Here are some sample of what I like in Delany's prose, all quotes from the 1971 collection Driftglass which seems in retrospect a collection of his quintessential short fiction.

Two glass panes with dirt between and little tunnels from cell to cell: when I was a kid I had an ant colony.

But once some of our four-to-six-year-olds built an ecologarium with six-foot plastic panels and grooved aluminum bars to hold corners and top down. They put I tout on the sand.

There was a mud puddle against one wall so you could see what was going on underwater. Sometimes segment worms crawling through the reddish earth hit the side so their tunnels were visible for a few inches. In hot weather the inside of the plastic got coated with mist and droplets. The small round leaves on the litmus vines changed from blue to pink, blue to pink as clouds coursed the sky and the pH of the photosensitive soil shifted slightly. ("The Star Pit", opening)

Pa ran off to Mars Colony before Buddy was born. Momma drank. At sixteen Buddy used to help out in a 'copter repair shop outside St. Gable below Baton Rouge. Once he decided it would be fun to take a 'copter, some bootleg, a girl named Dolores-jo, and sixty-three dollars and eighty-five cents to New Orleans. Nothing taken had ever, by any interpretation, been his. He was caught before they raised from the garage roof. He lied about his age at court to avoid the indignity of reform school. Momma, when they found her, wasn't too sure ("Buddy? Now, let me see, that's Laford. And James Robert Warren—I named him after my third husband who was not living with me at the time—now little James, he came along in…two thousand and thirty-two, I do believe. Or thirty-four—you sure now, it's Buddy?) when he was born. The constable was inclined to judge him younger than he was, but let him go to grown-up prison anyway. Some terrible things happened there. When Buddy came out three years later he was a gentler person than before; still, when frightened, he became violent. Shortly he knocked up a waitress six years his senior. Chagrined, he applied for emigration to one of Uranus' moons. In twenty years, though, the colonial economy had stabilized. They were a lot more stringent with applicants than in his Pa's day: colonies had become almost respectable. They'd started barring people with jail records and things like that. So he went to New York instead and eventually got a job as an assistant servicer at the Kennedy spaceport. ("Corona", opening)

Below him the spaceliner filled the hangar like a tuber an eighth of a mile long. The service crew swarmed the floor, moving over the cement like scattered ball bearings. And the music— ("Corona", p. 83)

"Driftglass," I said. "You know all the Coca-Cola bottles and cut-crystal punch bowls and industrial silicon slag that goes into the sea?"

"I know the Coca-Cola bottles."

"They break, and the tide pulls the pieces back and forth over the sandy bottom, wearing the edges, changing their shape. Sometimes chemicals in the glass react with chemicals in the ocean to change the color. Sometimes veins work their way through in patterns like snowflakes, regular and geometric; others, irregular and angled like coral. When the pieces dry, they're milky. Put them in water and they become transparent again." ("Driftglass", title of title story explained, p. 113)

"Time Considered as a Helix of Semiprecious Stones" rightfully won both Hugo and Nebula awards for 1969. It is a perfect microcosm of SRD's early themes and stylistic innovations. It's protagonist is 1) an orphan, 2) a young rebel, and 3) a career thief. His companion, for the main incidents of the story, Hawk, is 1) a teenager poet, 2) a street person/ hippy, and 3) a sexual deviant of masochist persuasion (perhaps suicidal). After the paragraph I quoted to introduce Delany the writer, the character is further introduced like this:

At sixteen they let me leave the orphanage. Dragging the name they'd hung me with (Harold Clancy Everet, and me a mere lad—how many monickers have I had since; but don't worry, you'll recognize my smoke) over the hills of East Vermont, I came to a decision:

Me and Pa Michaels, who had belligerently given me a job at the request of The Official looking Document with which the orphanage sends you packing, were running Opal"Pa Michaels' dairy farm, i.e., thirteen thousand three hundred sixty-two piebald Guernseys all asleep in their stainless coffins, nourished and drugged by pink liquid flowing in clear plastic veins (stuff is sticky and messes up your hands), exercised with electric pulsers that make their muscles quiver, them not half awake, and the milk just a-pouring down into stainless cisterms. Anyway. The Decision (as I stood there in the fields one afternoon like the Man with the Hoe, exhausted with three hard hours of physical labor, contemplating the machinery of the universe through the fog of fatigue): With all of Earth, Mars, and the Outer Satellites filled up with people and what-all, there had to be something more than this. I decided to get some.

So I stole a couple of Pa's credit cards, one of his helicopters, and a bottle of white lightning the geezer made himself, and took off. Ever try to land a stolen helicopter on the roof of the Pan Am building, drunk? Jail, schmail, and some hard knocks later I had attained to wisdom. But remember this oh best beloved: I have done three honest hours on a dairy farm less than ten years back. And nobody has ever called me Harold Clancy Everet again. (pp. 217-18)

Jasper is the pass/code/warning that the Singers of the Cities (who, last month, sang "Opal" from their divine injuries; and on Mars I'd heard the Word and used it thrice, along with devious imitations, to fix possession of what was not rightfully my own; and even there I pondered Singers and their wounds) relay by word of mouth for that loose and roguish fraternity with which I have been involved (in various guises) these nine years. It goes out new every thirty days; and within hours every brother knows it, throughout six worlds and worldlets. Usually it's grunted at you by some blood-soaked bastard staggering into your arms from a dark doorway; hissed at you as you pass a shadowed alley; scrawled on a paper scrap pressed into your palm by some nasty-grimy moving too fast through the crowd. And this month, it was: Jasper. (p. 220)

