Delightful! Now for news! Gossip! Tales of travel! Romance! We will have tall tales and religious chatter, and - who knows - perhaps some deep and lasting insight into the workings of the soul. The opening quote is from a monk in an isolated monastery greeting a party of visitors from Neveryon, the main city in the imaginary world created by Samuel R Delany for this opening volume of his sword & sorcery series. It is also a concise resume of the ambitions the author had about the project. This particular sub-genre has been long derided by critics as a poor relative of speculative fiction, and the usual cover of a naked babe clutching the biceps of a fierce eyed barbarian holding a huge axe dripping with blood is not exactly helping promote discussions about a higher purpose and deep meaning. This is where Delany steps in and demonstrates that it is possible to write a metaphysical sword & sorcery book to compete with the classical tales of Robert E Howard or Edgar Rice Burroughs, to rival in imagination the worlds of Fritz Leiber or Jack Vance, to create characters more introspective and analytical than Michael Moorcock.There are five novellas in the first collection, all set in a mythical world of dragons and competing cultures, all with a parallel timeline and recurring characters. By the end of the book, the separate threads come together into a singular and coherent larger story arc where each the earlier episodes are revealed as the opening moves in the master game of the author: "The justification of such abbreviation of method is that the sequence of images coincides and concentrates into one intense impression of barbaric civilization. The reader has to allow the images to fall into his memory successively without questioning the reasonableness of each at the moment; so that in the end, a total effect is produced. So we only see glimpses, snapshots of the world through the eyes of the main characters, but the information accumulates until the larger tapestry takes shape and general themes are identified. It is more demanding on the reader than simple yelling at the top of your lungs and bashing in the heads of hordes of brutal savages, but the satisfaction of figuring out the gems hidden by the author early in the text works better for me than plain escapism. The Tale of Gorgik introduces what I understand will be the central character here and for the next four Neveryon novels. We start with his childhood in a poor dockside neighborhood of the main imperial city, followed by hard years as a slave after a palace coup, rescued as a sex slave to a courtier, then an interlude at the palace, and later a new career as a professional soldier. The plot details are secondary to the investigation of the ways power is used, on a personal level and on a national level. He was learning that power - the great power that shattered lives and twisted the course of nations - was like a fog over a meadow at evening. From a distance, it seemed to have a shape, a substance, a color, an edge, yet as you approached it, it seemed to recede before you. Finally, when common sense said you were at its very center, it still seemed just as far away, only by this time it was on all sides, obscuring any vision of the world beyond it. Gorgik has to either use his muscles to survive in the slave mine pits or his wits to gain the favours of his jaded new mistress through sexual favours coupled with entertaining stories told every night, like a hairy and brawny Sheherezade - a reversal of gender roles that will play a great role in most of the other stories in the book. Almost as a throwaway discussion, I identified in Gorgik's story a sub-theme of painful significance for the third millenium, that of government surveillance and it's implications: If you can write down a woman's or a man's name, you can write down all sorts of things next to that name, about the amount of work they do, the time it takes for them to do it, about their methods, their attitudes, and you can compare all this very carefully with what you have written about others. If you do this, you can maneuver your own dealings with them in ways that will soon control them; and very soon you will have the control over your fellows that is slavery. Civilized people are very careful about who they let write down their names, and who they do not. Another theme introduced by Gorgik that will be better investigated in the second novella is the difference between civilization and barbarism. The Tale of Old Venn introduces an old woman from an isolated tribe who, after travelling all over the known world and inventing a number of useful contraptions to make fishing or harvesting easier, is now tutoring young children. A teacher POV is very useful to the author as a tool of philosophical debate, as a way to shape the discourse towards more lofty ideas like the nature of reality, the structure of language, the family dynamics as shaped by economic forces, in particular the transition from bartering (barbarians) to money (civilization). Venn's lessons deal with logic and self-awareness, ethics and abstract thinking, using mirrors to illustrate a form of dialectics in which each concept can only be understood by considering its opposite. It's like a reflection of a reflection. It doesn't reverse values. It makes new values that the whole tribe benefits from. From observation to narration to analysis, the children are led to discover the danger of making easy assumptions and not following up on the implications of one idea or another. Racial and gender discriminiation in particular is used to illustrate the danger of applying general concepts to subjects they were not intended for (think of Darwinism applied to social studies or Kant