Aye, and Gomorrah: And Other Stories

Aye, and Gomorrah and Other Stories collects the vast majority of Delany's short works from the beginning of his career, during which he was mostly focused on speculative fiction. The earliest of these stories was written when Delany was at the spry age of eighteen. Even at that age, he comes across as extremely well-read and referential.

Delany is, first and foremost, an ambitious writer. To accomplish his goals in a shorter format, most of these stories start off like a shotgun blast of details all crowded on top of one another, leaving little room for disengagement from the text. The literal facts of the story are often obfuscated by postmodern prose and descriptions that leave much up to the imagination of the reader.

"Cross an armadillo with a football field. Nurse the offspring on a motherly tank. By puberty: one Gila Monster."

Somehow these stories typically end up greater than the sum of their parts. He doesn't always succeed in his ambitious aspirations, but this doesn't detract from his sheer inventiveness. If nothing else, each work is distinct enough to be memorable (at least on a broad level) at the conclusion of the book, something that cannot be said of most similar collections or anthologies.

This collection primarily focuses on themes of class, sexuality, race, and art - four things that Delany returns to again and again across his work. But there's also a wealth of other explorations here, including loneliness, being trapped by our circumstances and abilities, existential suffocation, the complex emotions and expectations of adolescence, friendships between adults and children, sexual obsessions and fetishism, gender nonconformity, individual vs collective values, globalism, incompatibility between generations, personal toil vs modern technology, art as a tool for information dissemination, personal legacy, mourning/loss, and the loss of place or home. If this list overwhelms you, rest assured that it does for me as well. Delany is not satisfied until his work is teeming with layered commentary, until it practically splits its own seams.

Delany's characters sometimes call Gibson's to mind (particularly when he deals with thieves, layabouts, or prisoners), but he also devotes attention to children and the working class (linemen, mechanics, fishermen). Dialogue between his characters is given pride of place in most of these works, giving a personal and unreliable quality to the descriptions and world building elements. He also has particular interest in describing the scarred and rough hands of the working class, the magnificence of jewels, and the flamboyant colors that populate the worlds he imagines.

Some of my personal favorites include: We, in Some Strange Power's Employ, Move on a Rigorous Line, The Star Pit, the titular Aye, and Gomorrah that was first published in Dangerous Visions, and Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones, which has one of my favorite titles ever. These four exemplify Delany at his best, balancing his flavorful prose with enough lucidity to make the themes approachable enough. Most of these also function the best as standalone works because of their length, allowing Delany to indulge in world-building tangents without sacrificing space for compelling storytelling.

I have a preference towards Delany when he has at least thirty pages to work with. It doesn't seem that Delany preferred the short form either, considering that compared to his peers he published a lot less of it. I'm not sure his ambitiousness works nearly as well in a hyper-short format due to a lack of space for it. Most of the works that came in at less than ten pages in this collection were messy by comparison to the longer ones.

While each and every story wasn't transcendent, this collection is not filled with bloat or excess. Truly this is an excellent showcase of Delany's progress as a writer and his capabilities of producing captivating speculative fiction. Though his work has a cult following today (his style and sensibilities don't always translate well to a wide audience), I think this collection should be considered even by the uninitiated. It's that good.