Flight from Nevèrÿon

Return to Nevèrÿon #3

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.

Genres: Fantasy, Fiction, Science Fiction, Queer, LGBT, Science Fiction Fantasy, Sword and Sorcery

376 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1985

About the author

Samuel 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.

Reviews

[Algernon (Darth Anyan) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Could it be that, in the heat of lust’s extremity, the very concept of truth had become unstuck from his initial utterance to the one-eyed man and, in its molten state, fused now to this new notion, so that his new ‘truth’ was finally just as much an assemblage, a dream, a lie as all his other stories?

Can one escape from a reality turned into a living nightmare? Where is the promised land where all sins are forgiven and all sinners made back into angels? Is art a suitable healer when doctors throw in the towel in defeat? How did the hard won freedoms we dreamed about for so long became the instruments of our downfall?

Welcome back to the metaphysical fantasy world of Neveryon, the place where we first met Gorgik the Liberator, to the capital city of Kolhari, where we first walked across the Bridge of Lost Desire. This is the place we thought we knew, this is the place that constantly changes and defies our expectations. This is the place that is currently killing us. This is the reality we are trying to flee from. This is New York, around ’82 and ’84, when Delany was writing his story and the AIDS coverage was at its height, making this third episode of Neveryon a document of that modern world reality

With a shudder, the smuggler blinked, staring into black as if it were a slate wall inches ahead. The truth! he thought, desperate in the dark. The truth! Is that the kind of fool you are? The wise men and teachers of Neveryon who talked of truth as if it were some glowing and generous light? The truth was a blackness into which anyone might be reasonably terrified to enter alone; any and every horror, he knew, could wait there.

Our journey begins with a quest for truth in a world of shifting values. The Tale of Fog and Granite tells of the journey of a smuggler from Kolhari to the borders of Neveryon. Along the way, our smuggler crosses the Bridge of Lost Desire, meets several shady characters and tries to discover the truth about Gorgik the Liberator, the man who fights to free all slaves, yet is a slave to his own sexual impulses. How will the smuggler find his way between the patches of fog (legends, lies, fabrications) that hide the way forward and the granite boulders of blind laws and impersonators that surround the reality of the Liberator?

... the object of his obsession was not some innocent and indifferent fable, but rather a system of hugely conflicting possibilities and immensely turbulent values.

Elsewhere in the novel, Delany will point out that the role of the writer is not to pass judgement, but to ‘only provide raw material – documents, if you will.’ ; to initiate a critical dialogue in the mind of the reader (Bakhtin is given as a source for this, so I guess I will have to look him up) . That makes our smuggler an everyday Joe looking for answers, looking for a cause to embrace and for a way to reconcile his desires with his thirst for freedom.

Is Gorgik a good role model for this? Given the fact that he appears in all three Neveryona novels so far, my answer would be yes. Towards the end of the opening novella, we can hear his own views on slavery in general and on empathy in particular.

Slavery is the evil that makes a mockery of any man or woman who stands in the sun, breathes the air, and dares to think that freedom, love or their right to will is untainted by it.

My vote for Gorgik is more for his capacity to feel for his fellow men, his capacity to inspire greatness in others, than for his ability to disperse good sounding slogans.

Fog blew across the moon.
‘Yes, you know his sort well, master.’
‘Sadly, I know him as well as I know myself, for once I was such – perhaps am only an accident or two away from being such now.’
‘Ah, master, you say that of all you meet. You say it of every thief and whore and smuggler. You say it of every merchant and princess and minister – then you tell me it is the source of all true power!’

There, but for the Grace of God, goes you or me. Gorgik, seen by many as an agent of chaos, is fleeing Neveryon at the moment, in the company of his one-eyed partner, leaving behind a princess with dreams of her own.

I dream, here on the border of Neveryon. In my old, cold castle, I dream of nobility and grandeur and truth. [...] Life, I sometimes think – like dreams, like stories, like plans, even like lies if you will – is to be pondered on, interpreted, interrogated: but you had best not try to change it too radically in the middle, or you risk never finding its secret.

An aging gay actor provides us with a short interlude on our way back to Kolhari, a link between the flight of Gorgik and the request from the city for his return, to save them from a deadly plague. The Mummer’s Tale is more than just a simple Bridge of Lost Desire short story. It is a plaintive monologue on the role of the artist and the fragility of human nature, a plea for kindness in the face of distress.

Well, whatever you do, and like, and feel, and think, you must learn to accept them all and live with whatever contradictions between them the nameless gods have overlooked in your making, like cracks in an imperfect bit of ceramic still pleasing in its overall shape. Certain strains, certain tasks, certain uses one does not impose upon such pieces. But everyone has them. Learning what they are is, no doubt, why we were put here.

Like all of us, the actor was once young and driven by his desires for other young flesh, by his curiosity to know the world and its people, by his rebellion against walls and secrets, borders and constraints. With age, though, he has learn first, that to be wise is to be doubtful, and secondly, that the more you flee from one place, the more you carry it within you.

because the city had taught him that such borders were not endings so much as transitions, he now knew he might someday flee across, down whatever street, across whatever bridge, along whatever road, through whatever tangled wilderness, into whenever and wherever, the possibilities vaster than the seeable, endless as the sayable.

