Don't get me wrong. I'm kind of a fan of Chip Delany. I think that "Aye, and Gomorrah..." is one of the best stories in the disorienting-loss-of-personal-control-and-bodily-integrity subgenre since Cordwainer Smith's "Scanners Live in Vain." However...

This book is potentially successful only as a send-up of fantasy/sf subgenre conventions. The dragons and the ornate city are hilarious in the context of fantasy and sf as they existed at the time. However, the rest of the book amounts to nothing more than pretentious crap. The plot is, relatively, pointless and never resolved, Delany's insistence on inserting pointless, self-important, page-long quotations from his own journals to begin chapters (such as they are) is annoying to the nth degree (to see how inserting long quotations can torpedo an otherwise good story, see exhibit A, "'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman," by Harlan Ellison," and many of his sentences verge on utter incoherence. (Few things piss me off more than declarative sentences without verbs, and Delany has them here in spades). A lot of the book comes across to me as if I were watching "The Beast of Yucca Flats" again: "Flag on the moon. How did it get there?"

Granted, we can probably give Delany a little bit of leeway because he was supposedly engaging in some sort of linguistic experimentation, but one might rightly expect him to go all-out, rather than mixing what amounts to what would be a fairly decent short parody of genre conventions with spells of half-cocked Joyce imitation that leaves this critic absolutely at sea.

How this book won a Nebula is a mystery to me. Delany himself loves to tell the story about how one of the old guard cussed out the SFWA membership for handing it to him, but I believe that the SFWA in its early days had a bias definitely in favor of the most severe, alienating avant-garde writing possible, and I can prove it: In 1967, the year The Einstein Intersection won the Nebula for best novel, the attendees of the World Science Fiction Convention decided to bestow the Hugo Award for best novel upon an obscure, now-forgotten work by Robert A. Heinlein entitled The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. I rest my case.

While many of the "New Wave" science fiction writers of the 1960s did little more than adapt long-dead literary styles to their own work (as John Brunner, in "Stand on Zanzibar" adapted the style of John Dos Passos), Delany forged a new style of his own, telling a science fiction story through the creative use of ancient and modern myth. Warning--this is not a book for a lazy reader or a slow one. But if you've got the chops, this book has the chops for you.

This is essentially a retelling of myths and archetypes using what seems to be aliens or mutants. Now, bear with me for a second: This book is extremely well-written. I place it in the sci-fi section even though it is more like a fantasy on the surface. This is a world where people actually quote Ringo Starr and treat the rise and fall of the Beatles the way we treat the rise and fall of Achilles. We know it is our world, but something has gone awry. What, we never know.

This book won the Nebula and is full of rich, poetic prose. But I recommend it only to those people who love fantasy sci-fi with a good dose of poetic language on the side. For Delany's more straightforwardly "sci-fi" novels, see NOVA or THE FALL OF THE TOWERS.

This undeveloped, inconclusive little novel won some big sci-fi accolades back in the late 60s. But in those days, I would bet that the guys on the award committees were themselves on whatever the writers were on. This book is a little more enjoyable than Delany's tortuous magnum opus "Dhalgren," which is about eight times as long but accomplishes even less. Here, Delany has attempted to convert deep thoughts from his travels to the Mediterranean into a forcibly profound and visionary tome on the power of myth. In the distant future, after humans have either gone extinct or migrated from Earth, new alien inhabitants live lives informed by old distorted human myths. There's a little creative potential in that idea, and Delany comes up with a few intriguing tidbits on the power of mythology, and how myths get distorted and misapplied over time. But Delany merely turns the interesting premise into a self-indulgent writing exercise. He awkwardly applies the myths of Orpheus and Billy the Kid to an unfocused plotline about a country bumpkin living a dangerous life of labor, then finding self-awareness in the city, played out by insufficiently weird aliens. Delany's use of outdated pop culture tidbits and pretentious literary references are the signs of an author trying to be taken seriously and to not be pigeonholed into the narrow sci-fi genre. It's too bad that he dragged himself back down with a completely unexceptional story and inconclusive attempts at vision and profundity. [~doomsdayer520~]

The Emperor has No Clothes
This is a fantasy a drunk college sophomore could have written after having taken Introduction to Greek Mythology. The book is poorly written, self-indulgent, and inelegant. The story is simplistic (a country bumpkin through trials and travelling to the big city becomes self-aware). The characters, products of a genetic pot-luck, have strange bodies and one dimensional personalities. There is only a smattering of science. The book bandies pop, historical, and literary references to no purpose except to convince gullible readers that the writer is "profound."