The party sounds like a version of a late '60's left-liberal political gathering on the upper east side of Manhattan—like the parties that journalist Tom Wolfe satirized in one of his '60's essays. The host prides himself on his open-mindedness, and the unstated sub-text is that the aristocracy is outside the law just as the criminals are. The party is in honor of a radical woman political candidate, but the Singers steal the show since four of them gather at this party, including the eldest of the NY City Singers. The party is vividly described, with a lot of social protocol, status indicators, costume details, subtleties of exchange and conversation. On the material side, HCE shows the host his goods, and this man says that a guest is present who is much better able to afford these goods—THE Hawk, a mafia don, not to be confused with Hawk the Singer. In capsule—THE Hawk exchanges major credit chits for the jewels, Maud shows up, police helicopters descend, both HCE and THE Hawk (a.k.a. Arty) head for the elevator, HCE does two or three quick costume makeovers, he starts a fire with an incendiary device, as a distraction, Hawk the Singer helps by planting himself in the ground floor atrium and singing—so that a huge crowd gathers. The criminals slip out, Maud comes up empty-handed, but Hawk is last seen deliberately plunging into the flames at the end of his song (he survives, scarred). HCE asks THE Hawk for advice and the elder refuses to tutor the novice in crime.

HCE continues to upscale his criminal career. A string of "semi-precious stones" (one per month) are capsuled, finally he purchases a legit business on Triton, its first ice cream parlor. This becomes a huge success (shades of Hard Rock Café? Starbuck's?). After one year passes, HCE on Triton encounters the two principals again: Maud appears as a tourist and has a soda with him at his restaurant. She brings news of Earth, of Hawk the Singer, and so on, but she makes no threats, since she's on vacation! Arty (THE Hawk) also shows up, and HCE tells him that at some future time, Arty will demand to buy out HCE's business, HCE will refuse, Arty will attempt to kill HCE, they outcome will depend on how well HCE has learned to maintain security, and so on. Arty congratulates HCE on his acquisition of "hologrammic information" modeling, which will enable him to fend off Special Services. He closes: "…If you can just hold out, we'll be friends again. Someday. You just watch. Just wait." In the final scene, HCE locks his briefcase in the ice cream parlor—but decides not to break in, just to wait for the morning cleanup staff "because there was nothing in it that wasn't mine, anyway." In so many words, the man who lives by thievery, changes his own name more often than the Word of the month changes, this young man is becoming settled and secure in his own turf. Another name for this theme is bildungsroman: a story of growing up and initiation into manhood.

A Brief Assessment and Suggested Topics for Conversation

If you haven't read this novella, you may ask at his point—What's the big deal? Hardly any science content, future fiction that could be set in Brooklyn like any of the dozens of recent gangster movies, not one admirable character in the bunch…yet, a Hugo AND a Nebula? You simply have to read Delany to get the thrill of the moods and atmospheres he creates so masterfully with his strong capabilities: 1) character creation, 2) mise en scene or brilliantly evocative description, 3) the intermingling of many social strata and multiple psychic realities into an effective dramatic vehicle (chance meetings, the party, the escape, the innuendoes of the closing conversations). "Time Considered as a Helix of Semiprecious Stones" is vintage Delany.

The protagonist of this novella is a low-life, but—he reads poetry, knows the latest music, and operates routinely as a shape-shifter. The human universe evoked sprawls across the solar system, powered by interplanetary traffic and commerce, but—it otherwise resembles the '60's with the (prophetic) addition of an interplanetary guild of acknowledged—even institutionalized—minstrels. More than entertainers, bards; a Homeric resurgence in the midst of a hi-tech future. (Note that thirty years after the '60's in Greenwich Village, while the new paradigm is email and on-line dialogue, not only are "the Beats" being taught in colleges, but also the "poetry slam" movement is alive and well in bars and coffee houses nationwide….) Delany succeeds in this novella in romanticizing the criminal subculture (an approach familiar for decades in Hollywood) and creating a great poetic shorthand, the semiprecious stone Words, for the entire mindset of any subculture any time.

Like Robert Silverberg, SRD is nothing if not a literary science fiction writer. Most of his longer works have sub-texts based on oblique references to mythology and world literature. An example in this novella is the choice of initials for the hero: HCE translated as Humphrey Chimpton Earwicker is a key name in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, an intentional, possibly satirical reference by Delany. The Encyclopedia invokes some of SRD's literary models, the thieves of literature: Francois Villon and Jean Genet. There is also a great deal of the ancient heroic epics, Arthurian legend, sword and sorcery in Delany, not to mention flash and poetry. I would also invoke Edgar Alan Poe, since Delany's technique, like the short story master's, uses both concentration of effect and evocation of weird ambiance with precise language.

In discussing this story, I'd like to address these items:

1) Does the predictive potential of "hologrammic information" storage hold water, or is it a fictional ploy?

2) Is there ANY transcendence in this story—or elsewhere in Delany, i.e., do characters have illuminations, transform in any real way, or do they just "learn the ropes"?

3) What does Delany's opus (at least the work to 1975) offer to fans of not only literary SF but metaphorical or idea-bearing SF? In other words, is ALL his work about sex, drugs, and rock and roll?