One day a red sun swollen to hundreds of times its normal size rises to terrify the populace, then retreats across the sky to set on the same horizon. Inexplicable events punctuate the novel: One night the perpetual cloud cover parts to reveal two moons in the sky. People enter and leave by crossing a bridge on foot. The city of Bellona is severely damaged radio, television, and telephone signals do not reach it. It features an extended trip to and through Bellona, a fictional city in the American Midwest cut off from the rest of the world by an unknown catastrophe. I can’t recall much of the class, but I remember with fondness the times I met with Chip during his office hours, and spending the time chatting about Science Fiction and writing.Dhalgren is a 1975 science fiction novel by American writer Samuel R. I remember we read The Man Without Qualities by Musil and Death Comes for the Archbishop by Cather. Years later, when I found out that Chip Delany was going to teach at UMass-Amherst), which was a part of the 5-College Consortium (I went to Hampshire), I jumped at the chance to take his class, which was about Comparative Literature. I maintain that Dhalgren is one of the key works in my personal cannon. That book, a masterpiece of liminal fiction, bridges the gap between “low” speculative fiction and “high” post-modern literature between pornography and art between prose and poetry. The journey of the poet through a kind of underworld-like city has strong resonances with the Orpheus myth. Bellona is as vivid and haunting a creation as Mieville’s Bas Lag or Ashton Smith’s Zothique. I read the book over a summer, enthralled with the topnotch phantasmorgia, the alternative sexuality and, perhaps most of all, the dream-logic poetic prose. You know that classic Bantam Edition, the one with the ruined city and the swollen and sickly orange sun. When my older brother left for college, he left behind a copy of Dhalgren. Delany (1942 – ) when I was in my late teens.
I first encountered the work of Science Fiction Grandmaster Samuel R.
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