The show must go on, and what a scary, wonderful, unknowable carnival life turned out to be.

To flee beyond Neveryon itself was no more impossible than his flight across the unknown to Kolhari, his flight across whatever madness to this new sanity.
He went back to the bridge.

The mummer’s tale is also a commentary on the writer’s role as a ‘speaker for the dead’ , to paraphrase Orson Scott Card, as the one who gives voice to the many who are inarticulate enough or too busy with living to have time for metaphysics.

They speak against the other. They speak always in dialogue with, in contest to, in protest of the real. They are always calling out to the other across the bridge on whose wild span madness and desire endlessly trade places, creating a wilderness at their center as palpably dangerous as that ill-observed at any ill-mapped border. The monologue of art must be reinterpreted as the many-voiced argument of the artist with life, with life’s image – indeed, as the wrangle between the articulate and everything else, with desire never fully possessed by any party, but endlessly at play between.

The role of the mummer as an avatar of the author is taken in the next novel-long story by the Master of a university near Kolhari, at the times when a deadly plague is ravaging the city. The parallels between this fantastic setting and the AIDS epidemic in the New World are spelled out as clear (con)text in The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals , whose experimental postmodern structure alternates between scenes in Neveryon and scenes in New York, with interviews and critical essays inserted here and there.

It is connected with sex – ‘perverted’ sex. It is connected with blood – ‘blood products,’ as they say. Suddenly the body gives up, refuses to heal, will not become whole. This is the aspect of the ‘illness’ that is ravenous for metaphors to stifle its unsettled shift, its insistent uneasiness, its conceptual turbulence.

When all else fails, at a time when the nature of the disease was still unknown and a cure nowhere in sight, an artist will resort to metaphor and allegory in order to find a path forward,

The Master sat in the darkening room. There were student voices on the lawn, and little light. Laughter surged by in the hall. Pondering questions of magic, disease, and power, the Master sat alone.

In its raw emotional intensity, uncompromising eye and intellectual challenge, this novella might be the most powerful prose to come from the pen of Delany. It has certainly drained me and forced me to push myself harder to follow up on both sides of the reality gap, to read this ‘document’ of real/fantastic people who died alone, feared and despised by a cruel society that burdened them with its own shortcomings, instead of coming together in shared pain. The city of Kolhari is preparing for Carnival, celebrating the Return of Gorgik, But what must such laughter say when it rings beyond the windows of those, women and men, who are sick to their death?

Delany, the teacher of literary skills, knows how to blend in the different threads of reality, dreams, lies and inventions into a new form of fantasy novel. He is also making it easier for the critic to spot when he breaks the fourth wall and addresses the audience directly:

My job is, then, in the course of this experiment, to find this incompleteness, to fill it in, to make him whole.
But at this point, however, there’s a real question where to look for the material: in the past? in the future? on the roaring shore where imagination swells and breaks? in the pale, hot sands of intellection? in the evanescent construct of the here and now – that reality always gone in a blink that is nevertheless forever making history?

There is a gaping hole in the fabric of our modern society (gay blaming /persecution) , and the artist is exploring ways to bridge it. Beside the Bakhtin source I mentioned earlier, there are also direct references to Wagner and Baudelaire, opposing the heavy handed, ponderous seriousness of the one with the lust for life and wildness of Dyonisos and its ilk, with a few examples of communal theater from both the West and the East Coast. But the most powerful metaphor remains the image of Pheron, a poor weaver in Kolhari, afflicted by the plague, isolated and afraid, seeking the help of his former friends.

No... No, please. I just wanted to talk, Let me stay, awhile. I’m so ... I’m frightened, Nari. I want somebody to do something for me! But what can I ask them for?

Thirty-five years later, the world seems to have mostly forgotten the AIDS scare, before a virus was identified, and before prophylactic methods were recommended. People like Pheron the weaver or Joey the drug addict from Harlem are almost certainly dead and forgotten, with only a couple of famous entertainers still associated with the plague. Pheron was only a frayed thread pulled loose from the weave and fallen from time’s crowded and confused worktable. , and that’s why we need artists to gaze into the abyss, to call on the forgotten god of Amnewor ( It was associated with endless, mindless, pointless death. But which of them isn’t? ) and to write these stories that document not so much far off fantasy lands as a map of the human heart.

As his shuttles went in and out and under, carrying color over, dropping one hue beneath another, I thought: That is what I do when I make a tale! Whatever god oversees the making of webs and nets and fabrics must also oversee the construction of stories.

There is no single answer to the calling of Amnewor. Since we are human, and full of cracks, as the mummer said, our responses will be as varied as we are multitude. An honest writer will admit to his own shortcomings and avoid sermonizing. The more years you spend on the planet, the more disillusioned with lofty ideals and with slick phrasing you become:

Is the cynical response to protect myself from the emotions? Or: Does my knowledge of a cynical truth make the emotions as painful as they are? Or: Are the emotions and the cynicism two valid responses to the world as I’ve known it at painful play within me, in no particularly contingent hierarchy?

