“Wie lange noch hält diese Kette von Ereignissen an, bis Ich nicht mehr bin, gedanklich geordneter Stein.”¹

Autumn is coming to the City.  Autumn, and the trees are turning shades of rust, and soon the concrete jungle will be empty and bare.  Everything will look larger, then, clearer without the shield of a canopy.  And any wildlife we see in those melancholy streets will be wanderers in alien territory.

But, for now, autumn is coming to my City and I find my thoughts turning inwards and to the deep waters we share.  Skipping stones across the great unconscious sea.

In the same way that we wonder, occasionally, whether a banana might appear blue from behind another’s eyes;  it often occurs to me that we have no conception of what normal thoughts might be.  Our thoughts, translated as they must be through the medium of communication, are shaped by the restrictions of language and understanding² - even filled, as it is, with words defining things we might not recognize if we encountered them “in the flesh.”

Enlightenment.

Freedom.

Love.

I think that the very fact we possess some words is perhaps more important than their meaning.  How would we begin to approach some concepts without symbols to manipulate?  To stack alongside other symbols.  To compare, size up, rearrange and -ultimately- dismiss.  Some of our words, I think, are seeking words.  Existing in order that we might one day hold them up against the thing itself and say “yes, thou art that.”

I wonder whether the rest of the search is then in recognising where we have strayed, in killing the Buddha.³

My magical practice has always been prone to crises of faith, to moments of indecision, of silence.  There are days when the pattern of life is nothing but air traffic and dead leaves.  Days when, despite any of the incredible things that magic has brought into my life, I find myself doubting that it exists.  It’s ridiculous, I know, like doubting in the existence of beauty, of Kung-fu, of vector mathematics.  Some things simply cannot be submitted to doubt.

Not once you know.

Sometimes, my return is a breath of fresh air. A moment of certainty. One of my entities contacts me, a project comes to fruition, a magpie lands at my window and I remember. These are truly beautiful moments, I can actually feel a sort of golden flower unfurling in my soul. Returned as quickly as it had disappeared.

During this most recent sabbatical, I decided to keep my nose to the grindstone:

I have been trying, for years now, to learn to read simple playing cards. Divination isn’t exactly my forte and I decided that, since it was always going to be difficult to develop my skills, I may as well select a medium that appealed to me personally. I have already made some meaningful progress although the implications of certain cards still elude me, playing cards simply do not offer the creative prompts that the Tarot provides…

…in any case, an issue had been weighing rather heavily on my mind, and I spread my cards.

The prognostic was not good: I was venturing out from a position of strength into a situation which promised to make me suffer. It outlined pretty clearly the reasons, the players, and offered absolutely no way out. So the message was clear.

Get out. Get out, now.

I didn’t, of course.

I drew the cards again, and again, and finally put them away as nonsense.

(You might ask, at this stage, why I didn’t draw up a sigil to fix the problem – I don’t work on people without their agreement. I have heard some great arguments as to why it’s absolutely fine, but it makes me uncomfortable. It works, it seems harmless, and it feels profoundly wrong.)

You probably guessed it by now: everything played out very precisely as the cards foretold.

I was even able to predict the whys and wherefores of the situation, identify the players and circumstances involved, surprise people with knowledge of the events leading up to it all… one of my rare 100% hits, apparently.

I’m miserable as all hell, of course, but I can feel it tickling inside my ribs again.

A smug little golden flower.

Should have listened.

Continuing what has turned into a recent tour of the New Wave, I come to Babel-17. This novel first appeared in 1966. It won the Nebula in ‘66 and was short-listed for the Hugo award in 1967.

Robert at The Valve was dissappointed by this novel; he writes that this book is representative of award winners that represent the mediocre mainstream rather than the greatest potential of art. I can’t support this argument. Considering that Babel-17 was in contention against a Heinlein novel, in only the second year of the Nebula awards, it shows a substantial bias towards art over popularity that the Nebula voters chose the Delany novel (in a tie with Daniel Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon).

It’s true that the novel has dated itself somewhat. Its main theme is an exploration of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (see Wikipedia) that language strongly limits thought. More recent linguistic thought has all but rejected Sapir-Whorf, more or less nullifying the premise of Babel-17. But remember, the premise could be recast with the word “language” replaced by “memes” and it would have seemed current into the ’90’s.

And anyway, the novel does still have something to offer. For one, the first half or so of the book is a long sequence in which the heroine, Rydra Wong, is searching out a crew for her starship amongst the Transport community, who’s habits are somewhat wild, to say the least. She’s accompanied by a Customs officer, clearly representing mainstream and “straight” (in every sense) culture. The interaction is a direct comment on what 1960’s mainstream American culture had to learn from the various peripheral subcultures around it, and it’s still valid today.

The second half of the book brings the Sapir-Whorf premise more into play, as Wong takes her starship and crew out to find the source of a mysterious language that has been recorded in radio transmissions preceding various attacks on the Alliance government. This section also reflects a bit of the 1960’s SF’s romantic infatuation with the aristocracy, another feature that dates the novel. Nonetheless, the later part of the book does develop an action-oriented plot, without sacrificing Delany’s poetic writing style.

Given Delany’s style, and apt social commentary, Babel-17 is still well worth reading, even if other aspects of the book have aged in the 43 years since the original publication.

Phoenix is the sweatiest city in America.

“Stranger In Moscow.”

Sydney and the light rail.

Augmented reality in London.

The ghost in the field, and RFID chips.

What will happen when London is flooded?

“Berlin” in Paris.

Interracial couple denied marriage license in Louisiana.

Soft robots and DARPA.

Moscow’s mayor promises a winter without snow.

Paris Syndrome and Jerusalem Syndrome.

San Francisco and the 1906 earthquake.

Rebuilding New Orleans.

from here.

“City Of Blinding Lights.”

A possible glimpse at our future space cities.

America’s most expensive cities and most impoverished cities.

FOX promises to air all 13 of the already ordered Dollhouse season two episodes.

Speaking of which, Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard’s The Cabin In The Woods being held back a year to be switched over to 3D.

“Magnetricity” observed for the first time.

A map of your future mega-cities and megaopolises.

“When the lights go down in the city…”

Sensing the immaterial-material city.

Cities underground and cities tsunami-resistant.

City Of Shadows.

The ruins of Chernobyl, over 20 years later.

“Cities In Dust.”

GTA IV: Inherent Vice City.

“Silver City” and “Sad, Sad City.”

Why all cities are haunted.

The mind of a city (and how our brains are similar).

The cityscapes of François Schuiten.

Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem.