used to justify Arianism) And of course that is the problem with all truly powerful ideas. And what we have been talking is certainly that. What it produces is illuminated by it. But applied where it does not pertain, it produces distortions as terrifying as the idea was powerful. And it doesn't help that we cannot express the idea itself, but only give examples - situations which can evoke the idea in some strong way. I may give the impression here than nothing happens in the novella but dry theoretical discussions, but Delany proves that 'We are never out of metaphysics, even when we think we are critiquing someone else's. Venn's village is visited by a strange ship in which all the sailors are women while only the captain is male (a return to the theme of gender roles in ancient tribes). The locals feel threatened by the Barbarians, by the Unknown, and they resort to violence in order to maintain the status quo. The Tale of Small Sarg presents a different tribe of so called 'savages' , another look at the definition of civilization, another aspect of the institution of slavery, with the added bonus of the return of Gorgik, who challenges us this time to reflect on sexual emancipation or same-sex couples. It is a bridging piece, shorter in length, a transition to the second part of the novel where instead of branching out, the threads are brought closer together. On the world building level, we are presented here with the 'sorcery' part of the genre, namely with the dragons that are the sole example so far of magic in the realm. These dragons are another mirror reflection of the regular fantasy tropes: instead of being powerful, fire breathing, intelligent lords of the sky, they are an almost extinct species of wings-equiped lizards that can barely hop and glide from one crag to another. The Tale of Potters and Dragons starts with economic considerations, moves to political machinations, and ends with a mysterious absence at the end of a long journey by the sea. Two apprentice merchants set out to win a monopoly in rubber toys from a distant province. A third traveller is a 'barbarian' warrior on an assssination mission. My favorite passage here is a cosmogonic myth, a recurrent subject in many fantasy novels, as each author tries to come up with a new origin story for the universe. Delany presents us with a matriarchal version, in which men are created after the women and are responsible for the original sin and for the exile from Paradise: In the beginning was the act - and the act was within the womb of god. But there was neither flesh nor fiber, neither soil nor stone, neither clear air nor cloudy mists, neither rivers nor rain, to make the act manifest. So god reached into her womb with her own hand and delivered herself of the act, which, outside god's being, became a handful of fire. Rather than a provocation of the established set of values, I see the myth as an invitation to embrace diversity and freedom of thought: Praise the sun's warmth on the water in summer and the cold frost on the stones in winter and the difference between them, and you will praise the act [of creation], for the act may only be praised through difference. The Tale of Dragons and Dreamers is the culmination, the fulcrum of the separate episodes presented previously. All characters take part in an action oriented finale, the dragons representing the past / the establishment, and the dreamers representing change, the will to progress and to develop a new society, to redefine civilization. In this particular volume, it is the fight against slavery and stagnation that Gorgik and his friends are engaged in. This is also the closest the collection comes to the 'Swords' part of the genre, as a castle is under assault.The last chapter is not a novella set in Neveryon, but a semi-fictional essay on the study of ancient languages using advanced mathemathics and statistical theory, looking at the history and the differences in expression from Assirian, to Egyptian, Greek or Hebrew texts, or, as the author calls it, "a study of linguistic patterns common to comic books, pornography, contemporary poetry, and science fiction."The phrase can be used to describe the book in its entirety, with its larger than life heroes, its provocative sexual behaviours, its moments of grace and its secondary world setting that tries to embracce as its scope the whole human civilization. It is also an argument that when we choose to write/read about imaginary worlds we are still talking about the real world we are living in, with the added bonus of using a different perspective that gives us a fresh insight into the issues: You are as much an inventor of fancies as you are an observer of facts - though without a few fancies, I know, the facts never really make sense. or, put into a more elaborate phrasing: the world in which images occured was opaque, complete, and closed, though what gave it its weight and meaning was that this was not true of the space of examples, samples, symbols, models, expressions, reasons, representations and the rest - yet that everything and anything could be an image of everything and anything - the true of the false, the imaginary of the real, the useful of the useless, the helpful of the hurtful - was what gave such strength to the particular types of images that went by all those other names; that it was the organized coherence of them all which made distinguishing them possible. For me the first visit to Neveryon was both a tad dissapointing (not what I expected in terms of pure adventure and fun) and richly rewarding (in the demands it made on my reasoning and figuring out on my own what is going on). I will come back to this land of wonder under the guidance of Mr. Delany.
