From archive (archive)
From: jcc@MIMSY.UMD.EDU (John Cherniavsky)
Subject: Review - The Motion of Light in Water - S.R.Delany
Date: 26 Jul 88 16:15:46 GMT




                  The Motion of Light in Water
 Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village, 1957-1965

                        Samuel R. Delany

                  Arbor House - William Morrow
                         New York, 1988
                             $18.95


The sub-title of this book tells all. This  is  an  autobiography
covering  Delany's  high school and early adulthood years concen-
trating on his development as a writer and on his  sexuality.  It
is highly recommended for those who read and study Delany's works
for not only are some of the themes of  his  novels  revealed  by
this look at his early life and his view of his sexuality, but he
also explains the genesis of many of his early works. I've always
liked Delany's prose, whether in fiction or non-fiction, and this
book abounds with exquisite examples of it. The following is typ-
ical:

   At my Aunt Virginia's house in Montclair, we were  sitting  in
   the  glorious,  sunny  kitchen  one day - a kitchen with steps
   that went down to the square, wooden milk door in  the  yellow
   wall,  where,  in  his white coat, the milkman left bottles of
   milk in the zinc-walled chamber with ovoid bulbs at their tops
   in  which  the  ivory  cream  collected, a kitchen to which my
   cousin  Dorothy  returned  for  tomato  soup  and  a  tunafish
   sandwich  during  her  lunch period from school on weekdays, a
   kitchen in which steps went down to a basement  that  held  my
   cousin   Boyd's  extensive  electric-train  layout  and  where
   Dorothy taught me the rumba and the mambo, a kitchen where you
   went through a small door and bedroom and the pool table and a
   toy chest that held old magic  kits  and  chemistry  sets  and
   roulette  wheels  and mechanical racing horses and board games
   like Mr. Ree and Clue and Parcheesi and Monopoly -  in  short,
   it was a marvelous kitchen.

In addition, Delany includes a substantial amount of poetry  from
his wife's (Marilyn Hacker) published and unpublished works.

I found Delany's descriptions of his anonymous sexual  encounters
to  be  antithetical  to my own views of the the joys of love and
shared sex, but I could, in a way, understand his use of such en-
counters  as a release from stress. So be warned.  If you are of-
fended by descriptions of homosexual and bisexual encounters, you
should read this book only if you wish to be be offended.