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language: English
country: USA
year: 1985
form: short fiction
genre(s): fantasy
series: Return to Nevèrÿon, #3
dates read: 17.8.23-3.9.23
Samuel Delany’s Flight from Nevèrÿon contains only three stories, one of which — “The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals” (aka part 5 of Some Informal Remarks Towards the Modular Calculus) — is a novel-length speculative account of the early days of the AIDS crisis.
if the central term around which Neveryóna turns is power, here it is representation: “The Tale of Fog and Granite” follows a smuggler who is obsessed with Gorgik the Liberator as he meets several shadowy figures who may or may not be the Liberator, who hides behind signifiers of himself and moves through the shadows as he plans the overthrow of slavery in all its forms. “The Mummer’s Tale” explores discrepancies of memory in a meeting between the title character and one of his old friends, even as it also plays with our sense of the smuggler from the first story, who we see now from the outside (in one refraction, anyway).
“The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals” is a sprawling and fragmenting reflection on — as Delany puts it in the first appendix — “misinformation, rumor, and wholly untested guesses at play through a limited social section of New York City during 1982 and 1983, mostly before the 23 April 1984 announcement of the discovery of a virus […] as the overwhelmingly probable cause of AIDS”. interspersed with a fictionalized account of Delany’s own movements through this New York, his encounters with a heroin-using hustler named Joey, his responses to and speculations about periodic public health updates, and his attempts to grapple with what it means to even try to represent any of this through the medium of fiction (and particularly through fantasy or science fiction), is an account of a plague not unlike (though by no means identical to) AIDS spreading through Nevèrÿon, the city of Kolhari’s response thereto, the — apparent — recuperation of Gorgik into the state apparatus, the recreation or rediscovery of the ancient and unspeakable named gods who preceded Nevèrÿon’s official pantheon of nameless craft-gods, and the youthful journey of a kind of proto-Plato in search of the truth of the barbarian architect Belham.
what he discovers instead is what we might call Belham’s monster, the stories, rumors, legends, truths, and half-truths that circulate around all of us and, ultimately, displace us in death.
Flight from Nevèrÿon is an apt title: it expresses the book’s deep ambivalence about itself and its project. what, Delany asks, is the point of representation, of fiction, in the face of AIDS? he can, after all, only show a tiny fragment or sliver of what he experienced during this period, let alone what anyone else was going through. it‘s an unsettling book, intentionally so, and it’s telling that in its climax the boundary between “real” and “fictional” momentarily collapses, only for the possibility of transgressing it and encountering something like truth to be swept away. we are left, instead, alone with the absolute otherness of the Other:
And I would have sworn, on that chill night, he no longer understood me.
moods: dark, emotional, reflective