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