What remains at the end of my lecture is a simple image of three exhausted children, cowering in a forest, waiting for morning or a monster. and a throwaway line in a parody interview that in our failure lies our salvation
Make of it whatever you want!

[Megan · Rating 5 out of 5]

EDIT: wrote post on the Tale of Plagues and Carnivals....over here................. http://www.montevidayo.com/?p=1906

"The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals" which takes up the bulk of this, the third book in the Neveryon series, is worth reading on its own as a response to and document of the AIDS crisis in early 1980s NYC. It's also worth reading for what it does to unravel its own fictiveness and expose (explicitly, where all else has been implicit) the seeping of the present into Delany's construction of the fantasy world of Neveryon.

The tale is fragmented, moving between Delany's documentation of the rising numbers of AIDS cases and the frustratingly slow search for their cause, and the plague he is simultaneously writing into his fictional world (and Delany comments frequently about how each narrative comments upon the other). And of course it's all fiction or at least all constructed (plot spoiler!) - yes, it's a dazzling literary performance but that is somewhat beside the point. The sense of urgency with which he writes is stunning - the narrative is consistently disrupted and disrupting; it acknowledges the impossibility of representation, and the attendant helplessness of the writer responding to and attempting to address crisis.

When I worked with Chip at Temple, we talked a lot about experimental novels of crisis (because I was/am working on one) - this tale, a novel in itself (the book contains two other shorter tales preceding this one), is an example of such a work. In his interview on experimental writing in Para*doxa, included in his volume of essays About Writing, he writes of the difference between the novel of crisis (e.g., Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun) and the experimental novel of crisis (he uses Joanna Russ's The Female Man as his prime example) and why he chose the experimental mode to respond to the AIDS situation in 1983:

"Because of the topicality and the urgency of my own undertaking, I felt it was worth the risk to hoist up on my own shaky shoulder the burden of the experimental, when I decided to take on AIDS, life, and death in a novel started in '83 and finished in June '84.

"That judgment of the crisis was NOT: I must reach as many people as possible. Rather, it was: The people I reach, I must reach as INTENSELY as possible. ...To write that book, I said: Even if I don't use it all, I've got to have the full range of the contemporary aesthetic armamentarium from which to choose...I've got things to say that are too important and that will not fit within the structures of narrative fiction as it is usually handed to us."

These strategies are of their time and so seem a bit standard from today's vantage point - the meta and pastiche especially - but unlike a lot of pomo (I think) the novel reads like necessary, urgent and effective communication.

KAIROS!

The other tales in here are also meticulously and impressively designed.

[Gerhard · Rating 5 out of 5]

‘Tell me,’ I said at last, ‘since you’ve only been here a little while, how do you find our strange and terrible land? Have you heard that we have plagues of our own?’

Next to Earthsea, Dune and LOTR, Nevèrÿon is one of those incomparable classics that ages like a good wine. This is one of the strongest from the series, with 'The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals' one of the best pieces that Delany has ever written.
Full review to follow.

[Edward Rathke · Rating 5 out of 5]

Two novellas and a novel length story.

Like the previous two books, the previous six stories, the concerns and themes persist here. Language, stories, power, and what they all mean, how they all change, how they relate, reflect, and are dependent upon so many unclear answers and influences.

The most impressive story of the series thus far is The Tales of Plagues and Carnivals, or, Some Informal Remarks towards the Modular Calculus, Part Five [yes, all of that is the title]. It is a novel treatment of the early years of the AIDS epidemic which blends fact, fiction, and everything in between. Kolhari, the city at the center of the Neveryon world, is hit by a sexual disease which seems to mostly target homosexual men and the novel deals with how the government responds to this. At the same time, contemporary New York is the subject [contemporary at that time: 1982-1984]. The novel blends these two to surprising effect while, at the same time, commenting on the nature of these narratives, undercutting points he makes, critiquing them, critiquing the critiques, and so on until the novel seems to fall in many directions with no clear answers, no proofs, no center to hold onto, which, of course, is the point.

Even within all of that, there is a supreme focus on stories, on how who a person was said to be is never really who they were, how we invent people just as they invent us, and the truth is neither of those things, who we say we are, who we are, and who people believe us to be. But all of those things add up to something new, something that is neither us nor is it not us. It is our shadow and our reflection, it is the people we wanted to be as well as the people we never wanted to be. And this very much is about the nature of truth. What it is, how it is given, what it means, the signs that accompany it, and so on.

It is an extremely impressive mirror that he points on modern life as well as his own created world, which is a reflection of modern life and concerns. And so, again, we have mirrors facing mirrors, maps about maps about mirrors, all adding up to what can scarcely be pinned down.

It is very conscious of the series as a whole, too, and here is where many of the concerns and characters throughout the series come together and interact in amazing ways.

Best of the series so far.

[Kara Babcock · Rating 4 out of 5]

Delany remains one of the authors who most consistently fascinates, educates, and challenges me. His science fiction and fantasy novels are never exactly what they seem—or perhaps are exactly what they seem—and if Dhalgren is perhaps his most widely-known inscrutable work, his Return to Nevèryön series, and particularly Flight from Nevèryön, are the most obviously inscrutable.

