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Publisher's Weekly
After Delanyblack, gay and from Harlemplunged into a hasty marriage with young white poet Marilyn Hacker, he continued his sexually open lifestyle and had many partners, threesomes included. This self-indulgent, portentously titled hodgepodge of autobiographical snippets only sporadically reveals how the controversial themes of his bestselling science fiction (Dhalgren, etc.) emerged out of the tensions of his marriage, psyche and relations with society. Delany writes about his precocious talent, school days at the Bronx High School of Science, the Lower East Side arts scene and his friendship with W. H. Auden. The book's paragraphs and sections are numbered, divided and subdivided like a dissertation, but the detached style is at odds with the slender material. Fans of his SF will be disappointed.
Library Journal
In this memoir, Delany ( Babel-17 , Dhalgren ) chronicles his formative years in science fiction, including his adolescence in Harlem, his shaky marriage to the poet Marilyn Hacker, the publication of his early novels, the diagnosis of his dyslexia, and his experimentation with bisexuality. This is an interesting portrait of bohemianism in the East Village of the early 1960s, lucidly and vividly told. The book is less about science fiction writing than it is about sex, however, and ultimately one is left wanting to know more about how the author eventually came to produce some of the most challenging and controversial science fiction of his generation. Lonnie Beene, West Texas State Univ. Lib., Canyon
After Delanyblack, gay and from Harlemplunged into a hasty marriage with young white poet Marilyn Hacker, he continued his sexually open lifestyle and had many partners, threesomes included. This self-indulgent, portentously titled hodgepodge of autobiographical snippets only sporadically reveals how the controversial themes of his bestselling science fiction (Dhalgren, etc.) emerged out of the tensions of his marriage, psyche and relations with society. Delany writes about his precocious talent, school days at the Bronx High School of Science, the Lower East Side arts scene and his friendship with W. H. Auden. The book's paragraphs and sections are numbered, divided and subdivided like a dissertation, but the detached style is at odds with the slender material. Fans of his SF will be disappointed.
Library Journal
In this memoir, Delany ( Babel-17 , Dhalgren ) chronicles his formative years in science fiction, including his adolescence in Harlem, his shaky marriage to the poet Marilyn Hacker, the publication of his early novels, the diagnosis of his dyslexia, and his experimentation with bisexuality. This is an interesting portrait of bohemianism in the East Village of the early 1960s, lucidly and vividly told. The book is less about science fiction writing than it is about sex, however, and ultimately one is left wanting to know more about how the author eventually came to produce some of the most challenging and controversial science fiction of his generation. Lonnie Beene, West Texas State Univ. Lib., Canyon
Used availability for Samuel R Delany's The Motion of Light in Water