The city is a battlesuit for surviving the future.

Phantom City: See the city that could’ve been.

“…when we reach the city.”

“I have come to wound the autumnal city.”

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…”

“I’ll take the coral reefs as my metaphor. Though hardly so beautiful. If the essence of life is information carried in DNA, then society and civilization are just colossal memory systems and a metropolis like this one, simply a sprawling external memory….”

-a quote from Ghost In The Shell 2: Innocence, a movie that I was watching the other day and just first stirred the pot on several thoughts I had locked up. Thoughts about human beings and boxes we live in.

Warren Ellis had created a comic book character years ago called Jack Hawksmoor, the “king of cities.” Jack was a normal human who had been abducted by city-empathic aliens from the future and repeatedly operated on and “upgraded” to have city-specific powers for use with fighting some unknown future threat that was coming.

Jack Hawksmoor, the King Of Cities.

Hawksmoor, who’s name was inspired by both Spring Heeled Jack and Nicholas Hawksmoor, couldn’t survive for very long outside of an urban environment, but when he was in any city, he had powers specific to that city, including things like superhuman strength and agility, but also psychometry and the ability to control and alter architecture and infrastructure. I don’t think the character was ever utlized by successive writers to his full potential, but I do remember in one story where Hawksmoor had to fight a powerful villain, he made sure that the fight took place in Mexico City, the larged city in the world, to maximize his abilities.

Quarantined in utopia.

“There’s no one to know. There’s nothing to do. The city’s been down since you’ve been gone.”

Climate change and warfare.

“Black And White Town.”

Scientists create “sexual tsunami.”

12 sexist vintage ads.

What’s left of the Roman city of Dougga.

Futurism vs. Science Fiction.

Futuristic steampunk urban recycling.

The little town that Los Angeles killed.

Speaking of which: Future Los Angeles.

Future Chicago.

Future New York.

The saddest blow job story ever.

“History Of A Boring Town.”

Russell Brand not capable of monogamy.

10 most amazing ghost towns, including Prypiat.

“Everything In It’s Right Place.”

Scientists develop “brain to brain communication.”

As time progresses, the future will literally devour the past: WW2-era statue with added cell tower.

“Last Stop: This Town.”

To wrap up my review of this collection, begun here.

“Driftglass” Cal Svenson is a former depth gauger for International Aquatic Corp, adapted with gills and webbed digits to work underwater. His career ended years ago in a major accident in the Slash, an underwater trench. He’s living as something of a beachcomber in a tropical fishing village near the Slash, when he runs into a younger Aquatic who tells him about new plans to explore the Slash.

The story explores themes of generational torch-passing and of living in the world as it is and not how it might ideally be. Its as poetically and dramatically told as any other in the collection.

“We, in some strange power’s employ, move on a rigorous line” Gila Monster is a mobile cable-laying machine responsible for keeping the world connected by power and communications cable. Blacky Jones has just been promoted from “line demon” to “section devil” in the Power service, as Gila Monster receives a special assignment to convert a previously unconnected community to the global network. Which is trouble because that community is an aerie of “pteracycle” riders, which is basically an airborne motorcycle gang, and they don’t want to be connected to the global power network.

This is basically “The roads must roll” rewritten for the New Wave. There’s not too much to the plot, and the pteracycle concept is just too clunky to hold the story together. But its good to see the golden age get turned on its head by a New Wave that can make the connection between Global Power and global power.

“Cage of brass” Jason Cage is a genius architect who’s locked up in an “inescapable” prison for murder. He happens to be put in one of only three cells where, due to a quirk of the prison’s design, the prisoners can talk to each other through disused plumbing.

The main story is Cage’s telling the two other prisoners he’s in communication with about his life before prison, and his crime. The secondary story is the other prisoners’ effort to get slightly mad Cage to use his architectural knowledge to help them escape. The story of Cage’s life as an architecture student in Venice is atmospheric, and well told. The fellow prisoners are likewise naturally depicted. The quirk that allows the prisoners to esape, though, feels contrived.

“High Weir” An exploratory expedition to Mars encounters some interesting artifacts, meanwhile nearly driving each other crazy. The theme of the story is connected to holograms and hologrammatic information storage. Unfortunately there’s not much to it beyond that, and the 40 years since the story was written have reduced the hologram from a gee-whiz new technology to an everyday item.

“Time considered as a helix of semiprecious stones” “HCE” is a thief who specializes in using disguises to stay anonymous and inconspicuous. He goes by a variety of aliases, always with the same initials. Nonetheless, he mixes with a very conspicuous crowd, including a top crime boss and a variety of “Singers”, celebrities who capture events and the mood of the public in song.

This story seems to get as much attention as any of Delany’s short works. But I must have missed something because it never hooked me. The 60’s era nightclub culture came across more like something out of Gordon Dickson, and the kind of lyricism or poetry found in the rest of these stories was much reduced in this one.

“Night and the loves of Joe Dicostanzo” Joey and Max are trapped in a surreal castle, only abstractly described, where they have some control over reality, able to create and destroy things and even other people.

Probably Joey and Max represent warring ideas within Joe’s mind, or the id and the ego, or something. But Freudian psychology just doesn’t fascinate me the way it fascinated so many SF authors in the ’60’s and ’70’s. I just couldn’t put the story together in my head well enough to “get” it.

Driftglass collects Samuel R. Delany’s first 10 published short stories. These stories were originally published in a four-year period from 1966 to 1970. Before any of these stories appeared, Delany had already written eight novels, but when he wrote the last of them he was still aged in his 20’s. I read a 1977 facsimile of the 1971 Signet edition. According to Wikipedia, all of these stories are also available in the 2003 collection Aye, and Gomorrah, and Other Stories.

The collection shows why Delany is often ranked with the likes of Gene Wolfe as one of the foremost literary stylists in science fiction. In a few cases, Delany’s style has suffered from age, for example when he uses contemporary slang, like “rumble” for fight. Otherwise, his prose is as evocative and compelling as any author in SF.

The Star Pit This story pretty much hits you right in the nose with its theme, which is our reaction to human limitations. The story starts with the narrator, Vyme’s, recollection of an ant farm he had as a child, and the central premise is that most people die if they attempt to leave our home galaxy. Only a limited few, known as golden, have the psychological make-up needed to survive travel to other galaxies. The flip side is that golden are all more-or-less psychotic, uninterested in the feelings of others.

Vyme lives at the Star Pit, a waystation on the edge of the galaxy, compelled to push the limits of his containment. There he encounters a variety of other societal misfits, some of whom turn out to be golden. Finally the golden discover aliens who can travel to places the golden cannot, and they too must face the limits of their containment.