I’m not sure how to summarize this book. I wanted to say that the first two tales are fairly straightforward, but that isn’t true. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that the first two tales take place solely in Nevèryön, whereas the last two parts of the book—the two appendices—begin to break down the fourth wall and deconstruct the allegorical conceit of that fantastical place. All four parts examine motifs for which Delany is well known: sex/sexuality and queer politics/power. If you’re someone who is wondering where the queerness is in classic SF/F, you really do need to read Delany’s work, because it is right here.

Gorgik the Liberator, so prominent in the first two books, is present here but in a more subdued fashion. He is the object rather than the subject of “The Tale of Fog and Granite.” Here Delany revisits some of the ideas already trodden in Nevèryön, particularly around homosexual mores as well as sexual kinks and the master/slave dynamic. Once again, the seemingly foreign and strange land in this book serves as a good analogy for the cosmopolitan and conflicted 1980s in which Delany writes, particularly as it applies to sex. Yet in this regard it’s truly the last two parts of the book that steal the show.

As Delany breaks down the fourth wall, he begins to talk explicitly of AIDS. The AIDS epidemic as recorded here happened prior to my birth; for me it is history but on these pages it is raw fact. And without trying to create a false equivalence, reading this during the COVID-19 pandemic did hit hard. Delany discusses how surreal it felt, to live with the spectre of AIDS around every corner yet never actually be touched himself by the disease, and even though our respective times and circumstances are very different, I see what he means.

Delany peels back yet another layer in the final appendix, where he explicitly discusses the semantic and semiological aspirations of these books. As a writer and a reader, not to mention a huge fan of Umberto Eco, I found this part extremely fascinating. I love that Delany embraces what is regarded as a quintessentially pulp genre in order to play with and manipulate the boundary conditions of language. He pokes at and prods what he calls “patriarchal language,” and this is apparent throughout these stories. Many of his gay characters discuss their relationships, sexual or otherwise, with women, as well as their identities as fathers. While some of this might be attributed to autobiographical insertion, there’s more happening here. Delany in 1984 is doing what we nearly forty years later are once again attempting to do: queering queerness itself. Delany is pushing the boundaries, blurring the precision of labels like gay, not because he sees them as unnecessary or useless but rather because he wants people to be able to embrace them on their own terms. We see this today, as people embrace a variety of new or newly-reclaimed labels that better help them describe themselves.

Will you get a little lost in this book? Almost certainly, and that’s the point. Everything from the title to the cover to the copy will lull you into a false sense of security, make you expect a simple pulp fantasy novel with some hot! queer! action!. But there’s so much more happening here, and it hurts my brain to even think about it. I know that, contrary to his pronouncements in this volume, Delany does revisit Nevèryön once more. Even if he hadn’t, however, this would have been a fitting conclusion. Eco was right when he says Delany “has invented a new style.” Metafictional, intertextual, steeped in semiotics—Flight from Nevèryön is challenging as a work of fantasy and philosophy.

[Griffin Alexander · Rating 5 out of 5]

REVIEW FOR SERIES::
Did you know the novel in the third volume of this series "The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals" was the first piece of American fiction about the AIDS epidemic, published way back in 1984? Did you know its publication in the volume Flight from Nevèrÿon resulted in ALL of Delany's books being banned from Barnes and Noble for a number of years due to the moral cloying that existed at that time around AIDS? This series is downright historical for this piece of trivia alone, and it barely scratches the surface.

This is above and beyond Delany's best and most fully realized work, and I think also his most underread and underrated (I've read most of it, at 6,000+ pages so far). The long and the short: A linear unfolding through stories, novels, and novellas of Sword and Sorcery Fantasy concerning the slave uprising led by one famous former slave across an empire that is on the historical cusp of both writing and the minting of money. Each section begins with an epigraph from a postwar critical theorist, and the writing then begins toward and against these various ideas and thinkers, but it is never as simple as a mere explanation of an idea via narrative, and at times when it seems to be, those explanations are then problematized, warped, and reversed in successive pieces.

It's got all the hallmarks of Delany is known for: genre writing, headiness, weird sex, S&M, experimentalism/metatext, sly humor, lurid anecdotes, brilliant subtlety, blatant didacticism, monologue, dialogue, a consuming interest in what and how writing means, weirdos and outcasts, a true panoply of literary style and form.

Beyond that, it is sentence for sentence word for word his best written book (I say "book" because it really should be published as an omnibus, hint hint Library of America). I will and do forgive Chip a great deal of clumsiness in the minutiae for his larger sense of grace in general (especially in something like Dhalgren), but there is no forgiveness needed for Nevèrÿon, it is, dare I say—perfect? And that is coming in at ~1200 pages of dense philosophy laden fantasy narrative where to be honest not a lot "happens." I was engaged, and impressed, and stunned, and at many moments even emotionally moved, which is just a strange combination for a book like this that, honestly, should not work in the way it does or as well as it does.

I exhort you: read it read it read it READ IT!

And while I'm at it: Just give Delany the Nobel prize already. What are we waiting for?

