Without a doubt, one of the strangest, oddest, least complete, slightly unacessible, and most thought-provoking SF novels I've ever read. I had a hard time wrapping a review around it, so here goes.Humanity has abandoned Earth long ago; it’s been inherited by a group of aliens with malleable genetics, struggling to retain a unified physical norm in the wake of run-amok mutation. They even adapt titles, Lo, La, and Le, to signify a “functional” male, female, or androgyne. Non-functionals—those too mutated to pass as normal—are cared for in an enclosure until they succumb to their deformities, taking them out of the gene pool.But many traces of humanity remain; its myths have survived and become subverted—its protagonist parallels that of Orpheus, it features an allegorical Billy the Kid—and the world of myth has expanded: the Beatles turn into a legend of Greek proportion, the population believes in the great rock and the great roll, Elvis is a replacement epithet in for God. Like with many other SF stories from the same era, it reads like a psychedelic far-future fantasy, moreso because this novel blends so many mythological elements and allegories into its story-arc.Lo Lobey is a shepherd in one rural village, a functional with hand-like feet and a musical machete-flute. He falls in love with Friza, a barely functional girl with secret telekinetic powers; one fine day, when he’s out shepherding with her, she dies under mysterious circumstances. In this world steeped in mythology and tradition, the village elders decide the crestfallen Lobey is filling the role of Orpheus (also, Ringo Starr), so he’s sent out to reclaim the dead Friza; the hope is he won’t make the mistake Orpheus did, and Lobey won’t turn around at the last second and lose his Eurydice. It turns out both Friza and Lobey are differents, as in, evolved super-mutants; Lobey can sense the music within a person, and can recreate it with his musical flutechete.Along the way, he meets Kid Death, Friza’s killer, who prods Lobey along as he flings chiding discouragement; Spider the dragon herder; PHAEDRA, AI oracle of a dead past; the Dove, eternal sex-symbol; Green-Eye, a mute different undergoing a long-dead race’s ritual; and a bunch of other people (plus things!) not listed on the back cover which I’m not going to give away. For the most part, this is a journey tale, taking place in an ornate, far-flung future, a melting pot of Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces, 1960s pop culture, literary leitmotifs, and the baroque far-future wasteland of Jack Vance’s Dying Earth or Cordwainer Smith’s Norstrilia.The novel feels modern, with an array of deep concepts entwined with metafictional surrealism—snippets from the author’s journal, parenthetical footnotes from Lobey to further detail his narrative. Come to think of it, it feels more postmodern than modern (literary joke, nod and smile). The analogues to Greek myth and the hero-journey are unavoidable; the roles of myth, heroes, and stories are all examined. The parallels are surface-level and frequent, from the elders’ early retelling of the myths of Ringo and Orpheus, to Lobey’s fight with a bull-headed mutant biped as part of his first training steps on his journey to reclaim Friza. There’s a strong theme of language and mathematics, though I’m not the best candidate to go into those; the novel’s title comes from the intersection where Einstein’s theory of relativity (realism and logic) crosses Gödel’s incompleteness theorem (irrationality).But the novel’s macro-scale focus is difference, playing out in a future of mutant aliens possessing psionic powers (and more), struggling to keep the sense of “normalcy” left to them by their human precursors. You can read it as an allegory for nonconformity, perhaps, or the more obvious connotations it has for gender or ethnicity or sexuality—Delany self-identified as gay. In any case, it deals with the Other; in fact, a whole world of Others, clinging to a concept of normalcy and the self idealized by a foregone and vanished mankind. There’s a chill irony about a race of aliens taking on human husks, clinging to our faded memories, then trying to retain our aesthetic ideals of form; as they mutate and diversify, so does their concept of “functional” normalcy.If my armchair psychology paints the book as dull or stodgy, that’s not my intent; it’s very accessible and engaging, never stopping you dead and beating you with grandiose concepts. Rather, it raises issues that crop up often enough to make you ponder, later, what the author is getting across; it’s sometimes frustrating to spot its