Knowing Delany is one of very few African-American SF writers, its hard not to draw a parallel with the black experience in America. In the ’60’s even more than today, blacks faced constraints and limits that did not affect the whites around them. And whites by-and-large must have seemed as callous toward blacks as golden toward normal humans in the story. Realizing that whites face their own social limitations must be small consolation to those who were (or are) stuck in some narrow role dictated not by their own will but by uncontrollable forces.

And there’s much more to the story than just human limits. There’s Vyme’s lost family and others scarred by war; and there’s Vyme’s fatherly adoption of various young riff-raff of the Star Pit. There’s really as many intertwined themes here as you’d normally find filling out a novel. This is truly a fantastic piece of science fiction.

“Dog in a Fisherman’s Net” On a small Greek island the fishermen value their nets so highly that when a dog is caught in Panos’ net, his friends rush to kill the dog rather than let it tear the net. Indeed they are so intent on the dog that they don’t notice Panos himself has fallen on his knife and is mortally wounded. The story explores the relationship between Panos and his brother Spyro, the narrow world of the isolated island, and the seperate hopes of Spryo and an orphaned young woman to leave the island for greater things.

This is one of two fantasies in the collection; and what fantasy there is, is subdued, mostly in the minds of the islanders. Nonetheless, the tale is magical.

“Corona” A brilliant young girl, Dianne Lee Morris, is hospitalized, cursed with telepathy that mostly manifests in connections with people in moments of pain or fear, driving her to attempt suicide. In the hospital she meets (telepathically) Buddy, a young man with a limited intellect and a history of getting into trouble. Together they discover that the music of pop sensation Bryan Faust can give them enough joy to help them endure the other pain in their lives. Even after they’re separated, their moment of human contact remains to blunt their suffering.

Perhaps not the strongest in this collection, but still a quality story, and particularly evocative in the description of Buddy’s hardships and clumsy reactions to them.

“Aye, and Gomorrah” Spacers must give up their sexuality for their profession, to the point where its difficult to tell what sex they were born with. Among non-spacers certain maladjusted souls, frelks, have developed a sexual fascination with the spacers. Spacers, though they perhaps don’t understand the sexual drive of the frelks, take advantage of them for money. But our protagonist somehow hopes to connect with a frelk on a different level. He won’t taker her money, but hopes she’ll give him some thing of hers.

Originally published in Dangerous Visions (see Wikipedia), this story intentionally pushes the envelope of “acceptable topics” as they were in 1967, and probably could still be considered dangerous today. Mainly there is the parallel between the frelks seeking liason with spacers in back alleys and certain established corners of city parks with the necessarily circumspect arrangements made by gays in pre-Stonewall times (and later). This maybe doesn’t resonate so strongly in today’s relatively accepting climate, particularly with straight readers in urban America. But its likely to still connect with gays, and could potentially open the eyes of straights in more traditional societies.

This is an example of science fiction that is both a dramatic extrapolation into a possible future, and a sharp and thoughtful commentary on the present–both the contemporary present of the writer and today’s present.

with Samuel R. Delany at KGB Bar Reading, NYC, July 15, 2009

with Ellen Datlow

with Michael Terrell

KGB Bar, NYC

“Because he knew he was a disappointment to you. And that you wouldn’t get mad or yell at him, and he wanted you to. Because he thought that if you cared about him, you’d ask him if he was seeing someone else. He thought if you really liked him, you’d be jealous, and he knew you weren’t.”

-A White Bear, “Enough Rope“

You have a chapter that lists all the things that you can’t do when you’re married. All those things are just about living with a roommate.

That’s partly true. But a lot of them are about changing each other, and preventing your own anxiety about the other person stopping loving you. If they don’t come on time, they’re out having an affair–which you wouldn’t be worried about with a roommate. Or how their behavior reflects on you–if they tell a bad joke in public or have bad table manners. I think there are a lot of ways mates try to reform each other just for control–controlling people comes natural to us.

-Laura Kipnis, interviewed by David Bowman

I think if you take a look at the economic distribution, there should be an entire strike of the workforce tomorrow. So how is it that we live in a culture that is so acquiescent that we believe all the lies told by politicians and these economic programs that benefit the rich? Part of what I’m interested in doing in this book is to show how domesticity is the training ground for complacence–all the endless rules and edicts of love are training to larger forms of passivitiy.

-Kipnis, interviewed by Bowman

Nehring uses models such as Edna St. Vincent Millay, Emily Dickinson, Frida Kahlo, and Margaret Fuller to illustrate how women can be consumed with love and still be creative, intelligent, and productive. In fact, for many of the women profiled in the book, love actually fueled their creativity. Wollstonecraft, who had already tried to kill herself over spurned love, wrote her great Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark for a man.

-Jessa Crispin, “Beating Hearts“

Kipnis acknowledges that love affairs can feel completely transforming; with this new third party, you can surrender to long-buried feelings; ordinary conversations glisten and gleam. “But what really keeps you glued to the phone till all hours of the night–conversations sparkling with soulfulness and depth you hadn’t know you possessed, exchanging those whispered intimacies–is a very diferent new love-object: yourself. The new beloved mirrors this fascinating new self back to you, and admit it, you’re madly in love with both of them.”

-Stephanie Zacharek reviewing Laura Kipnis

But, good God, that desperate desire to be alone, not because she hates other people but because it’s so complex and impenetrable and anxiety-producing to figure out how to be something other than herself for other people–that’s my childhood, and something I struggle with constantly as an adult. Alone, I’ve always felt held, self-comforting, fine. I crave contact with other people (real friendships, sex, etc.), but I always need to come back to being alone.

I loved the Dork Yearbook pictures because they reminded me of this feeling. Video games, math puzzles, science projects, music, endless reading, hours of daydreaming–it’s all masturbation, right? It’s all finding a way to make being alone more satisfying, more comforting, than being with other people.

-A White Bear, “What’s the Opposite of Nostalgia?“

——–

Or Something Like It.

“What frustrates me is that–and it became apparent tonight–is that you do italics adhere to some kind of code of good manners, proper behavior, or the right things to do, and yet you are so emotionally lazy that you are incapable of implementing the only valid reason that any such code ever came about: to put people at ease, to make them feel better, to promote social communion. If you ever achieve that, it’s only to the credit of whoever designed the behavior code a hundred years back. The only way you seem to be able to criticize your own conduct parenthesis at one point I watched the thought march across your face; you aren’t very good at hiding your feelings; and people like that simply cannot afford to count on appearances close parenthesis is that your version of the code was ten years out of date. Which is to so monumentally miss the point I almost wanted to cry.