[Cécile · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ouch... Ok, so let's start with the most important things. Delany is a very, very clever author. He's a keen observer of the world and he definitely can write. He can even write enjoyable books when he wants to. When he wants to make you think, though, you may come out of the book with a slight headache.

This is the third book in the Neveryon series, so I assume (as the author has) that if you are brave enough to carry on, you already expect to read about prehistorical barbarians exchanging very thoughful points of view about capitalism and psychoanalysis, not to mention the power of names and signs and of course, modular calculus (whatever that is). You also know that after the novel proper is finished, you will come across an appendix about some mysterious Mesopotamian texts recently unearthed in the desert and containing mentions to names, places and events strangely similar to those in the book (you may also have already been puzzled by this unheard-of discovery, looked it up on the net and found out it was all Delany's invention), discussed by very renowned (and completely inexistent) archaeologists, putting the novel in an entirely new light. So now you are comfortably expecting to have understood what Delany was up to, and probably feeling a lot more confident and relaxed as you open the book.

Well, you won't be for very long. The first part, it's true, is pretty much what you must have got used to by now. The most surprising point in the second part is the way it is told, but otherwise, it's ok. And then, not halfway through the book, you reach the third part.

Have you ever read an SF novel where the point of view shifts every paragraph or so, never telling you exactly where it is picking up? All right, and one which alternates paragraph about a fantasy world and paragraphs about New York in the eighties, in full AIDS panic ? And that adds to the lot numerous comments about the art of writing, meanings, SF, disease, freudianism...? What is more, in its shifting between the colourful, if plague-ridden, world of Neveryon, and the atmosphere of profound despair of the gay community in New York before the discovery of the HIV virus, the story is deeply unsettling. You never feel you are wasting your time. It is fascinating, deeply intellectual and heart-rending at the same time.

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first two in this four-book collection are intellectually thrilling takes on power, economics, politics, slavery, the constructions of language and history, the fallibility of memory alongside the influence of familiarity, cultural mores, gender and sex roles, class, and so much more, all wrapped into fairy tales that read beautifully, like simple stories, but are built to reflect the very concepts being introduced within them, using our memories and familiarity as readers to reinforce their effects. They are experimental, layered, philosophical, clever, and brilliant.

This third book contains several discrete pieces, held together only by threads Delany has already built among us readers, so that scattered references to things we know tie them to each other as well as to the previous books. The first part of the book, The Tale of Frog and Granite, returns us to Nevèrÿon, reintroducing us to familiar places and people through the eyes of someone we met briefly in a different person's story. This tale dips into the sordid, the lonely, the broken, and the resilient while returning to Delany's theme of reality's shifts as interpreted through different experiences and perspectives. From there we move into The Mummer's Tale, which takes the form of a one-sided conversation, again relies on what we already know of Nevèrÿon, but examines narrative, art, and how both can elucidate but also manipulate, represent, but also misrepresent. The third and final part of the book is a novel, The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals, and this is the most experimental. The previous books included wonderful fictional academic elements that are repeated here, but in this one, Delany also writes about writing what we're reading, discusses what we've just read, ties fictive versions of his real-life experiences to the fictions he creates in the novel: more layers and construction to mirror the concepts. But this third section of the third book also is steeped in Delany's terror of, and frustration with, the emergence of HIV/AIDs. It's absolutely fascinating and terribly, terribly sad to read Delany as he describes, at the time, and then through updates, the early confusion, fear, and prejudice; as the general lack of knowledge and his own both give way to more information; as he first hears of distant deaths and then later loses friends. This novel self-consciously and deliberately serves up his warnings, anger, horror, and sadness. And still, within it, among the descriptions of real world turned fictive murders and junkies and public toilets gone foul, there is also nestled a secondary tale that itself contains and reflects all of Delany's complex themes of memory and perspective and class and history, a little jewel of a story that connects to all three parts of this book and to the other books, while also standing on its own within the novel (a fact that, in itself, is another mirror).

Overall, this third book feels, in the reading, more prosaic and interrupted and it reeks of disappointment, frustrated ambition, and oppressive structures, threaded through with the sneakier, nastier, parts of humanity in all three parts. The experience of reading it is, in the moment, less delightful. And yet, in retrospect, it is as complex, as layered, as deliberate, and as intellectually challenging and exciting as the other books. That its power resides in hindsight seems almost miraculous, once more an absolutely genius and intentional application of some of the very ideas to which Delany has introduced us.

[Izzy Cole · Rating 4 out of 5]

Much heavier thematically/theoretically than the first two and as a result slightly less enjoyable to read. However, Delany writes illness and disturbance artfully and urgently, capturing the immediacy and fear of the early 1980s AIDs crisis in New York. Although fragmentary, whole sections stand alone as historical documents (though he explicitly seeks to trouble boundaries between fact and fiction and the point seems to be the impossibility of representation) and constantly disrupt the genre of 'sword and sorcery' (it's not that weird I promise). Another very naff 1980s fantasy book cover too which is important.

[Olivia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic & unlike anything I’ve ever read before. Loooooooooooved it

[Becky · Rating 5 out of 5]

As always kinda over my head but utterly stunning, Delany explodes the Nevèrÿon series in this novel with the intrusion of the real world AIDS crisis.

