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Return to Nevèrÿon #1-4
Return to Nevèrÿon: The Complete Series
A four-volume “postmodern sword-and-sorcery” epic from a multiple Hugo and Nebula Award–winning author (The Washington Post Book World).
Tales of Nevèrÿon : After his parents are killed during a political coup, Gorgik is taken into captivity and forced to work the government obsidian mines in Nevèrÿon’s Faltha Mountains. Years later, he is sold to serve one of the royal families, and eventually the army. When he is finally free, he leads a rebellion against Nevèrÿon’s rulers to end the tyranny of slavery.
Neveryó Or, The Tale of Signs and Cities : One of the few in Nevèrÿon who can read and write, Pryn escapes her village on the back of a dragon. On her journey across the civil war–torn land, Pryn has a fateful encounter with Gorgik the Liberator, whom she finds herself fighting beside in his war against slavery.
Flight from Nevèrÿon : A smuggler, witness, and worshipper of Gorgik the Liberator follows his idol’s bloody trail on a quest to meet him. But a disease has ravaged Nevèrÿon. Men, rich and poor, are dying. The illness seems to have first come from the Bridge of Lost Desire, a hangout for male and female prostitutes, and is spreading fast. With no hope of recovery or cure, it will change Nevèrÿon’s sexual and political landscape forever.
Return to Nevèrÿon : Slavery is outlawed and the land is finally free. At a deserted castle in the countryside, as Gorgik the Liberator regales a young barbarian about his deeds, he prepares to return to the mines where his own slavery began for one final battle.
Tales of Nevèrÿon : After his parents are killed during a political coup, Gorgik is taken into captivity and forced to work the government obsidian mines in Nevèrÿon’s Faltha Mountains. Years later, he is sold to serve one of the royal families, and eventually the army. When he is finally free, he leads a rebellion against Nevèrÿon’s rulers to end the tyranny of slavery.
Neveryó Or, The Tale of Signs and Cities : One of the few in Nevèrÿon who can read and write, Pryn escapes her village on the back of a dragon. On her journey across the civil war–torn land, Pryn has a fateful encounter with Gorgik the Liberator, whom she finds herself fighting beside in his war against slavery.
Flight from Nevèrÿon : A smuggler, witness, and worshipper of Gorgik the Liberator follows his idol’s bloody trail on a quest to meet him. But a disease has ravaged Nevèrÿon. Men, rich and poor, are dying. The illness seems to have first come from the Bridge of Lost Desire, a hangout for male and female prostitutes, and is spreading fast. With no hope of recovery or cure, it will change Nevèrÿon’s sexual and political landscape forever.
Return to Nevèrÿon : Slavery is outlawed and the land is finally free. At a deserted castle in the countryside, as Gorgik the Liberator regales a young barbarian about his deeds, he prepares to return to the mines where his own slavery began for one final battle.
352 pages, Kindle Edition
Published October 3, 2017
70 people are currently reading
143 people want to read
About the author
Samuel R. Delany
294 books2,201 followersSamuel Ray Delany, also known as "Chip," is an award-winning American science fiction author. He was born to a prominent black family on April 1, 1942, and raised in Harlem. His mother, Margaret Carey Boyd Delany, was a library clerk in the New York Public Library system. 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. The family lived in the top two floors of the three-story private house between five- and six-story Harlem apartment buildings. Delany's aunts were Sadie and Bessie Delany; Delany used some of their adventures as the basis for the adventures of his characters Elsie and Corry in the opening novella Atlantis: Model 1924 in his book of largely autobiographical stories Atlantis: Three Tales.
Delany attended the Dalton School and the Bronx High School of Science, during which he was selected to attend Camp Rising Sun, the Louis August Jonas Foundation's international summer scholarship program. Delany and poet Marilyn Hacker met in high school, and were married in 1961. Their marriage lasted nineteen years. They had a daughter, Iva Hacker-Delany (b. 1974), who spent a decade working in theater in New York City.
Delany was a published science fiction author by the age of 20. He published nine well-regarded science fiction novels between 1962 and 1968, as well as several prize-winning short stories (collected in Driftglass [1971] and more recently in Aye, and Gomorrah, and other stories [2002]). His eleventh and most popular novel, Dhalgren, was published in 1975. His main literary project through the late 1970s and 1980s was the Return to Nevèrÿon series, the overall title of the four volumes and also the title of the fourth and final book.
Delany has published several autobiographical/semi-autobiographical accounts of his life as a black, gay, and highly dyslexic writer, including his Hugo award winning autobiography, The Motion of Light in Water.