[...]

Maybe because you quote feel you love me unquote you feel I should take you on as a case. I’m not going to. Because there are other people, some of whome I love and some of whom I don’t, who need help too and, when I give it, it seems to accomplish something the results of which I can see. Not to mention things I need help in. In terms of the emotional energies I have, you look hopeless.”

-Samuel R. Delany, Trouble on Triton

Ibland brukar Will Eisners Ett hus i Bronx omnämnas som vad som kallas den första (amerikanska) graphic novel (knepigt med bestämd form på ett engelskt ord i en svensk text, så det skippar jag…). Det stämmer självklart inte eftersom det finns många föregångare, exempelvis Milt Gross underbara He Done Her Wrong, men däremot var den viktig som den första moderna serien som gavs ut i bokformat istället för tidningsformat i USA.

Idén med längre serier som gavs ut i bokformat låg i tiden. Samma år, 1978, gavs Sabre ut, en comic novel (det är vad förlaget kallade det) som var avsedd för seriebutikerna, och den brukar ibland nämnas tillsammans med Eisners bok som de första moderna serieromanerna i USA. Dessutom fanns böcker som Richard Corbens Den som också kom ut 1978, men den hade trots allt publicerats i en tidning så det är inte riktigt samma sak som en originalutgåva i bokformat.

Men en annan bok som helt saknas i dessa diskussioner är en som åtminstone enligt mig är bra mycket intressantare än Sabre vars ynka 38 sidor knappast gör själv för att kallas roman, och som också kom ut 1978: Empire, skriven av Samuel R Delany och illustrerad av Howard Chaykin.

Delany räknas som en av de allra bästa sf-författarna, och när Empire kom ut 1978 stod han på toppen efter romaner som Nova och Dhalgren. Chaykin å sin sida hade innan Empire blivit hyllad för sin serieversion av Star Wars. Goda chanser för någonting storartat när Berkley Books anlitade dem för att producera vad de kallade för en visual novel.

Och på en del sätt uppfyller Empire förväntningarna: Det är en bok som ser fantastisk ut; stort format, en Chaykin som aldrig tecknat elegantare, och överhuvudtaget en design som i mångt och mycket påminner om det som nuförtiden kallas widescreen comics, dvs serier som låter teckningarna andas med generöst användande av stora ytor och en tydlig “Wow”-känsla. Med tanke på att det är mer än 30 år sedan den publicerades är det imponerande hur modern den känns ibland.

Men tyvärr finns det också en hel del som inte är lika bra. Manuset är mer än lovligt Star Wars-inspirerat som redan titeln antyder, och att Delany var en nyskapare inom prosan märks inte. Det finns spår av hans talang, framförallt i idén om rymdimperiet som har låst allt informationsflöde i fysisk form, och därigenom upprätthåller sin makt tack vare att de behärskade planeternas kulturer tvingas in i samma spår som dem, men mestadels är det en rak space opera, med nya planeter och nya äventyr på varje sida. Delany var heller inte nöjd med resultatet, och det är förståeligt.

Teckningarna är utan tvekan den stora behållningen, men ibland blir det lite väl slaviskt följande av mallen att alla sidor antingen ska bestå av enbart horisontella eller enbart vertikala rutor som sträcker sig över hela sidan. Men mot slutet blir det en del andra layouter också, och det vinner serien på. Som sagt är det en elegant och raffinerad Chaykin vi ser här som målar istället för sin vanliga teckningsstil, men att det ändå är Chaykin är uppenbart; hans manliga hjältar är alla misstänkt lika varandra, och han har alltid varit bra på att teckna larger than life-karaktärer vilket passar perfekt här.

I det stora hela är Empire ett mycket intressant misslyckande; det märks att det är ett ovant format både för Delany och Chaykin. För att undvika klassiska pratbubblor envisas man med att lägga repliker utanför bilderna vilket känns otympligt, och det finns flera andra exempel på hur man väljer att försöka undvika de vanliga seriekonventionerna så mycket man kan. Om man jämför med Chaykins teckningar till American Flagg! så ser Empire antagligen mer lättförståelig ut för en ovan serieläsare och mer lockande, men AF! är ändåen betydligt bättre serie som vet hur seriemediet kan användas optimalt.

Som sagt är Empire i princip bortglömd; när jag skulle leta upp illustrationer till det här inlägget gick jag helt bet: Det verkar inte finnas en enda illustration från Empire på hela nätet, förutom omslaget, vilket är första gången det händer för mig med en serie som jag skriver om (så jag scannade, mycket försiktigt, några sidor på jobbet eftersom min scanner är trasig). Inte ens Wikipedia har mycket information om serien; de flesta andra Chaykin-serier har egna sidor, men Empire har ingen.

Lustigt nog är det inte knepigt att få tag på en kopia trots att den aldrig tryckts om. I amerikanska seriebutiker brukar den dyka upp då och då, och den brukar inte kosta många dollar. För den som stöter på den rekommenderar jag helhjärtat ett köp; det är en fascinerande, om än inte speciellt bra, bok.

I’ve gone on about Samuel R Delany books before and well, here’s another one. In Calgary I found Stars In My Pocket Like Grains of Sand at the CBC Book Sale for a dollar. If only every dollar a person spent made you think this much.

I can’t zip through Delany’s books, no matter how much I enjoy them. I need space to let them decompress, to be wrestled with, because that’s how they’re written. Glossing through things to get to the action, the pathos or whatever basically avoids everything interesting. This book is about two people in a galaxy where travelling 60 thousand light years is expensive but possible. There are two main factions the Family and the Sygn who form the political backdrop to the galaxy. There are aliens and assassins and Industrial Diplomats and a very internet-like thing known as General Information (the book was written in the early 1980s). But the space opera things you might expect don’t happen.

Rat Korga is the lone survivor of a world where he was a slave. His story takes up the first sixth of the book and is called a prologue. Then we hit Marq Dyeth and her world-hopping ways. And already I’m mangling everything up. In this book sentient beings are referred to as women, regardless of gender (and there are several alien species too who obey this grammatical dictum). So the males and females thorughout the book are referred to as She unless they’re currently an object of sexual desire, in which case He. Since the story of Marq and Korga is told primarily through Marq’s voice she is always she even though she is male. Korga (a huge acne-scarred nail-biting male slave who’d had anxiety wiped out of his brain and now wears the rings of a long-dead poet which allow him to think) is Marq’s perfect erotic match (down to 6 or 7 decimal places) and as such vacillates between pronouns depending on how lust drives Marq. So that requires a lot of paying attention.