This is, among other things, historical fiction that looks at inventions and social change: for example, the introduction of money into a barter tribe, and the consequent devaluation of women, and why – as explored within a gorgeous ethnographic tale; attached to which is a satire of Freud’s penis-envy theory, at once funny and seriously mind-warping. At one point in this book, when the introduction of writing is critiqued, because writing's first uses were to convenience slavery, I thought of a revelatory chapter in The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, ‘Orality, Writing and Texts’ about why peoples might want to hang onto the freedoms of an oral culture and resist writing. I thought, I needn’t have read that, I can read this fantasy fiction instead. I’d been clobbered by that chapter in The Art, but it’s here in Delany, and much more to come… Slavery is about the most important institution there was in every history up to recent times… this fantasy-history gives slavery its large place. I have ambitions to leaf through Cambridge’s World History of Slavery – but maybe I can just read Delany… Anyway, is the Cambridge going to inspect us on how we can hate coercive power yet want sex games around it? As Gorgik and Small Sarg, the Spartacuses of this world, do. I’ll avow that I love both Gorgik and Small Sarg: the one a giant noted to be unhandsome, with a brutish but affable face; the other captured from a forest tribe (his tale begins, “In that brutal and barbaric time he was a real barbarian prince – which meant that his mother’s brother wore women’s jewelry and was consulted about animals and sickness.”) Delany loves the ironies he can wring from ‘these barbaric times’ and those adjectives ‘civilized’ and ‘savage’. The anthropology on savage tribes here is wonderful. But neither are the aristocrats in court anything other than human beings first and not to be blamed for where they are. The other half of the book is Norema and Raven. The women of Norema’s island, thought more or less barbaric, tend to invent things and ideas that civilization runs on. Raven is his woman warrior. Now, she is hard to like, as is her culture. On Norema’s island you can see sailor women who rub along in near-equality, at least an equality of work, but Raven inverts patriarchy and its ills: inverted, you see how horrible it is. Nevertheless these two strike up a friendship. At the end the four of them meet and talk. Talk like university intellectuals, as often happens in this book. At times I explain that to myself as Delany translating, capturing thoughts they have but cannot possibly express so well; at other times I accuse myself of prejudice and see it as a statement in itself, that even primitive people in this novel can argue Derrida into the ground. Either way, I like this technique. It lives beside an unusual sense of realness… that in part comes from his attention to the underprivileged, in part is the detail with which he pictures people... I'll admit this realness is intermittent. Still astonishing.
What do You think about Tales Of Nevèrÿon (1993)?
I first read this book when I was in High School, at a time when I was reading a lot of rather more pedestrian fantasy novels. I came back to it in my early thirties, having become a dedicated Delany-fan in the interim. In both cases, I enjoyed it, but suspected that at least some of it went right over my head. I think I actually found that experience more enjoyable as a teenager.It is a fantasy set at a time “when the world was young,” in an indeterminate but temperate region of earth with a few relatively new cities and empires beginning to flourish. Delany takes advantage of the period to turn certain assumptions about the past on their heads: especially male dominance and compulsory heterosexuality, both of which are completely dispensed with. He creates matriarchal cultures and his main character is a gay mining slave turned warrior. He manages to make this seem perfectly normal to all his characters, creating the suggestion that later cultures suppressed the memory of this very different time in the service of creating a history that would endorse their view. A page I marked has a very interesting take on a kind of primitive inversion of penis-envy, which seems to be a deliberate mockery of much of Freud.While many books I read in youth seem to lose something when I come back to them as an older adult, this book seems to grow in complexity and interest. I’ve never read any of the other books in the series, but one of these days I’ll get around to completing Delany’s oeuvre, and I’m sure I’ll find new delights in this volume that I had missed, or simply forgotten, the other times around.
—Michael
Every few years, I return to Delany, thinking this is my year to fall in love with his writing. First in high school, then in graduate school, and more recently while preparing to teach a class on science fiction, I thought, this is the year when I discover just how amazing Delany's writing is! Because really, he is often cited as the inspiration for many of my favorite novelists.This spring, I read Neveryon, as I love fantasy and this series has been recommended to me on multiple occasions. I love love love Delany's intelligence and his questioning. I also adore his premises and politics. I just don't appreciate his storytelling. Sometimes, the passages of Neveryon seemed to be too simplistic to immerse me in the story. It is almost as if Delany wrote this novel while reading a history of economics textbook. As I read, I kept feeling as though Delany somewhat narrativized a textbook's accounting of feudalism, then mercantilism, and then the clumsy, disorganized advent of financial capitalism. I know that novelists often read scholarship to guide their writing and thinking and that Delany is himself a scholar. Still, this book lacked the wonder and imagination I most love in fantasy, sword-and-sorcery or not. This season is not my season of Delany.
—Darshan Elena
I really enjoy Delany in general for his ability to mix academic rigor with sci-fi entertainment. The ways in which he weaves philosophy, economics, and political theory into these narratives intrigues me at the same time that the stories themselves engross me. This particular work especially tickled me with the reversal of the typical science fiction concept of projecting current trends into a distant future. Instead, he takes the present and imagines a history for it far richer and more challenging than the one I learned in school. This changes the dominant question from "What if we . . . ?" to "Why do we . . . ?" It's probably not for everyone, and definitely not for young audiences, but this book definitely impresses me.
—Charlie
