Samuel R. Delany

In a war-riven world, why will saving humanity require . . . a poet? At twenty-six, Rydra Wong is the most popular poet in the five settled galaxies. Almost telepathically perceptive, she has written poems that capture the mood of mankind after two decades of savage war. Since the invasion, Earth has endured famine, plague, and cannibalism-but its greatest catastrophe will be Babel-17. Sabotage threatens to undermine the war effort, and the military...

A breakneck race through tomorrow's marvels In 3172, the universe is divided between three political units: the stars and worlds of Draco, with Earth as its power center; the Pleiades Federation, on whose capital world, New Ark, lives the incredibly wealthy Von Ray family, descended from well-heeled merchants whose ancestors made their fortune as pirates; and the Outer Colonies, where, in their underwater mines, tiny quantities of the fabulously valuable...

In this novel of Nevèrÿon, a girl takes off on a dragon's back for an adventure of amazement and wonder One of the few in Nevèrÿon who can read and write, pryn has saddled a wild dragon and taken off from a mountain ledge. Self-described as an adventurer, warrior, and thief, in her journey pryn will meet plotting merchants, sinister aristocrats, half-mad villagers, and a storyteller who claims to have invented writing itself. The land of Nevèrÿon...

Two novellas and a full-length novel of Nevèrÿon, the land at the limit of history In The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals, a disease has come to Nevèrÿon. Men, rich and poor, have been stricken with it-but far fewer women. More and more die, and no one recovers. The illness seems to have first come from the Bridge of Lost Desire, a hangout for prostitutes male and female, but its spread through the city has been terrifying. And it will change Nevèrÿon...

A philosophy student's research draws him into the sexual underground of 1980s and early nineties New York John Marr is surprised he doesn't have AIDS. He has been having near-daily sexual encounters with strange men since before the dawn of HIV, but he remains healthy. His initiation began in the bathroom of the Staten Island Ferry Terminal, and since then he has found himself at home in the darkest corners of Manhattan's culture of anonymous gay...

A four-volume sword-and-sorcery epic from the legendary Grand Master of Science Fiction, multiple Hugo and Nebula and Award–winning author Samuel Delany. Tales of Nevèrÿon: After his parents are killed during a political coup, Gorgik is taken into captivity and forced to work the government obsidian mines in Nevèrÿon's Faltha Mountains. Years later, he is sold to serve one of the royal families, and eventually the army. When he is finally free,...

Appearing in book form for the first time, "The Atheist in the Attic" is a suspenseful and vivid historical narrative, recreating the top-secret meeting between the mathematical genius Leibniz and the philosopher Spinoza caught between the horrors of the cannibalistic Dutch Rampjaar and the brilliant "big bang" of the Enlightenment. Also Delany's "Racism and Science Fiction" combines scholarly research and personal experience in the unique true story...