intellectual discourse, its brilliance, and ponder through Delany’s insinuations in fits and grasps as you surmount its slopes. (I’ve seen several people say, as a compliment, that reading Delany makes them feel like their IQ is bleeding away; the novel aims to fly over the reader’s head, and not everyone likes that feeling of being out of their depth.) The novel never talks down to you—though you can accuse it of being pretentious, Delany being a self-proclaimed child prodigy—nor does it stoop to long, dry monologues of explanation: it’s all here, ready and eager to be read, but the explanations are not clear or laid-out.On the back cover, Judith Merril—then editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, the most literary of all the SF digest magazines—proclaimed Delany “comparable only to [Theodore] Sturgeon, [J.G.] Ballard, Vonnegut, and Cordwainer Smith.” Merril’s comparison is on target, in that the work is of staggering poetic and literary genius… so much so that comparing existing ’60s literary SF poets like Bradbury or Sturgeon to Delany is like comparing victorious Olympic athletes to a Greek god. Delany, with seemingly effortless ease, transcends genre conventions and SF expectations. He holds many secrets to his chest in The Einstein Intersection, and is slow to play his cards. Even when he does so, their greater meaning is often left to you to decipher. The result is a cerebral, clever novel—perhaps too clever for its own good. Within its pages, you can see the rise of science fiction’s heady, insightful, and game-changing New Wave... expanding the boundaries of SF not in creative setting or prophetic science, but, as this book does, in vision, style, and literary technique.(Full review found here.)
This tale is about Lo Lobey a sherpherd in his small village. Lo Lobey and his fellow villagers are an alien species that have chosen to make Earth their home after humans have abandoned it many years ago. Due to radiation and fickle genes, this species has trouble reproducing functional children. Those that are deemed functional receive the title Lo (for men), La (for women), and Le (for the androgynous). Those that are non-functional do not receive a title. Lo Lobey falls in love with Friza, a villager with no title. Soon after, Friza is killed by Kid Death. The village elders feel Lo Lobey is the chosen one to go after Kid Death and bring Friza back.This is a hard book to review. This is one of those books that you know that you need to read at least twice (if not more) to truly understand everything that is happening in this book. This book is less than 150 pages, so you can read this book in one sitting, and then read it again if you want. :) I should mention that I started this book, and I had to put it down for a week or so before picking it up again. I feel like I would have a better grasp of how I feel about this book, if I had read it in one sitting.This is a beautiful book to read. It is like reading a mythological dream written in the form of a poem. The book is not written in verse, but you feel like you just float along as you read it. This feeling is definitely helped along by the fact that Lo Lobey is on a hero's journey and he, like the Greek hero Orpheus, is going to the underworld to rescue his love (Friza for Lo Lobey and Eurydice for Orpheus). I wish that I was a bit more up-to-date on my Greek mythology to make more connections.Besides the song-like quality of the text, I really liked the messages in this book. In particular, a major focus of this book is on difference. Early on in the book, the villagers have a long conversation about whether Friza should be given the title of La. Friza doesn't speak, but she is smart and has special powers like being able to keep dangerous creatures away. Some villagers argue for La because she understands others, but others vote against it because she does not speak. Overall, I enjoyed this short book. It was thought-provoking but comfortable (i.e., the mythology context of the story made the story feel relate-able). I have read a few reviews of this book, and most of them note that the book feels like it is going over the heads of its readers; however, it is not done in a condescending way. When you read this book, you just get the feeling that you need to reread it, because there is so much in it and you can't absorb all of it.Delany won the Nebula and was nominated for the Hugo for this book. If you were considering trying Delany but were not ready to jump into Nova or Dhalgren (his more popular books), this is a great starting point.
Do You like book The Einstein Intersection (1998)?
