dm@BBN-VAX.ARPA (08/18/85)
From: dm@BBN-VAX.ARPA I think you'll like Delaney if you like to watch words be put together in interesting ways. This should not be surprising from an author with numinous titles like ``Time considered as a helix of semi-precious stones'' and ``Stars in my pocket like grains of sand''. Delaney's books are the kind that you read to be reading, where the act of reading itself is a pleasure, yet where nothing much really happens, and you may not really like the people to whom it's happening, anyway... Dahlgren, Nova, and Triton all have this in common, as does ``Stars in my pocket like grains of sand.'' Babel-17 is also well written, but is rather conventional (it has a plot and hackneyed stuff like that) (interesting, all the same, and I suspect it's most likely his most approachable book). I thought ``The Einstein Intersection'' read like the first novel it was (nonetheless, not a bad bit of writing for a 17-year-old kid). Not to be missed are Delaney's short-story collections: ``Drift-glass'' is the name of one, I can't remember the title of the other (``Empire Star'' perhaps?). Most of his short-stories are pretty conventional, with plot and interesting characters, and not so much Bizarre Sex, yet they retain his wonderful prose. Good Reads in all senses of the words. Try his stories before you give up on him completely. Another thing that Delaney does very well is imagining new societies and the way they work. As far as I'm concerned, Triton only works as a travelogue describing the politics of the Jovian moons (coterminous governments which you select every four years. Once you've selected a government, your stuck with it until the next election, but your neighbors aren't, necessarily, since your neighbors can choose their own government, different from yours.) The writing style is typical Delaney sacher-torte prose, but the character is pretty dull and whining, so despite the interesting politics and the rich prose, I vote for Triton as my ``least likely to be re-read'' of Delaney's books. Dahlgren describes New York City during a garbage strike, or maybe Bellona is a city in Pynchon's Zone in Gravity's Rainbow (anyone who stops reading Gravity's Rainbow before they get to Byron the Immortal Light Bulb deserves what they're getting), or Tarkovsky's Zone from Stalker, or even Troy after the gift horse has opened its mouth. Turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the falconer; things fall apart, the center cannot hold: mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. Dahlgren is the notes of the set designer for Bladerunner. Someone sparked all this by asking if anything ever happened in Dahlgren. Well, yes. Lots of things happen. About three or four hundred things happen on every page. Weren't you paying attention? Just about every single word in Dahlgren is an event in itself. Unfortunately, most of the words don't seem to be describing anything. I'm glad you brought it up, though, because since then lots of people have mentioned what they saw in the book, and now I'm eager to re-read it with these new ideas. Why do you care that Dahlgren never explains where it's going when the mere act of getting there has more in it than you can possibly absorb?