His father, Samuel Ray Delany, Senior, ran a successful Harlem undertaking establishment, Levy & Delany Funeral Home, on 7th Avenue, between 1938 and his death in 1960. His mother, Margaret Carey Boyd Delany, was a library clerk in the New York Public Library system. He was born to a prominent black family on April 1, 1942, and raised in Harlem. (episode transcript available here: Delany RTB 3.7.Samuel Ray Delany, also known as 'Chip,' is an award-winning American science fiction author. More than Humanand The Dreaming Jewels, Theodore Sturgeon I Will Fear No Evil and By His Bootstraps, Robert A. Le Guin (Delany disses them!)Ī Little Earnest Book Upon a Great Old Subject, William Wilson

In Milton Lumky Territory, Confessions of a Crap Artist, Mary and the Giant, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and The Man in the High Castle, Philip K.

The Neveryon Series, “ Racism and Science Fiction,” Triton(also referred to as The Trouble on Triton), “ Aye, and Gomorrah,” “ Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones,” Samuel R. He came to Wellesley’s Newhouse Center for the Humanities to talk about Afrofuturism, but also carved out two little chunks of time for this conversation. RTB loves him especially for his mind-bending Neveryon series: did you know that many consider his 1984 novella from that series, “The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals,” (set both inside the world of Neveryon and along Bleecker Street in NY) the first piece of fiction about AIDS in America? Reading him means leaving Earth, but also returning to the heady days when Greenwich Village was as caught up in the arrival of Levi-Strauss and Derrida to America as it was in a gender and sexuality revolution. You probably know him best for breakthrough novels like Dhalgren and Trouble on Triton, which went beyond “New Wave” SF to introduce an intense and utterly idiosyncratic form of theory-rich and avant-garde stylistics to the genre. On August 6, 2019, an article based on this podcast interview appeared in our partner publication, Public Books.įresh on the heels of our conversation with Madeline Miller, author of Circe, John Plotz has a talk with Samuel Delany, living legend of science fiction and fantasy.

Triton delany