of Butler's early novels not to be reprinted after its initial editions. Butler expressed dislike for the work, referring to it as "my Star Trek novel."

"Butler called Survivor a “Star Trek novel” and said the book revolves around offensive clichés. Frankly, it does. Whatever narratives we’ve been trained to accept about addiction, colonization, foster children and adoptees, fundamentalism and first contact with ‘others’ are all in this book with no subversion. I knew exactly what would happen from the first chapter, which is very disappointing for a Butler novel. Her genius was in showing us the grim reality that the standard sci-fi clichés and tropes were built to idealistically hide, but this book is rather ham-handed and obvious."

"An early sci-fi/fantasy novel from Delany, one of my favorite authors. Delany worked on this story for 30 years until he got it where he wanted it. It is really a cautionary tale of inadvertent fascism, of forcing your values & culture down the throats of your neighbors for their own good. Take heed, imperialist regimes!" -John, a reviewer at GR.

Sparks fly when science fiction and the funk collide

"There are musical parallels too, alternate universes created to prove that sparks fly when science fiction and the funk collide, starting in true Superman-style with one man and one outlandish claim about his true origins."

Shabazz Palaces, Sun Ra, Badu, and more. Published 2018.

"Sensitive Skin #9 features an exclusive interview with, and music by, seminal guitarist Fred Frith, the missing chapter from the latest novel (Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders) by science fiction legend Samuel R. Delany, a portfolio of paintings from actor and musician John Lurie, a memoir by Marty Thau, former manager of Suicide and The New York Dolls, a new translation of poetry by Vladimir Mayakovsky, photographs of the seamy side of Tijuana by Chris Bava and an interview with Darius James conducted by Ghazi Barakat, about his new documentary, 'The United States of Hoodoo.'

Sensitive Skin, an anthology of post-beat, pre-apocalyptic art, writing, music and whatnot, features work by both world-famous and new-and-emerging artists, writers, and musicians from around the globe."

SenSkin #9, 2012.

smashorpassgilf

Science fiction author Samuel R. Delany (born April 1st 1942)

Samuel R. Delany

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Voting ended onApr 15, 2025

jay-rayart

Big sis

A coming of age story about Black kids who finally have power to fight back against systems designed against them.

"In the two decades that preceded the original publication of Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, Forty-second Street, then the most infamous street in America, was being remade into a sanitized tourist haven. In the forced disappearance of porn theaters, peep shows, and street hustlers to make room for a Disney store, a children’s theater, and large, neon-lit cafes, Samuel R. Delany saw a disappearance, not only of the old Times Square, but of the complex social relationships that developed there. Samuel R. Delany bore witness to the dismantling of the institutions that promoted points of contact between people of different classes and races in a public space, and in this hybrid text, argues for the necessity of public restrooms and tree-filled parks to a city's physical and psychological landscape. This twentieth anniversary edition includes a new foreword by Robert Reid-Pharr that traces the importance and continued resonances of Samuel R. Delany’s groundbreaking Times Square Red, Times Square Blue."

samueldelany

“You can be bored with anything if you try hard enough.”

— Samuel R. Delany, Nova (via quotespile)

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Dhalgren: Samuel Delany, afrofuturism, & black SF