[Julene · Rating 4 out of 5]

I took this book out from the library to read "Appendix A: The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals, or Some Informal Remarks toward Modern Calculus, Part Five." This is part diary, part of a breakdown of the series of books that make up author Samuel R. Delany's Flight From Neveryon, the last in a series titled Neveryon, where there is a deadly epidemic that mimics HIV/AIDS, which hit big cities in the early 1980s.

This Appendix is numbered into sections. Near the beginning, in section 2.2 Delaney starts by quoting Susan Sontag from her book Illness as Metaphor, "Diseases should not become social metaphors." She was addressing cancer and wrote her book in the late 1970s, before the AIDS epidemic was known. Delaney then writes, "When dieseases generate such metaphors, the host of misconceptions and downright superstitions that come from taking them literally (misconceptions that, indeed, often determine the metaphors themselves in a system of reciprocal stabiliation) make it impossibe, both psychologically and socially—both in terms of how you feel and how others, with their feelings, treat you—to "have the disease" in a "healthy" manner." In Section 3 he writes, "Perhaps the job is to find a better metaphor and elaborate it well enough to help stabilize those thoughts, images, or patterns that, in the long run, are useful—useful to those with the disease, to those who care for them, or even to those who only know about them. (Needless to say, what is useful in the long run is not, necessarily, in the short.) What is most useful in the long run is what destabilizes short-run strategies, the quick glyphs, the cliches, the easy responses history has sedimented." (This is the whole of Section 3.)

He weaves in and out of the story that must be from Neveryon, stopping to ask what an orthodox Freudian would say in a few sections. Later in Section 8 he introduces us to Joey a street hustler in NYC who he sees in his neighborhood and who he occasionally gives money to. Joey asks for help because a murderer is killing people who sleep on the streets. In Section 8.2 he has breakfast with a friend who works at a hospital and talks of how many AIDS cases are coming in daily. He assures her he is curtailing his sex outside his main relationship. (Samuel Delaney is a gay man who was also married and had an agreement with his wife.) Section 8.21 he talks about the one person so far (1984) that he knows of with AIDS, Hibiscus who worked as an actor, he died two years later. What begins to emerge between the science fiction/fantasy story is Samuel's personal history with the disease, his grappling with it's effects as he watches people disappear. Also he begins to pick up anecdotal evidence, of say the number of cases of infection who use needles. And at one point he has a flu with fever where he questions if he has AIDS and sees a doctor to be told he does not.

Section 9.7 is his recounting of being at the Port of Authority at 4:30 am, he is catching a bus to Philadelphia for a conference. It is a vivid recounting, not a pleasant place to be, but intriguing to read as a native New Yorker. Section 11.3 documents April 23rd, 1984 where it is announced on the news that there has been an AIDS breakthrough; Dr. Robert Gallo isolated a virus (HTLV-3) as possibly the causative agent of AIDS. In Section 11.4 he writes, "By now I'm willing to admit that perhaps narrative fiction, in neither its literary nor its paraliterary mode, can propose the radically successful metaphor. At best, what both modes can do is break up, analyse, and dialogize the conservative, suggesting (not stating) where still another retains the possibiltiy of vivid, radical development. But responding to the suggestion is, of course, the job of the radical reader. (The "radical metaphor" is, after all, only an interpretation of preextant words.) Creators, whatever their polictics, only provide raw material—documents, if you will. In terms of AIDS itself, there are all sorts of social practicalities one can endorse: better reserarch, better information, support groups for people with AIDS, support groups for those around them."

He ends Appendix A in Section 13, walking along Riverside Park and meeting a man who has a fire going in the bushes. The line I love is, "Muggers? They're too scared to wander in this part of the city after sundown." and, "But the cops are almost as scared of this section of the park as the muggers." If you want to know what happens in this exchange, I leave it to you to read this essay.

[Tim · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read the first three volumes over the week. I don't think I'll be going on to the fourth just yet, but I may come back to it. There are going to be spoilers in this review.

Delany writes philosophical novels. Or perhaps he pastiches philosophical novels. Plato's dialogues lie behind several sections and almost the whole of volume 2 can be read as a cheerful response to Sade's 'Justine' Voltaire, Dostoevsky, and Anton Wilson drift in and out of the text. The author tackles psychology - mostly Freudian - economics (he's almost certainly wrong about the evolution from barter to money, which he seems to see as very important in the first volume, but which happily doesn't get much in the way of the rest of the series), literary theory and much, much more. Some of this rides with the story, but there are long passages which the reader may find pretentious, boring or mundane, depending on how much patience she has for academic quibbling.

Delany's lead character is the leader of a slave revolt - and comes across as a Staggerlee as in Nick Cave's version of the tale. It is a little mysterious as to why he acts as he does; in several places throughout the books it is suggested that slavery is, in any case, pretty much a thing of the past. And indeed, this rather peculiar hero never seems to do very much, slipping clandestinely from place to place, and holding meetings which finish in mayhem, as those he has - perhaps - betrayed discourage would-be followers and attempt to assassinate him. When he does move into action, he is as much concerned to realize his Hegelo-Sadian sexual fantasies as to make much difference to the wider world around him. Delany spends pages and pages on his fornications, particularly with his successive lieutenants, but relatively little on his political and military campaigns. And once Delaney has wound him up in the first book, he is pretty much left to tick his way through the following two as a background figure that gradually takes less and less space.