And then there are the Evelm, the aliens who get the most spotlight time. Marq is part of an Evelmi stream (not family as there’s no genetic correspondence between the generations; they’re Sygn-aligned) and we never get a clear “Here is what an Evelm looks like” kind of statement, which leaves you to put a lot of things together yourself. It works from Marq’s point of view as she grew up in such a household. As an example, in Pride and Prejudice you don’t get Mister Darcy described as a bipedal mammal with manipulating limbs, two eyes, a nose, ears and a mouth that does both ingestion and communication duties. It’s the same sort of thing, doing away with the clunky expositions that happen so often in science fiction. You have to go with it, be carried along.

Marq is an Industrial Diplomat and brings up the cultural differences in other ways constantly. One of the refrains in the book is that even a world is a huge place, let alone a galaxy with over 6000 of them. Cultural differences between the north and south on his world are always being brought up as Korga missteps or does exactly the right thing.

But yes, it’s a beautiful weird book.

Samuel R. Delany on writing science fiction: “I had nothing else to do, and it was fun.”

Wells Tower on nature and revision: “A male moose will jump into the lake with the idea that a female moose is on the other side, and then he’ll get to the other side . . .” 

George Scialabba on conservatism: “It may be a delusion, as Conquest repeats endlessly, to imagine that state power can ever create a just society. But one reason some people are perennially tempted to try is that private power is generally so comfortable with unjust ones.”   (From Scialabba’s new book.)

Kom precis hem, ska upp och jobba om 8 timmar så tänkte att jag skulle sova lite. I och med att jag åkte hem vid midnatt i stället för vid tre var det inte fullt så mycket fulla människor, tack och lov.

Det som märks allra tydligast på tunnelbanan mitt i natten är att folk pratar mer med varandra. T.ex. nu. Jag stod i rulltrappan och läste min bok (aye, and gomorrah av Samuel R. Delany) när jag plötsligt märkte att någon stannade till och försökte se vad jag läste för något. Killen stannade och pratade när han såg att jag sett honom. Tydligen brukar han försöka se vad folk läser, han tycker det är intressant. Oftast läser folk böcker om självhjälp och hur man får ett bättre liv, så jag lyckades förvåna honom med min sf. Han hade dessutom läst några andra böcker av Delany. Vi hade sällskap en bit och pratade lite böcker, och sen skildes vi åt på hörnet nedanför mitt hus. Jag har aldrig sett honom förr.

Jag älskar sådana här spontana nattsamtal, jag blir så glad! Spontana samtal överlag är roliga. Som när jag skulle åka hem från Tyresö en dag, en kvinna började snacka med mig på busshållplatsen, sen hade vi sällskap hela vägen till T-Centralen.

Människor gör mig glada Och nu ska jag sova så att jag orkar jobba i morgon…

Läs även andra bloggares åsikter om folk, natt, tunnelbana, öppenhet, party, randomness, samtal, spontanitet, böcker, läsning, sf, samuel r. delany, aye and gomorrah

I’ve been constantly thinking about Raging Sun, Raging Sky since its screening at the San Diego Latinio Festival last week. One of the settings of the film takes place in a porn theater where as one would expect random gay hookups occur. It’s actually a perfect space since it’s a microcosm of the larger themes of the film- isolation, desperation, the need for connection. While some of those scenes delve mimics mythological space especially Orpheus’ descent into the underground, mirroring the actual mythology segment later in the movie, the locale of the rundown theater reminds me of two movies I absolutely adore: Jacques Nolot’s underappreciated Porn Theatre, whose French title would translate as The Pussy with Two Heads (imagine that on our prude American marquees, where the advertisers don’t want us to know that Zack and Miri make a porno), and Tsai’s (Ming-Liang) Goodbye, Dragon Inn. The latter doesn’t take place in an X-Rated joint, but rather a revival house projecting for the last time King Hu’s famous martial-arts film, but the cruising and yearning for sexual release or intimate connection appears just as it does in Porn Theatre and Raging Sun.

This made me nostalgic for a part of gay history that is no longer there so I reread one of my favorite books. Professor Samuel R. Delany wrote a book about ten years ago that reminisces about the sanitizing of New York called Times Square Red, Times Square Blue. The Blue section of the book are his almost Whitmanesque accounts of the different men who frequented the various porn theatres of Times Square that no longer exist, all part of the Guiliani legacy. The porno theatres with names ripped from the Greco pantheon, names like The Capri, The Venus, were sites for release for men of all different backgrounds, from black to white, from stockbroker to shoeshiner. Samuel Delany, “Chip” to his friends and to the visitors of these porn theatres, records the encounters with the regulars to humanize the folks who are ostracized outside the confines of these decrepit establishments. What is left of Times Square? Disney-owned shops, vendors who want to sell you reminders that you’re in New York, constant television commercials in real life. I suppose it’s not all Guiliani’s fault. I suppose Craigslist and porn on the Internet, for many people, and the VCR before, helped kill the porn theatres. But it wouldn’t be easy to make the type of connection, sexual or otherwise, about which Delany writes. His book may be a romanticization of a pre-AIDS New York, but it’s not all utopia, even if compared to the gay urban experience now, it might as well be.

I’ve promised myself that I will read more of Delany’s science-fiction, the genre from which he’s most noted. Times Square Red, Times Square Blue is an important classic on my shelf.

Tales of Neveryon is a Samuel R Delany book about civilization. Much like its sequel Neveryona, the stories talk about the different ways people organize themselves. Since I read the two books out of order it was a little odd coming upon these characters in this new way. My experience of Neveryona would have been much different if I’d read this first, but as it was I met these characters with the heroine from that book. Now I was learning a bit about their background. And more than that. There were creation myths and tales of courtly intrigue, plus frank discussions of money and its meaning and sexual preferences in regards to slavery (by the liberators of the slaves).

Really, though, this cover was the worst yet for a Samuel R Delany book. There’s a huge dragon (dragons in the book are kind of small and pathetic, unable to take off if they aren’t on a precipice) attacking people whose faces are all hidden. A bow is awkwardly placed so you can’t tell if the guy with the sword is holding it or if it’s flying through the air. Ugh.

Distant Stars is the reason I have my Samuel R. Delany book buying policy. I had no idea this book existed till I spotted it used in Aqua Books. It’s a collection of short stories, the longest of which I’d read before. My favourite was Corona, about a guy who’s injured in an industrial accident and then meets a telepathic little girl who wants to kill herself. And Prismatica was a pretty great fairy tale. I always like Delany’s book because he mixes simplicity and complexity so well. In the introduction he says the most important thing he tries to do is figure out why cliche happens and write his way into exploring that. That’s not what he says, but it’s my best approximation, and the kind of important thing I need to read as I write my own shit.

