#neveryon

[perennial-wave]

i’m getting closer to mapping Neveryon

[queereads-bracket]

Older Queer Works Book Bracket: Round 2A

Choose a book:

Orlando (1928) by Virginia Woolf

Nevèrÿon series (1979–1987) by Samuel R. Delany

Voting ended onDec 13, 2025

Book summaries and submitted endorsements below:

Orlando (1928) by Virginia Woolf

Endorsement from submitter #1: "Ugh Orlando deals with gender identity in such an interesting way: Orlando, a person living over several centuries, is born as a man and one night transforms into a woman. This is pretty much not commented by the people around her, but does affect her life and freedom. Amazing book and I adore Woolfs writing style"

Endorsement from submitter #2: "Funny, strange, boundary-crossing"

Virginia Woolf's Orlando 'The longest and most charming love letter in literature', playfully constructs the figure of Orlando as the fictional embodiment of Woolf's close friend and lover, Vita Sackville-West. Spanning three centuries, the novel opens as Orlando, a young nobleman in Elizabeth's England, awaits a visit from the Queen and traces his experience with first love as England under James I lies locked in the embrace of the Great Frost. At the midpoint of the novel, Orlando, now an ambassador in Constantinople, awakes to find that he is now a woman, and the novel indulges in farce and irony to consider the roles of women in the 18th and 19th centuries. As the novel ends in 1928, a year consonant with full suffrage for women. Orlando, now a wife and mother, stands poised at the brink of a future that holds new hope and promise for women.

Classics, literary fiction, historical fiction, experimental

Nevèrÿon series (Tales of Nevèrÿon, Neveryóna, Flight from Nevèrÿon, Return to Nevèrÿon) (1979–1987) by Samuel R. Delany

In his four-volume series Return to Nevèrÿon, Hugo and Nebula award-winner Samuel R. Delany appropriated the conceits of sword-and-sorcery fantasy to explore his characteristic themes of language, power, gender, and the nature of civilization. Wesleyan University Press has reissued the long-unavailable Nevèrÿon volumes in trade paperback.

The eleven stories, novellas, and novels in Return to Nevèrÿon's four volumes chronicle a long-ago land on civilization's brink, perhaps in Asia or Africa, or even on the Mediterranean. Taken slave in childhood, Gorgik gains his freedom, leads a slave revolt, and becomes a minister of state, finally abolishing slavery. Ironically, however, he is sexually aroused by the iron slave collars of servitude. Does this contaminate his mission — or intensify it? Presumably elaborated from an ancient text of unknown geographical origin, the stories are sunk in translators' and commentators' introductions and appendices, forming a richly comic frame.

Fantasy, speculative fiction, philosophy, episodic, secondary world, series

[identicaltomyself]

The Neveryon series by Delany purports to be translated from ancient tablets. The first volume has a (fake) appendix by a paleographer explaining the extreme liberties taken by Delany in turning fragmentary ancient tablets into a sword-and-sorcery novel, and what little we actually know about ancient Neveryon and the tablets. The second novel’s appendix is a counterblast by an archeologist explaining how the writer of the first appendix has completely misunderstood the import of the tablets and the latest thinking about Neveryon, and generally gotten everything wrong. And the appendix to the third volume is by the same guy who wrote the first one, explaining that, no, he was right in the first place, and the second guy is being a bad linguist and generally an idiot. We never get to actually read any translations of the tablets, just the disputes around them.

The appendices are hilarious and full of linguistics jokes; one of the best parts of the books.

[manyworldspress]

Rowena Morrill, wraparound cover painting for Neveryóna; or, The Tale of Signs and Cities, by Samuel R. Delany (Bantam, 1983).

_________________________________________________ Our shop: https://bookshop.org/shop/manyworldspress

[queereads-bracket]

Older Queer Works Book Bracket: Round 1B

Choose a book:

Nightwood (1936) by Djuna Barnes

Nevèrÿon series (1979–1987) by Samuel R. Delany

Voting ended onNov 22, 2025

Book summaries below:

Nightwood (1936) by Djuna Barnes

Nightwood, Djuna Barnes' strange and sinuous tour de force, "belongs to that small class of books that somehow reflect a time or an epoch" (TLS). That time is the period between the two World Wars, and Barnes' novel unfolds in the decadent shadows of Europe's great cities, Paris, Berlin, and Vienna—a world in which the boundaries of class, religion, and sexuality are bold but surprisingly porous.

The outsized characters who inhabit this world are some of the most memorable in all of fiction—there is Guido Volkbein, the Wandering Jew and son of a self-proclaimed baron; Robin Vote, the American expatriate who marries him and then engages in a series of affairs, first with Nora Flood and then with Jenny Petherbridge, driving all of her lovers to distraction with her passion for wandering alone in the night; and there is Dr. Matthew-Mighty-Grain-of-Salt-Dante-O'Connor, a transvestite and ostensible gynecologist, whose digressive speeches brim with fury, keen insights, and surprising allusions.

Barnes' depiction of these characters and their relationships (Nora says, "A man is another person—a woman is yourself, caught as you turn in panic; on her mouth you kiss your own") has made the novel a landmark of feminist and lesbian literature. Most striking of all is Barnes' unparalleled stylistic innovation, which led T. S. Eliot to proclaim the book "so good a novel that only sensibilities trained on poetry can wholly appreciate it."

Literary fiction, experimental, modernist, interwar

Nevèrÿon series (Tales of Nevèrÿon, Neveryóna, Flight from Nevèrÿon, Return to Nevèrÿon) (1979–1987) by Samuel R. Delany

In his four-volume series Return to Nevèrÿon, Hugo and Nebula award-winner Samuel R. Delany appropriated the conceits of sword-and-sorcery fantasy to explore his characteristic themes of language, power, gender, and the nature of civilization. Wesleyan University Press has reissued the long-unavailable Nevèrÿon volumes in trade paperback.

The eleven stories, novellas, and novels in Return to Nevèrÿon's four volumes chronicle a long-ago land on civilization's brink, perhaps in Asia or Africa, or even on the Mediterranean. Taken slave in childhood, Gorgik gains his freedom, leads a slave revolt, and becomes a minister of state, finally abolishing slavery. Ironically, however, he is sexually aroused by the iron slave collars of servitude. Does this contaminate his mission — or intensify it? Presumably elaborated from an ancient text of unknown geographical origin, the stories are sunk in translators' and commentators' introductions and appendices, forming a richly comic frame.

Fantasy, speculative fiction, philosophy, episodic, secondary world, series

[manyworldspress]

Rowena Morrill, wraparound cover painting for Flight from Nevèrÿon, by Samuel R. Delany (Bantam, 1985).

__________________________________________________ Our shop: https://bookshop.org/shop/manyworldspress

[manyworldspress]

Rowena Morrill, wraparound cover painting for Tales of Nevèrÿon, by Samuel R. Delany (Bantam, 1979).

__________________________________________________ Our shop: https://bookshop.org/shop/manyworldspress

[perennial-wave]

i wish there was any online fanbase for Neveryon,, i need to speculate with my peers about what Really happened between Gorgik & Small Sarg between the 1st & 2nd books very badly