Samuel Ray Delany Jr. (1942– ), who writes as Samuel R. Delany, is a widely influential and often avant-garde US author and academic associated with the New Wave movement. Delany’s best-known fiction is speculative fiction, but he also has written important essays on sexuality, including Shorter Views: Queer Thoughts and the Politics of the Paraliterary (2000). Delany was for a time married to the National Book Award–winning poet Marilyn Hacker, with whom he had a daughter. Hacker’s poetry is important to Delany’s early novels, especially Babel-17 (winner of the 1966 Nebula Award).
Delany’s other novels include The Einstein Intersection (winner of the 1967 Nebula Award), Dhalgren, and the swords-and-sorcery series Return to Nevèrÿon. Dhalgren elevated Delany beyond cult status, selling almost a million copies while polarizing the science fiction community; it was the quintessential New Wave text. More recently, Delany published the sprawling, ambitious novel Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders (2012), which recounts the lives of a group of gay men. The novel ventures into the near future and reasserted Delany’s career-long commitment to ambitious, adult literature in the vein of Dhalgren. In terms of nonfiction, Delany’s book on science fiction The Jewel-Hinged Jaw (1977) remains influential on new generations of writers and readers.
But Delany’s impact on the field has been felt in many ways. He won enough Nebulas that in 1986 Bantam could publish a 425-page book of Delany’s work entitled The Complete Nebula Award–Winning Fiction. His story “Atlantis: Model 1924” has been included in every edition of The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. He wrote two issues of Wonder Woman, including the (in)famous “Women’s Lib” issue, and wrote the graphic novel Empire (illustrated by Howard Chaykin) as well as a graphic memoir, Bread and Wine (illustrated by Mia Wolff). He taught at the influential Clarion workshop many times, and his students included Octavia E. Butler and Kim Stanley Robinson. Delany’s story “The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals,” written in 1984 and included in Flight from Nevèrÿon (1985), was, in Jeffrey Tucker’s words, “the first novel-length work of fiction on AIDS from a major publisher in the United States.”
Delany entered the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 2002. From January 2001 until his recent retirement, Delany served as the director of the graduate creative writing program at Temple University. In 2010 he won the third J. Lloyd Eaton Lifetime Achievement Award in Science Fiction from the academic Eaton Science Fiction Conference at UCR Libraries. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America named him its thirtieth grand master in 2013.
“Aye, and Gomorrah” appeared in Harlan Ellison’s famous Dangerous Visions anthology in 1967. In his introduction to the story, Ellison wrote that Delany’s work approaches “shopworn clichés of speculative fiction with a bold and compelling ingenuity…He brings freshness to a field that occasionally slumps into the line of least resistance.” “Aye, and Gomorrah” remains a truly groundbreaking story that demystifies the epic role of the astronaut in science fiction, creating a grittier and stranger reality, much as James Tiptree Jr. does for other science fiction tropes in her “And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill’s Side.”