Samuel R. Delany

There's a search engine I started using because my old... novel editor, this guy called Patrick Nielsen Hayden, who's the most brilliant autodidact I ever met.

He read a science fiction novel by Samuel Delaney when he was 14, living in suburban Phoenix that he bought at the pharmacy off a spinner rack.

It blew his mind.

He dropped out of school.

And he said, have you ever heard one of my favorite science fiction novels? You assume that you're going to hear a Game of Thrones novel or a Matt Deniman or Dune or something like that.

He said, have you ever heard of Babel 17? And I'm thinking, my waiter is coming up with Chip Delaney's earliest, one of his earliest novels, which was quite amazing.

And then when I told him I knew him...

I have an autographed copy, and I have an autograph by Mario Pei, who is the epigram at the beginning of the book, the language scholar.

Even if it's not literally physical danger, but it's, it's the sort of not knowing of it all, the not obviously, you know, the possibility of rejection, the possibility of attracting the wrong kind of attention.

I always think of, of Samuel Delaney's incredibly vivid scene in one of his memoirs.

I think it's Light Moves Over Shifting Water, something like that.

Anyway, I will look up the title during the break, so I will have it for readers who are interested.

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Authors like J.G. Ballard, William S. Burroughs, Samuel Delany, and Roger Zelazny were seen by the younger generations as delivering work with a more realistic quality than older science fiction.

They built upon these perceptions during the new wave.

William Gibson, who would go on to write Neuromancer, was very influenced by the authors of this age, especially Samuel R. Delany.

Delany's 1968 book Nova is considered one of the major forerunners which laid the groundwork for the cyberpunk movement.

In his novel, we see the first instance of the cyberpunk trope involving a human being interfacing with machines via implants.

Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, which I've done a full video on here on this channel, is also a seminal work in the pre-cyberpunk era.

And I decided I had a genius idea way back in 2010 to write an experimental novel in a secondary world fantasy.

It was very Samuel R. Delaney kind of kind of stuff.

And I was like, this will be great because people who like experimental fiction will like it and people who like epic fantasy will like it.

And no one, at least I didn't take the obvious next step, which is like, well, what if they both hate it for the obvious reason? Experimental fiction readers are not going to want to read fantasy and fantasy readers are not going to want to read experimental fiction.