Hippie crap.I liked the cover better than the story. Delany has a few quotes before each chapter, some of them from his travel diary. In one he says how he can't totally fall back on himself as a child prodigy ... touch of the ego there ... I have no idea what this is about, its just a bunch of weirdness thrown together that has a thesis about three-quarters of the way through that attempts to hold the weirdness together.Ah, the Sixties. Good drugs I imagine. Author, reviewers, Nebula Award judges all smoking the hoolie, telling each other how far out they all are....mind-blowing, man!
—Rob Bliss
Hmmm ... this book reminds me of Orson Scott Card's analysis of James Joyce's Ulysses " pretentious twaddle ... which can only be understood with the magic decoder ring which Joyce thoughtfully provided to friends, and which they passed on to the professors ... when we finish learning how to read and understand Ulysses, most of us realize that it's twaddle. Whatever insights into the human condition James Joyce had to offer were trivial compared to the labor of receiving them."Now I don't want to say that about this book. I don't know if it is pretentious twaddle or not. I know that I don't have the requisite background knowledge and I don't feel like looking it up. If you are like me, a regular person who understands what is meant by Einstein and Godel and their intersection, who catches the allusions to Greek mythology, but misses all the other cultural referents, this book doesn't have much to offer. I guess I'm not smart enough or widely read enough. The plot is vaguely interesting, the characters are interesting only in their "archetype-ness". But the messages at the bottom that I got were: People don't like other people who are different, even if they can't really define "same". It is impossible to understand everything. Oh yeah, and some of the sentences were pretty. But I wouldn't read it again or recommend it.
—Josh Meares
When this was the first Sword and Laser pick of the year, I was thrilled. After all, one of my 2014 reading goals was to finally read Delany. I'm not sure what to think of this particular book as an introduction to his work!I think I need this book to be a graphic novel. It is brief, just over 150 pages in my edition, but is chock full of ideas. At first they seemed random but as the parts of the story filled in toward the end, they became more obviously intentional. I'm certain Delany knows more than I do, and that it would take me months to untangle all the references, both named and unnamed, in what is really more of a novella. Genetic mutation, alien invasion, ancient history of western 1960s culture, Einstein and Gödel, the limitations of humanity, the future of the universe.... this isn't even scratching the surface.If this were a graphic novel, I could try to grasp the human mutations created by an alien race millennia after humans have destroyed themselves. Lobey, the hero (Orpheus, yes. Jesus? Maybe not. And other things) who hears the music others have in their heads, ends up going on a quest after the ... girl (?) he loves dies. More and more "people" are dying, actually, and he seems to be around for these deaths, and eventually he is warned that this might be a repeat of how humanity died off before. If there were pictures, I could understand the three accepted genders and the non-accepted creatures kept in kages. I could see the bull, the super computer, and the dragons. Delany seemed to really enjoy writing the fight scenes, and really one ended each of the three major sections of the story.Some of the writing stuck me, just little bits like:"Dragons swarmed in sunlight.""Who wants to take part in an orgy of artificial insemination?""A fly bobbed on a branch... and thought a linear, anthropod music. I played it for him, and he turned the red bowl of his eye to me and whispered wondering praise. Dragons threw back their heads, gargling. There is no death. Only music."Going back to Gödel, here's an interesting quotation from Judy Jones and William Wilson about his incompleteness theorem, which is an important concept in the book:"And it has been taken to imply that you’ll never entirely understand yourself, since your mind, like any other closed system, can only be sure of what it knows about itself by relying on what it knows about itself."I think that's how I feel about the book - I will never entirely understand it, because it's relying on Delany's knowledge and what Delany connected together. I'm not Delany, therefore my understanding can never be complete, and he did that on purpose.Don't despair, fellow readers, just bask in the blissful non-understanding of the book. "It's still the wrong maze, baby."This book was also discussed on the Reading Envy Podcast Episode 01.
—Jenny (Reading Envy)
