"A, B, C: Three Short Novels" contains the first three novels of Samuel R. Delany s long and illustrious career. "" "The Jewels of Aptor" is a science-fantasy story about a seafaring quest that sets out to find powerful magic jewels on a mystical, forbidden island where unimaginable danger lies. "The Ballad of Beta-2" is about a future academic searching for the true story behind an interstellar voyage, a journey over multiple generations that ended in tragedy. "They Fly at Ciron" is a fantasy about the clash between a marauding army and a peaceful village at the foot of a mountain from which a race of winged people oversees both sides. Presenting these three novels in this omnibus volume for the first time, along with a new foreword and afterword by the author, "A, B, C" showcases Delany s masterful storytelling ability and deep devotion to his craft.
"I wanted to wield together a prose luminous as twenty sets of headlights flung down a night road; I wanted my words tinged with the green of mercury vapor street lamps seen through a shaling of oak leaves in the park past midnight. I needed phrases that would break open like thunder, or leave a brush as gentle as willow boughs passed in a dark room.... The finest writing is always the finest delineation of surfaces.
What was the strange impetus that drove a group of four widely different humans to embark on a fear-filled journey across a forbidden sea to a legendary land? This was Earth still, but the Earth of a future terribly changed after a planet-searing disaster, a planet of weird cults, mutated beasts, and people who were not always entirely human. As for the four who made up that questing party, they included a woman who was either a goddess, a witch, or both, a four-armed boy whose humanity was open to question, and two more men with equally "wild" talents. The story of their voyage, of the power-wielding "jewels" they sought, of the atomic and post-atomic terrors they encountered, is a remarkable science-fiction Odyssey of the days to come.
En la Tierra ya no hay seres humanos y una banda de extraterrestres ha tomado la forma corporal de la gente desaparecida; intentado dar sentido a los artefactos humanos entre los que viven, tratan tambien de resucitar las tradiciones humanas. Aparecen avatares de Ringo Starr, Billy the Kid y Jesucristo junto con la figura del heroe, un musico negro que toca melodias en un machete y que es Orfeo y Teseo.
BABEL-17 is the novel which catapulted Samuel R. Delany into the front rank of sf writers.In the far future, after human civilization has spread through the galaxy, communications begin to arrive in an apparently alien language. They appear to threaten invasion, but in order to counter the threat, the messages must first be understood.
Esta novela relata la terrible invasión que sufre un pueblo pacífico, pretecnológico, que desconoce muchas cosas, entre ellas las armas, el homicidio, la rendición, el dinero y el monoteísmo. En su ayuda acude una tercera cultura, representada por una sociedad de seres alados que tiene una vision del mundo intermedia entre agresor y agredido.
Come and enter Samuel Delanys tomorow, in this trilogy of high adventure, with acrobats and urchins, criminals and courtiers, fishermen and factory-workers, madmen and mind-readers, dwarves and ducheses, giants and geniuses, merchants and mathematicians, soldiers and scholars, pirates and poets, and a gallery of aliens who fly, crawl, burrow, or swim.
Science fiction master Delany's novel is the story of Lorq von Ray, an intrepid spaceship captain determined to travel through the core of a recently imploded sun. Wise, witty, and whirlingly paced, this tale is the highest order of speculative fiction as it casts a new light on some of humanity's oldest truths and most enduring myths.
