Samuel Delany was first recommended to me in the early 2000’s by someone in a second hand Boston bookstore. Aside from describing the plot to Delany’s Trouble on Triton (albeit rather poorly), the person did not seem to really know much about Delany as a writer. Somehow, I got sucked in to a place in his fandom that would last a very long time. I tore through Delany’s fiction in that decade, and as well tried one of his non-fiction books just by happenstance.
Turns out Delany not only can put together a very competent work of fiction, but his non-fiction is pretty great too. I have since read an equal amount of both, and I actually think that the non-fiction is in some cases better. Delany was truly a fantastic essayist, and whatever writing prowess transferred from him to really helped me produce some great essays when I was in University.
Ok, that’s enough fawning.
Authors are human. They are going to do things we don’t always like. They have our same foibles that the rest of us shitty people do. I reca,l once pirating a series of videos where authors spoke at length about various topics, and while Neil Gaiman’s was fine, Margaret Atwood was clearly doing something akin to a cash grab, and the smirk on her face while she did it suggested she knew what she was doing.
Authors are human too.
Of Solids and Surds belongs to a Yale University Press series called Why I write, in which famous authors answer that very question. Delany opts to do this in a series of short and long vignettes.
I didn’t like it.
Delany has better essays.
I think what made this a little worse is that Delany himself kind decries this work in the work itself. He has a passage talking about how bored he is about talking about certain topics which he has already discussed. And considering he has a book titled “About Writing”, he may have exhausted the discourse.
This was published in 2021, when Delany was 78. He could not have been all that much younger when they approached him to do this. He also has had major health problems for many years now. At his age, I would hope to have something as together as this just to be able to phone it in. For me, this volume doesn’t take away from Delany as an author. I still love his work, and if I wanted ‘reflections on 50 years of writing”, I can easily look at some of his other work for the same effect.
Failures in Polymathy 