Nutshell: always already dashing petit bourgeois outsider seeks to break interstellar monopoly of Old Money aristocrat via innovative stellar semiotics.Text is kickass in its presentation of celestial objects and outer space, “where night means forever and morning’s a recollection” (18). Space i...
Delightful! Now for news! Gossip! Tales of travel! Romance! We will have tall tales and religious chatter, and - who knows - perhaps some deep and lasting insight into the workings of the soul. The opening quote is from a monk in an isolated monastery greeting a party of visitors from Neveryon, t...
Ace Books first published Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany in the United States in 1966, when the writer was 24 years old. By my count he had already published six previous novels. (Dare I bore readers of this review with the obvious declaration that is standard of any retrospective assessment of Del...
The second book and sixth story in the Neveryona series, and the first novel length story.It is the story of Pryn who leaves her northern smalltown life and world on the wings of a dragon. Her adventure takes her through the intricacies of Kolhari [the capital of this country] where she meets a p...
“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.”Was that chant prevalent in your grade school? Who said it? Who heard it? Whorepeated it? In the dialogical criticism of Longer Views, where the critiquesrespond to their own premises of exposition at the same time that they...
When I do laundry I like to bring a book small enough to fit into one of my pockets with me. This happened to be on top of a pile of mass markets I hadn't read, so it got read today. It's ok. In college I took a Sci-Fi literature class, and the teacher got really excited about what SF and Fantasy...