Reading him was formative for Junot Díaz and William Gibson Octavia Butler was, briefly, his student in a writing workshop. There are so many Delanys that it’s difficult to take the full measure of his influence. Still others know the professor, the pornographer, or the prolific essayist whose purview extends from cyborg feminism to Biblical philology.
Others know the revolutionary chronicler of gay life, whose autobiography, “ The Motion of Light in Water” (1988), stands as an essential document of pre-Stonewall New York. Many know him as the country’s first prominent Black author of science fiction, who transformed the field with richly textured, cerebral novels like “ Babel-17” (1966) and “ Dhalgren” (1975). In the stellar neighborhood of American letters, there have been few minds as generous, transgressive, and polymathically brilliant as Samuel Delany’s. Every so often, when the milk foams, he sees Laniakea-the galactic supercluster that’s home to Earth. Next, he recites an atheist’s prayer, hailing faraway celestial bodies with a litany inspired by the seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza: “Natura Naturans, system of systems, system of fields, Kuiper belt, scattered disk, Oort cloud, thank you for dropping me here.” Finally, he prepares oatmeal, which he faithfully photographs for the friends and fans who follow him on Facebook. First, he spells out the name Dennis, for Dennis Rickett, his life partner. The only evidence of a neurological event was a test result indicating that he had lost fifteen per cent of his capacity to form new memories-and a realization, in the following weeks, that he was unable to finish his novel in progress, “This Short Day of Frost and Sun.” After publishing more than forty books in half a century, the interruption was, he told me, both “a loss and a relief.”įor years, Delany has begun most days at four o’clock in the morning with a ritual. His daughter, Iva, an emergency-room physician, persuaded him to go to the hospital, but the MRI scans were inconclusive. Delany, who is eighty-one, began to suspect that he’d suffered a mini-stroke. When he came to, everything looked different, though he couldn’t say exactly how. Delany experienced a mysterious episode that he calls “the big drop.” His vision faded for about three minutes, and he felt his body plunge, as if the floor had fallen away. In September, 2021, while working at his desk in Philadelphia, Samuel R.
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