Delany is very much interested in gender questions, and several of the leading characters are women, particularly in the second volume. At one point, the heroine, a happier Justine, who is prone to embracing her opportunities rather than running away from them, finds herself caught up in a four-way drama of passion, setting up a rather interesting set of characters who then just disappear from view, to leave space for a rather pointless fellow who takes on the heroine's role as victim.

The third volume is perhaps the most intriguing and successful of the three, and its final section, which winds back and forth from the fantasy world to New York at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, is, for the most part, wonderfully done.

[Jakob Johnson · Rating 4 out of 5]

To start out, I adored this book. The reason why I would give it 4/5 instead of 5/5 is simply because of the density and complexity of the language. For the average reader (that being one who does not study literature academically at the post-undergraduate level) this book may not be as accessible as some of Delany's other works. However, for me personally, this book gets 5/5. But in general, 4/5 due to issues of accessibility. In this review I'm really only going to talk about The Tale of Fog and Granite and The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals. The Mummer's Tale is a great short story, but for brevity's sake I won't include my thoughts on it.

The Tale of Fog and Granite is uproariously funny, erotic, and even tragic to an extent. This smooth blend of the three establishes it as one my favorite works of the Nevérÿon series. In addition, while like many of Delany's works it is dense, the density of this novella is complemented by visceral and intense scenes, which are so compelling that I happily re-read them. In truth, even after finishing the novella and having re-read most sections multiple times, I still feel like I need to re-read it, and that's a good thing.

I would argue that The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals is a seminal work in American speculative fiction and contemporary literature. This is certainly the highlight of the book. Likewise, it is also the most difficult selection that the book has to offer. This novel certainly has a way of kicking you while you're down. Some of the scenes with Joey left me feeling depressed while still craving more. Truly, it is a powerful way to comment on the AIDS crisis that killed so many LGBTQIA+ people. In addition, it is perhaps the most interesting use of setting that I've ever come across. Switching between 1980s New York and Nevérÿon and eventually synthesizing the two narratives simultaneously- genius, sheer genius. I can't adequately express just how much I love this novel.

[Stephanie]

Read this for an English class, and the only confident statement I can make about the book is that experimental writing is not my preferred genre of reading. To be honest, this book is daunting; especially towards the beginning as a new reader of Delany, the experience is “bewildering” as my professor has mentioned. Many passages do not make sense without a second read over and the book is split into different sections, one part involving the fantastical world Of Nevèrÿon and the other of NYC during the AIDS epidemic. The sections jump all over the place, and because I have not read the first 2 books, the characters and world are new and unfamiliar without proper introduction. This is
a book, if the plot interests you and you’d like to try experimental writing, that requires multiple readings to grasp any meaning from it. Overall, not my personal taste in reading since I tend to be a
More casual reader of “fun” fiction, but Delany’s work can be appreciated with a careful eye.

Side note: No rating because I do not understand enough of it.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

The 3rd in this series finds SRD settling in to tell the tales of some side characters (one of the smugglers that Pryn travelled with in the 2nd book, and a mummer that may have been the head of the company she went away with at the end) and how they interact with the main narrative; the final longer tale is a bit more complicated but also just continues to paint the city of Kohlari through common folk. They all continue the narrative of Gorgik and (I imagine) sets up the conclusion, but should be enjoyed mainly for their character portraits in themselves. And the last tale is a fourth-wall-boundary-breaking one that (as is always the case with those) threatens to go off the rails once or twice but is deftly brought back in before that happens. At times the series has both confirmed to and defied my expectations, and the only thing I'll be disappointed by is if it doesn't cleanly wrap up in the last book (but from what I'm seeing during my glances at the blurb for the 4th book without reading enough that I'm spoiling it, I think I'll be satisfied).

[Robyn Lisle · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘Of course the [AIDS] epidemic is a terrible thing - and the satisfaction with which so many Americans regard it as God’s fulfilment of their own extremely disgusting system of values and fantasies is worse. [...]To be morally upset about how other people take their sexual pleasures is surely the weirdest human quirk ever’


Probably my favourite of the series so far. Touching on so many themes including the previous topic of slavery, but more predominantly focussing on addiction, sexuality, and the AIDS epidemic which was just starting in New York during Delany’s writing. Super interesting read, especially ‘The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals’.
Also a small section about the closing of all public places during the 1772 plague in Europe was definitely very relatable during the COVID-19 lockdown - history repeating itself etc.

[k-os]

[Pandemic Lit 2/4]

What an unusual "documentary novel" -- interspersing a first-person account of 1984 AIDS NYC with a plague in fantasy Nevèrÿon. Hard at first for me to get into it (owing in part to not having read the first two books in the series), but then I did, and I love the way fact and fiction ultimately blurred. A very cool template for a project. Made writing fiction seem more possible?