Neveryona is another one of these used-bookstore Samuel R. Delany books I own. This one is a fantasy novel that from the cover (not shown at the link) looks like some 1970s epic sword and sorcery thing, with a man and woman looking out to sea (away from the reader). She’s sitting and wearing a white dress, while he wears a chainmail thong, buttcheeks all exposed to the wind. So yeah, if I didn’t know Delany’s books there’s very little chance I’d have picked it up. When you actually read the book it’s actually impossible to figure out who those people on the cover might be, as they match neither description nor actions of anyone you’ll find inside.

The book is about the birth of civilization, about living life in a world when all the stories are just being written. A girl sets out from her village to see the world and learn about power. She does. It’s pretty great. Not epic in sweep or anything, just character and setting studies of the places she goes. It’s basically a world-building book that delves into language, invention, design, mathematics, the whole shebang.

Via GalleyCat I found this interesting call to literary missionary activity: buying books by black authors for white people.

So: Attention, lit-mart shoppers! I would suggest John Edgar Wideman for those ambitious readers who don’t mind tackling somebody whose reputation for demanding modernist writing is well-earned. Wideman goes in for stream-of-consciousness narrations and abrupt shifts in viewpoint that require some athleticism from his readers — think The Sound and the Fury, or the trickier passages in Ulysses — but his work is well worth the effort. His affecting memoir Brothers and Keepers might be a good introduction, followed by Philadelphia Fire, a novel loosely derived from the 1985 confrontation between the Philadelphia police and an eccentric back-to-nature cult called MOVE.

While I’m at it, let me give a shout out to Wesley Brown, who isn’t as prolific as I’d like him to be. I read his first novel, Tragic Magic, after taking his creative writing class at Rutgers University, and he was one of the first people I interviewed for a series of author profiles written for a Central Jersey print. The story follows a young Vietnam-era radical and conscientious objector who has just done a stretch in prison and is back on the street, trying to make sense of his life, women, masculinity and the dangerous cross-currents of life as a black man in the early 1970s. The prose plays in your head like a private performance of the greatest jazz group ever assembled: a Thelonious Monk melody line here, a Charlie Parker solo there, voices orchestrated by Duke Ellington and a stormy Charles Mingus bass line driving the whole thing forward. The more ambitious followup, Darktown Strutters, makes play with the rise of Jim Crow as it blends fictional and historical characters. Brown is sometimes compared with Ishmael Reed, and the comparison flatters both writers.

I would also recommend Mat Johnson’s graphic novel Incognegro, a gripping blend of historical fiction and noir that was one of the best things I’ve read this year. Next I’ll want to read Johnson’s The Great Negro Plot: An Urban Historical.

During a recent spate of recreational ricochet reading — funny how books that have been on your shelves for decades suddenly seem to demand you take them down for another look – I also renewed acquaintances with two Seventies-vintage science fiction authors: Samuel R. Delany, whose story collection Aye, And Gomorrah presents this often demanding writer in his most accessible guises, and Octavia Butler, whose celebrated novel Kindred uses SF devices to ring several intriguing, sometimes appalling changes on the nature of racism and the psychological (and physical) wounds it inflicts on everyone it touches.

And no list such as this would be complete without a pitch for friend, colleague and blogbud Charles H. Johnson, whose two poetry collections are more than worth your while. Unlike some of the writers mentioned here, Johnson has some excellent work posted on the Intertubes, so I’ll just  let his words do the talking.

Poate multi dintre voi stiau sau nu, ca pe Scifi.com, pina mai recent, a existat o sectiune numita Scifiction unde erau publicate povestiri online,  sub indrumarea cunoscutei Ellen Datlow.

Autorii prezenti faceau parte atat din cei cunoscuti si apreciati de publicul cititor cat si din cei in curs de afirmare. Am putea exemplifica astfel cu nume ca : Robert Silverberg, Elizabeth Bear, Lucius Shepard, Alfred Bester, Jay Lake si Ruth Nestvold prezenti cu povestirea din Best Year Sci-fi vol 2 publicata la Nemira, Fredric Brown, Vonda N. McIntyre, Bruce Sterling, Gardner Dozois, Walter Jon Williams, Daniel Abraham, Samuel R. Delany, George RR Martin, Theodore Sturgeon, Gene Wolfe, Gregory Benford, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Roger Zelazny, John Wyndham, Robert Sheckley, Paul Di Filippo, si lista nu e nici macar la jumatate.

Desi se spunea ca postarile au fost inchise din 2005, arhivele ramanand disponibile pe site, se pare ca in Iunie 2007 NBC-ul a renuntat sa mai găzduiasca sectiunea de mai sus invocand problemele legate de drepturile de autor si urmarirea lor precum si numarul redus de vizitatori, afirmandu-se ca in luna mai a anului respectiv au fost doar 48 de vizite, fiind incluse persoanele care au citit povestirile pina la capat, incluzandu-se navigarea pina la ultima pagina din adresa.

Cert este ca si la momentul de fata povestirile pot fi gasite aici, in schimb trebuie sa va inarmati cu un dram de rabdare deoarece se incarca destul de greu, insa daca treceti de micul inconvenient o sa aveti parte de o mare surpriza.

Master of Dreams

If you could ask Neil Gaiman one question, what would it be?

I was faced with this particular challenge last month when I joined a gaggle of other over-eager fans (er, journalists) at the National Book Festival in Washington DC. As we waited on the muddied grass of the National Mall, it became increasingly clear that we would not each get to have a one-on-one interview with Gaiman, that we would not each be able to impress him with our wit and casual intellectualism thereby earning his favor and eternal friendship. No, that pipe-dream was as distant as a movie adaptation of Sandman. Instead we were each allowed to ask him one question, the results of which appear below…

Chelsea Bauch, Dorkscape:
Trickster figures frequently appear in your work—from Low Key (ie. Loki) in American Gods to Lucifer in Sandman. What is it that you find so interesting about the archetype?

Neil Gaiman: Part of the joy of tricksters as characters is their utter randomness. They obviously belong very, very deep in the human psyche. All of the stories that we have, going all the way back, have trickster characters in them. And they’re not heroes. And they’re not gods. And they’re not villains. Although sometimes they wear all of these roles. The Native American trickster figures are wonderful because they’re as likely to create the world as they are to have their penises cut off while trying to make love to somebody else’s wife. It’s all part of the same thing. I think that, as a storyteller, it’s that wonderful random element. You can be fairly sure when entering the story of what your hero is and what your villain is, but if you have a trickster on the scene then anything can happen.

