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language: English
country: USA
year: 1978
form: graphic novel
genre(s): science fiction
dates read: 20.2.26
Pensively, Wryn listened. Finally, the boy asked the woman: “Qrelon, by destroying Ice, do you think we may have done more harm than good? Do you think its [sic] a good thing when information is destroyed?”
Gravely, the outlaw answered: “Information can’t be destroyed, Wryn. It can be hidden, dispersed, forgotten, ignored, or totalized into a repressive structure. That’s all. No actual information was lost at Ice—only the rigid control of it.”
Samuel R. Delany’s Empire, illustrated by Howard V. Chaykin, is billed as “A Visual Novel” because it was published in 1978, only — apparently — two years after the advent of the term “graphic novel” (which is also used in some of the publisher’s paratext); Delany, however, apparently considered it a “comic book”. frankly, I had expected it to be a graphic novel adaptation of Empire Star, but it’s actually an original story.
reading the novel is like seeing all of Delany’s work between Dhalgren and Return to Nevèrÿon refracted through a prism. it follows three main characters: the archaeology student Wryn, the arch-rebel Qrelon, and Qrelon’s accomplice Blaz. when Wryn and his supervisor are caught in the crossfire between Qrelon and the authorities of the titular Empire, called Kūndūke, Wryn finds himself tagging along on an interstellar journey in search of the components of a crystalline object that, when deployed, will break the Kūndūke’s hold on the flow of information, destroying their power and opening up their former territories to a world of new possibilities.
the highlight of the plot is that while Wryn is, I would argue, the protagonist — it is Wryn who, in the end, destroys the Kūndūke, though Delany has made an effort to give Qrelon some role in the climax, at least — it gives significant narrative time not only to Qrelon but also to Blaz, who gets to have one of the most striking moments in the novel while the trio are visiting — unbeknownst to Wryn — her homeworld:
You have seen the ruins of Eyrth. So the ruins of Praxis must seem very ordinary to you. But there are ruins all over the Kūndūke’s worlds, and not all of them are ancient. Wryn, sometimes I feel / I could take fragments from each ruin I’ve visited and put them together in a great figure that would inscribe the rage of the oppressed across the night!
alongside this main trio, the novel also devotes a moderate amount of space to the “Nizerine” (cf. the “Vizerine” in Tales of Nevèrÿon) Eleyn, leader-ruler-representative of a world outside of the Kūndūke that is considering membership. she’s implied to have a homoerotic relationship with one of her clones, which is fun. anyway, while the story does give a bunch of space to women, Wryn is the character who introduces readers to the world — because he’s the one who hasn’t already traveled all over the place — and so I do think it’s fair to say he’s The Main Character. the fact that he’s a white guy is cast into particularly sharp relief by the fact that his mentor, a Black woman named Dr. Plong, is killed in the crossfire at the beginning. I don’t know if this was Delany’s choice, Chaykin’s choice, the publisher’s intervention, or something else, but either way it was frustrating, to say the least.
like Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, Empire is concerned with the control and distribution of information: Kūndūke rules by literally freezing undesirable information, isolating local populations from their own histories and cultures and replacing them with Kūndūke-approved information as it extracts both information and, implicitly, material resources from their worlds. the novel’s thesis is both that information cannot truly be destroyed and that a genuinely free flow of information is essential to the project of overthrowing Empire. within the novel the free flow of information is, in fact, sufficient to ensure the collapse of Empire, insofar as the Kūndūke rule by controlling information, but I don’t think Delany is unaware that more than this would be required in real life, particularly since the end of the novel affirms that while Kūndūke has collapsed/is collapsing this only opens the question of what the peoples of the galaxy will do with the information that is now freely available to them: Wryn returns to the university, but Qrelon and Blaz have work to do yet.
the way Delany is thinking about the control of information here is, I think, closely related to the Modular Calculus stories and, less directly, to Babel-17: what, the novel asks, would it mean to have absolute control over the information available to people? what does it do to people to be denied access to themselves? what would become possible if information were not controlled?
is it altogether successful in answering these questions? I don’t think so, no; it is constrained by the adventure narrative structure. but it is an interesting — and, it must be emphasized, visually stunning in spite of the whiteness — attempt.
moods: adventurous, hopeful, reflective, tense