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A review by le_lobey
A, B, C: Three Short Novels: The Jewels of Aptor, the Ballad of Beta-2, They Fly at Ciron by Samuel R. Delany
3.0
Finished: The Jewels of Aptor
I love Samuel Delany's writing, and in this — his first novel — you can see his uniquely poetic style germinating without becoming terribly overwrought. You can also see him working with one of his favorite devices: setting his stories on a distantly post-human earth where our seemingly immutable history has been clouded, distorted and extant only as myth. Just as time has deteriorated the archival evidence of human civilization, evolution has garbled the embodied history of humanity, and Delany makes good use of these temporal and anatomical displacements to alienate his readers from the characters. By erecting these boundaries, Delany forces you to engage with the story from an historical perspective.
Held back at times by clunky and contrived dialogue framing, the characters are otherwise lots of fun to accompany on their adventure. A poet, a sailor, and a four-armed mut(e)ant are sent to steal the last of the three powerful jewels from the dark god Hama's temple on Aptor, where the Goddess incarnate of their own faith has been kidnapped. A lot of the plot ends up resting on a falsely dualistic pseudopsychology, but the moral lessons are less Manichean. A warning against absolute power delivered on most fronts by more self-aware beings than ourselves.
I love Samuel Delany's writing, and in this — his first novel — you can see his uniquely poetic style germinating without becoming terribly overwrought. You can also see him working with one of his favorite devices: setting his stories on a distantly post-human earth where our seemingly immutable history has been clouded, distorted and extant only as myth. Just as time has deteriorated the archival evidence of human civilization, evolution has garbled the embodied history of humanity, and Delany makes good use of these temporal and anatomical displacements to alienate his readers from the characters. By erecting these boundaries, Delany forces you to engage with the story from an historical perspective.
Held back at times by clunky and contrived dialogue framing, the characters are otherwise lots of fun to accompany on their adventure. A poet, a sailor, and a four-armed mut(e)ant are sent to steal the last of the three powerful jewels from the dark god Hama's temple on Aptor, where the Goddess incarnate of their own faith has been kidnapped. A lot of the plot ends up resting on a falsely dualistic pseudopsychology, but the moral lessons are less Manichean. A warning against absolute power delivered on most fronts by more self-aware beings than ourselves.