Nancy O. Greene, Pen in Hand:
There tends to be a gap between what’s considered literary and what’s not. Since you won the World Fantasy Award for Sandman how do you think the gap is narrowing between those two schools of thought on what’s literary and what’s not?

NG: I got lucky because Norman Mailer read Sandman and said something like “Sandman is a comic book for intellectuals and I think it’s about time.” That kind of changed all the rules for me. It changed all the rules in that people started thinking that if Norman Mailer said it’s ok, then maybe it’s not trash literature. The truth is it’s not something I ever give any thought to. I figure that I get to have the best of all possible worlds in that I write what I want, it all gets published, and afterwards people can argue about whether it’s high culture or low culture or pop culture, people can argue about whether or not I get taken seriously or whether I should be taken seriously. But none of that has anything to do with what I do. I sit down and I make stuff up, write it to the best of my ability then put it out into the world. It only ever dawns on me that I’m technically high culture too when I learn that I’m being taught in colleges and universities. But that’s not on my agenda. My agenda is to tell stories.

Ben Walker, Orphanim Media:
Have there been any times that you’ve had a fanboy brain melt?

NG: Yes, it’s happened many, many times. The only one that somehow leaps out of my consciousness was the first time I was introduced to Samuel R. Delany. It was one of those moments where my friend Steven Bruce said “Neil I want you to meet Samuel R. Delany.” I just started doing that thing where you look down at your shoes and you shuffle a bit and I’m going “Oh my God, Mr. Delany this is just such an honor and I’ve been a fan of yours since I could read.” Then I look over and I realize he’s saying, “Oh Mr. Gaiman, this is absolutely an honor.” I’m thinking: You can’t do that! You are not allowed to look at your shoes and shuffle. You’re Samuel R. f*cking Delany and I demand the right to be the one who’s standing here being the fan. It was sort of a mutual fanboy meltdown.

This morning I went to the White House breakfast because if it wasn’t for Laura Bush this thing would not exist. There is no guarantee we’re going to have one next year. I hope we will, but this was actually founded by Laura Bush. She is a librarian and whatever I think politically of things, I’m going to the White House breakfast. And I vaguely assume that being a White House breakfast it will be like any other time I set my foot on federal property, where you’re not allowed to have any kind of instrument. But of course I could have brought and the cameras I wanted. As I’m standing there grumbling to Salman Rushdie that I had no picture taking equipment, he says “Oh, I’ll take a photo of you on my phone.” So Salman takes a photo of me and my daughter standing in front of a Lincoln painting with John Scieszka in the background showing off his medal. Then I was posting it on my blog this morning because I’d got back to the hotel and there’s the email form Salman and I realized that I live in a really strange world. The main reason that I don’t get the celebrity meltdown is I started life as a journalist and I started life doing celebrity interviews. Twenty-five years ago that’s what I was doing and it sort of inoculated me. And, looking back at it, and those are my heroes who I met have remained my heroes. People like Alan Moore and Terry Gilliam who I thought were cool before I met them, were even cooler once I met them and got to know them as friends.

Bill Thompson, Eye on Books:
What do you take away from the Vulcan mindmeld of your fellow wizards at a place like this?

NG: Except for geeking out about Batman with Brad Meltzer this morning, you normally don’t get to talk to your fellow wizards. When you do, you’re saying things like “Is there any more coffee?” or “Do you mind if I sit over there?” and “My microphone works fine.” You’re not sitting there back in the VIP tent saying: “Let’s talk about adjectives and the nature of fiction.” Instead you’re talking about the coffee. But I think these things are really for authors and readers to interact. The joy for me is looking at them all and you’ve got 120,000 people and they all care about books, they all care about reading. And they are all ages and sizes and some of them are here because they’re librarians and teachers, but most of them are here because they’re human beings and they think that words on paper are important. That meeting between authors and artists and readers is the real meeting of the wizards.

Caustic Cover Critic offers a beautiful roundup of Geoff Grandfield’s noir cover designs and illustrations for various editions of Graham Greene’s “entertainments” and other books. Personally, I think the black and white interior illustrations (such as the one above, which I assume is from The Power and the Glory) are the best of the bunch. Grandfield’s work on these Raymond Chandler special editions is also nothing to sneeze at.     

Show of hands, please. How many people remember Welsh artist Kit Williams and his Masquerade challenge? For some reason, the Great Minneapolis Octopus Hunt reminded me of the search for the golden hare. 

The perfect vacation destination for the typographer in your family.

Michael Swanwick’s post about the power of words has gotten me re-reading Samuel R. Delany’s short stories. Which goes to prove his point.

Liz and Dick, Kurt and Courtney, Brad and Angelina . . . Sylvia and Ted?

Apparently the Federation of Light did not make its scheduled appearance in the skies. Wow . . . didn’t see that one not coming. (Maybe this was the Federation that Blossom Goodchild had in mind.) Anyway, we all know that flying saucers came here a few decades ago.

The news that Paul Krugman had won the Nobel Prize in economics had heads exploding the length and breadth of right-wing punditry and blogitry. Here’s your chance to pick the winner from “the five most impressive spontaneous human combustions” tracked in the wingersphere.  

An international team is preparing to study the Gamburtsevs, a puzzling mountain range buried deep beneath the Antarctic ice. “You can almost think about it as exploring another planet – but on Earth,” said Dr Fausto Ferraccioli from the British Antarctic Survey. “This region is a complete enigma. It’s in the middle of the continent. Most mountain ranges are on the edges of continents, and we really can’t understand what these mountains are doing in the centre.” I can think of at least one explanation.

Now that music writer Alex Ross has won a MacArthur Foundation genius grant, you’ll want to listen to excerpts from some of the music he describes in his book The Rest Is Noise. 

What is generative music? And why am I not surprised that Brian Eno is involved with it? The Guardian article is worth reading simply for the news that when Music for Airports, Eno’s first collection of ambient music, was finally played in an airport, “people complained of nameless, gnawing anxieties – not what one needs moments before boarding an aeroplane.”

From the Roman Empire to the steps of a bankrupt Icelandic bank — follow the verbs.

What would you rather do: Attend a Baltimore City Language Arts professional development session, or get poked in the eye with a flaming stick? You want some time to think it over? I understand.

There have been two recent films based on the poem Beowulf. The good professor reviews the one you ought to see.

