Samuel R. Delany - Themes

Themes

Recurring themes in Delany's work include mythology, memory, language, and perception. Class, position in society, and the ability to move from one social stratum to another are motifs that were touched on in his earlier work and became more significant in his later fiction and non-fiction, both. Many of Delany's later (mid-1980s and beyond) works have bodies of water (mostly oceans and rivers) as a common theme, as mentioned by Delany in The Polymath. Though not a theme, coffee, more than any other beverage, is mentioned significantly and often in many of Delany's fictions.

Writing itself (both prose and poetry) is also a repeated theme: several of his characters — Geo in The Jewels of Aptor, Vol Nonik in The Fall of the Towers, Rydra Wong in Babel-17, Ni Ty Lee in Empire Star, Katin Crawford in Nova, the Kid, Ernest Newboy, and William in Dhalgren, Arnold Hawley in Dark Reflections, John Marr and Timothy Hasler in The Mad Man, and Osudh in Phallos — are writers or poets of some sort.

Delany also makes use of repeated imagery: several characters (Hogg, the Kid, and the sensory-syrynx player, the Mouse, in Nova) are known for wearing only one shoe; and nail biting along with rough, calloused (and sometimes veiny) hands are characteristics given to individuals in a number of his fictions. Names are sometimes reused: "Bellona" is the name of a city in both Dhalgren and Trouble on Triton, "Denny" is a character in both Dhalgren and Hogg (which were written almost concurrently despite being published two decades apart), and the name "Hawk" is used for four different characters in three separate stories – Hogg, and the novellas "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones" and "The Einstein Intersection."

Jewels, reflection, and refraction — not just the imagery but reflection and refraction of text and concepts — are also strong themes and metaphors in Delany’s work: Titles such as The Jewels of Aptor, The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones", Driftglass, and Dark Reflections along with the optic chain of prisms, mirrors, and lenses worn by several characters in Dhalgren are a few examples of this. Reflection and refraction in narrative are explored in Dhalgren and take center stage in his Return to Nevèrÿon series.

Following the 1968 publication of Nova, there was not only a large gap in Delany's published work (after releasing eight novels and a novella between 1962 and 1968, Delany's published output virtually stops until 1973), there was also a notable addition to the themes found in the stories published after that time. It was at this point that Delany began dealing with sexual themes to an extent rarely equaled in serious writing. Dhalgren and Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand include several sexually explicit passages, and several of his books such as Equinox (originally published as The Tides of Lust, a title that Delany does not endorse), The Mad Man, Hogg and, Phallos can be considered pornography, a label Delany himself endorses.

Novels such as Trouble on Triton and the thousand-plus pages making up his four-volume Return to Nevèrÿon series explored in detail how sexuality and sexual attitudes relate to the socioeconomic underpinnings of a primitive — or, in Trouble on Triton's case, futuristic — society. Even in works with no science fiction or fantasy content to speak of, such as Atlantis: Three Tales, The Mad Man, and Hogg, Delany pursued these questions by creating vivid pictures of New York City, now in the Jazz Age, now in the first decade of the AIDS epidemic, private schools in the 1950s, Greece and Europe in the 1960s, and — in Hogg — generalized small-town America. Phallos details the quest for happiness and security by a gay man from the island of Syracuse in the second-century reign of the Emperor Hadrian. Dark Reflections is a contemporary novel, dealing with themes of repression, old age, and the writer's unrewarded life.

The Mad Man, Phallos, and Dark Reflections are linked in minor ways. The beast mentioned at the beginning of The Mad Man graces the cover of Phallos. In Dark Reflections we learn that novel's protagonist, Arnold Hawley, was the actual anonymous author of the fictive Phallos (the non-existent novel of the same name that Delany's novella "quotes from" and discusses at length). Additionally, Delany's 2012 novel Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders contains several scenes with a statue of the beast from The Mad Man. Finally, the encapsulating "outer frame" story of Phallos is that of one Adrian Rome, whose life partner is someone named Shoat Rumblin. Shoat Rumblin is the name of yet another of Delany's forthcoming works, an excerpt of which appeared in Volume 24, Number 2 of "Callaloo".

Delany has also published several books of literary criticism, with an emphasis on issues in science fiction and other paraliterary genres, comparative literature, and queer studies.