[Dean Wilcox · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can't claim to understand all parts of the stories, nor can I boast that I hung on every word, but a wonderful mix of sword-and-sorcery, metafiction, semiotics and deconstruction. I'll be wrapping my head around this series for some time to come.

[Esme Roda · Rating 3 out of 5]

technically i only read the tale of plagues and carnivals out of this but it’s a full length novel so i’m counting it
definitely well-written and super interesting but i got a little lost in the sauce sometimes

[Frank Ashe · Rating 5 out of 5]

This intertwines so many strands of fiction and non-fiction that are unexpected - a masterpiece.

[Roy Kenagy]

RK KINDLE

[Venneh · Rating 5 out of 5]

The story that is the bulk of this collection is a 1:1 discussion of the AIDS epidemic and how Delany chooses to fictionalize it in Neveronya and it’s goddamn amazing. Absolute masterwork.

[Martin Keith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Flight from Nevèrÿon is book number three in Samuel R. Delany's sword-and-sorcery series, Return to Nevèrÿon. This one contains three novellas/short novels:

The Tale of Fog and Granite is about a young, nameless smuggler who idolises the political figure Gorgik the Liberator (a central character of the series). He encounters various people who impersonate Gorgik for their own ends. One encounter results in his first experience with BDSM while other encounters are more sinister.

In The Mummer's Tale, an old actor recounts his memories of a (sometimes sexual) relationship he had with the young, adolescent smuggler to a friend (a nobleman academic).

The final story, The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals, might be my favourite so far in the Nevèrÿon series. The story switches between two main threads: a plague has struck Nevèrÿon's queer community; Delany recounts his memories of AIDS in New York during the early '80s. Shockingly, this story was the first novel-length treatment of AIDS from any major US publisher.

Most of these stories, characteristically, deal with truth. Is there a real Gorgik (and, therefore, a real hope for liberation?) Is there a shared truth behind our subjective memories of events and people? Is the lack of absolute truth itself a way for hope?

Goddamn it, Delany, you did it again.

[Macartney · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review is for the series: Set in a long ago time in a forgotten kingdom, Delany explores the structures of civilization in this four novel “sword and sorcery” series comprised of eleven interlinking stories surrounding Gorgik the Slave Liberator. At times privileging academic exercise over pure storytelling, the series nevertheless captivates as much as it elucidates. To be immersed in Delany’s Nevèrÿon is to watch him attempt to name the unnameable magic and spirit that makes humans human. Even when the story creaks and shakes from the weight of Delany’s ideas, it never falls apart and, like a Rube Goldberg machine, its near destruction makes its eventual success all the more fun and awe-inducing. The second book Neveryóna, a stand-alone novel chronicling the adventures of a young girl named Prym, is the most cohesive and successful of them all. A true joy of a character resulting in a story that is a delight to read and so very delicious to think about.

[Chuck Childers · Rating 5 out of 5]

Okay, while Neveryona, the 2nd book in this series, is one of my favorite novels ever, this book, Flight from Neveryon, is... not. I'm fairly sure part of this collection of stories that juggles sign, symbol, reality, the written shadow of reality, and AIDs in 80s New York, is that Samuel Delany like to f**k with his readers. Flight may be one of those books that one can get more out of depending on how much work one puts into it, but I'm not sure I want to work that hard. Again, Delany may just be f**king with us. Still I enjoyed the experience if not the actual reading.

Being the third book in the series, other books should be read first for any (let's just call it) "clarity." Also, the book has some fairly graphic gay sex scenes with BDSM elements, not particularly arousing, but detailed. So, Flight isn't for everyone. Forewarned, forearmed, etc.

[Konrad · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read for the imbedded novel 'The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals,' Delany's self-referential, Po-Mo, intelligent twining of the sword & sorcery world of his imagination (Nevèrÿon) with his verisimilar rendering of the AID's epidemic in NYC, circa 1984 (often following Joey -- homeless, hustler, junkie). Toss in here & again there portions Delany's own lit. theory musing, thoughts on his approach towards historical 'real' events, & editorial comments of his own writing, even include outside, persuasive critique from (imagined) persons who have a bone to pick with Delany's novel, and you got yourself a, challenging, sure, yes, if that matters, but whole-hog-heartedly rewarding text. Read. Read. Read.

[David Meyers · Rating 5 out of 5]

While the first two stories in this book are two of the best in the series, the third, A Tale of Plagues and Carnivals, is by far the best of the Neveryona stories that I've read to date. In a strange, but compelling amalgamation, it combines the author's experience as a gay man in New York at the height of the AIDS crisis with a story of AIDS affecting the fantasy world that the Neveryona series takes place in, with additional tidbits and digressions on literary theories on scifi and fantasy spread throughout. It is worth reading the whole Neveryona series, just for this one story.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Neveryon’s story told through weak translation, as entire series. Limitations of language’s accuracy and historiography in translation and fantasy genre tropes .
Gorgik’s legend is different from reality. Sexual proclivities and power examined. Delaney’s meta-fantasy.

[Justin · Rating 4 out of 5]

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