In memoriam, Neal Hefti: composer of television themes that, once heard, cannot be forgotten.

My aim with this blog is to review all (well, most of) the books I read, plus other stuff I get up to, like films, theatre, gigs etc. but mostly books.

I have been reading Samuel R. Delany’s Neveryon series (a series of linked short stories and novellas published in four volumes: Tales of Neveryon, Neveryona, Flight from Neveryon and Return to Neveryon), and wanted to write about each individual story, but my reading coincided with a period of being very busy with other things, so that’s not going to happen now.

I have been on a bit of a Delany binge recently; before embarking on Tales of Neveryon I read his latest, Dark Reflections (which is brilliant, but I leant my copy to a friend so won’t be able to review it yet), in two days. Before that I read The Einstein Intersection.

There is obviously a whole lot going on in these collections of linked stories, a lot on semiotics, the use and development of language, writing, ways of thinking (particularly in relation to the development of monetary systems, trade and labour); fully understanding Delany’s writing is a life time’s work.

See here for an alternative pulp Sci-Fi cover (and am I glad I never had to read that on the bus!). I assume that the woman sitting down is supposed to be Pryn; they’ve got the green dress right, but that’s about it, as she is described as a “heavy, short girl” and “a loud brown fifteen-year-old with bushy hair.” It looks like the cover suffered from the same type of ‘white washing’ Ursula Le Guin complains of in relation to her Earthsea books.

The above link describes the books as “feminist parable or gay porn?”, and after reading Tales of Neveryon and Neveryona, it was the ‘gay porn’ of ‘The Tale of Fog and Granite’ in Flight from Neveryon that defeated me, it was just, well, dull (I have no objection to sexually explicit writing as itself – I’ve read Dhalgren too – it’s just in this particular instance it could not hold my interest).

I am going to write a little bit about ‘The Tale of Old Venn’ (the ‘feminist parable’ part. As with his discussions of sex and gender in Trouble on Triton, Delany gets it), from Tales of Neveryon. I’m not even going to cover all the ideas expressed in this one short story, but only from one part of it. Venn describes an inland tribe she lived with while she was young, and the changes that occurred since the introduction of money, which, because it was the men of the tribe who did the trading with foreigners, fell under the control of men:

The men hunt geese and wild goats; the women provide the bulk of the food by growing turnips and other roots, fruits and a few leaf vegetables; [...] the women do far and above more work than the men toward keeping the tribe alive. But because they do not come much to the sea and they have no fish, meat is an important food to them. Because it is an important food, the hunting men are looked upon as rather prestigious creatures. Groups of women share a single hunter, who goes out with a group of hunters and brings back meat for the women. The women make pots and baskets and clothes and jewelry, which they trade with each other; they build the houses, grow and cook the food; indeed – except for very circumscribed, prestigious decisions – the women control the tribe. Or at least they used to. [...] In the Rulvyn before money, the prestige granted the hunter was a compensation for his lack of social power. Now that money has come, prestige has become a sign of social power, [...] I found that since money has come, the young women are afraid of the men. The women want good hunters; but because they understand real power, they know they must have good money masters.

The introduction of money reversed all the values of the tribe. Women who before had worked collectively to support themselves, their children and their hunter, where now working for a money-gatherer, in competition with that man’s other women.

Here is another reversal, does any of it sound familiar?

The Rulvyn value daughters much more than sons – Oh to a stranger like my friend, it seems just the opposite; that they make much more fuss over sons. They pamper them, show them off, dress them up in ridiculous and unwearable little hunting costumes and scold them unmercifully should any of it get broken or soiled [...] They let little girls run around and do more or less as they want. But while all this showing off and pampering is going on, the demands made on the male children – to be good and independent at the same time, to be well behaved and brave at once, all a dozen times an hour, is all so contradictory that you finally begin to understand why the men turn out the way they do: high on emotions, defenses, pride; low on logic, domestic – sometimes called “common” – and aesthetic sense. No one pays anything other than expectational attention to the boys until they’re at least six or seven; and nobody teaches them a thing. Girl children, on the other hand, get taught, talked to, treated more or less like real people from the time they start to act like real people – which, as I recall, is about six weeks, when babies smile for the first time. Sometimes they’re dealt with more harshly, true; but they are loved the more deeply for it.

The Sandman Vol. 5: A Game of You
By Neil Gaiman (writer), Shawn McManus with Colleen Doran, Bryan Talbot, George Pratt, Stan Woch, Dick Giordano and Dave McKean (artists)
Published by DC Comics/Vertigo
Originally released 1993

Availability: Amazon.com
Cover price: $19.99
Format: Soft cover, color, standard-size
ISBN 1563890895

Availability: Amazon.com
Cover price: $39.95
Format: Hard cover, color, standard-size
ISBN 1563890933

Synopsis from publisher for soft cover edition:
Take an apartment house, mix in a drag queen, a lesbian couple, some talking animals, a talking severed head, a confused heroine, and the deadly Cuckoo. Stir vigorously with a hurricane and Morpheus himself and you get this fifth installment of the SANDMAN series. This story stars Barbie, who first makes an appearance in THE DOLL’S HOUSE, who here finds herself a princess in a vivid dreamworld.

Synopsis from publisher for hard cover edition:
THE SANDMAN: A GAME OF YOU tells a fascinating tale of lost childhood dreams and the power that they can wield over reality. Since she was a child, Barbie has dreamed of a world in which she was a princess. But after separating from her husband, she has ceased to dream and her fantasy kingdom has been savagely overrun by an evil entity known as the Cuckoo. Now as elements of her fantasy world cross over and begin to drastically affect reality, Barbie and her friends venture into the realm of dreams to save its peaceful inhabitants. But against the power of dark and dying dreams, even the combined might of a witch, two lesbian lovers, a transsexual, and a decapitated talking head might not be enough to save two different planes of existence.

Notes:
The fifth collection of the second Sandman comic book series. All material reprinted in this publication was written by Neil Gaiman and illustrated by Shawn McManus, except for issue #34 by Colleen Doran with George Pratt and Dick Giordano and a portion of #36 by Bryan Talbot and Stan Woch. The cover was created by Dave McKean.
Issues #29 to 31 are not included in this collection but appear in the next publication in the series, The Sandman Vol. 6: Fables and Reflections.

Reprints:

1. Sandman #32 (1991)
2. Sandman #33 (1991)
3. Sandman #34 (1992)
4. Sandman #35 (1992)
5. Sandman #36 (1992)
6. Sandman #37 (1992)

Bonus material:

1. Introduction by Samuel R. Delany