Since 1988, Delany has been a professor at several universities. This includes eleven years as a professor of comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, a year and a half as an English professor at the University at Buffalo. He then moved to the English Department of Temple University in 2001, where he has been teaching since. He has had several visiting guest professorships before and during these same years. He has also published several books of criticism, interviews, and essays. In one of his non-fiction books, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999), he draws on personal experience to examine the relationship between the effort to redevelop Times Square and the public sex lives of working-class men, gay and straight, in New York City.
In 2007, Delany was the subject of a documentary film, The Polymath, or, The Life and Opinions of Samuel R. Delany, Gentleman. The film debuted on April 25 at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival.
Delany attended the Dalton School and the Bronx High School of Science, during which he was selected to attend Camp Rising Sun, the Louis August Jonas Foundation's international summer scholarship program. Delany and poet Marilyn Hacker met in high school, and were married in 1961. Their marriage lasted nineteen years. They had a daughter, Iva Hacker-Delany (b. 1974), who spent a decade working in theater in New York City.
Delany was a published science fiction author by the age of 20. He published nine well-regarded science fiction novels between 1962 and 1968, as well as several prize-winning short stories (collected in Driftglass [1971] and more recently in Aye, and Gomorrah, and other stories [2002]). His eleventh and most popular novel, Dhalgren, was published in 1975. His main literary project through the late 1970s and 1980s was the Return to Nevèrÿon series, the overall title of the four volumes and also the title of the fourth and final book.
Delany has published several autobiographical/semi-autobiographical accounts of his life as a black, gay, and highly dyslexic writer, including his Hugo award winning autobiography, The Motion of Light in Water.
Since 1988, Delany has been a professor at several universities. This includes eleven years as a professor of comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, a year and a half as an English professor at the University at Buffalo. He then moved to the English Department of Temple University in 2001, where he has been teaching since. He has had several visiting guest professorships before and during these same years. He has also published several books of criticism, interviews, and essays. In one of his non-fiction books, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999), he draws on personal experience to examine the relationship between the effort to redevelop Times Square and the public sex lives of working-class men, gay and straight, in New York City.
In 2007, Delany was the subject of a documentary film, The Polymath, or, The Life and Opinions of Samuel R. Delany, Gentleman. The film debuted on April 25 at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
May 26, 2025
delaney understands exactly how sexuality is formed by the material processes of clutter and citymaking. an unintended roleplay and a visit to the supermarket are psychosexual on the same discursive level; both elicit and construct libidinal connections with the world around us as we live through it. we become un-standardised through the attempts of normalisation, aberrate when repressed.
so to apply that theory (and a lot more hard academic theories about linguistics, sociology, queerness, history, colonialism, et al.) to pre-modern history is a huge endeavour. it's a good thing he split this up into several stories - each reflecting on a layer of this fantasy, alien, precapitalist/pre-"Feudal" world, with the next one reversing its discoveries.
courtly culture as an inversion of slavery, the verbiage of slavery as a sexual choice, the sexual choice leading to a life of dangerous regret, the dangerous regret culminating in a libidinal drive to make things right, the right-made things urging on a utopia that maintains a sexual sphere wherein the last vestiges of colonialism can be found.
And then to top it all off, a novel-length story about the AIDS crisis during its height, as if urging us to use the "textbook" to analyse one of the most grievous chapters in the history of the queer lifeworld. what needed to have happened in order to arrive to such a crisis -- what is it a reflection and an inversion of? a series of reflections and inversions that seem as incidental as they are intentional. history is material and power-driven, held closely to one's bosoms - where the heart beats ceaselessly and the blood rushes from excitement.
There's also 50000 more things to praise this collection for. But this stands out the most to me
so to apply that theory (and a lot more hard academic theories about linguistics, sociology, queerness, history, colonialism, et al.) to pre-modern history is a huge endeavour. it's a good thing he split this up into several stories - each reflecting on a layer of this fantasy, alien, precapitalist/pre-"Feudal" world, with the next one reversing its discoveries.
courtly culture as an inversion of slavery, the verbiage of slavery as a sexual choice, the sexual choice leading to a life of dangerous regret, the dangerous regret culminating in a libidinal drive to make things right, the right-made things urging on a utopia that maintains a sexual sphere wherein the last vestiges of colonialism can be found.
And then to top it all off, a novel-length story about the AIDS crisis during its height, as if urging us to use the "textbook" to analyse one of the most grievous chapters in the history of the queer lifeworld. what needed to have happened in order to arrive to such a crisis -- what is it a reflection and an inversion of? a series of reflections and inversions that seem as incidental as they are intentional. history is material and power-driven, held closely to one's bosoms - where the heart beats ceaselessly and the blood rushes from excitement.
There's also 50000 more things to praise this collection for. But this stands out the most to me
August 23, 2021
Abort, abort, abort. Life’s too short. Do not return to Nevèrÿon. I repeat, do not return to Nevèrÿon.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews