Empire Star
In Babel-17, the protagonist describes a novel called Empire Star written by her late ex, Muels Aranlyde (an anagram of Samuel R Delany), about their late ex, fictionalised as Comet Jo. The fictional novel isn’t the same as the real novel by that name written by Samuel R Delany (and fictionally narrated by Jewel), because the former has Muels disguised within his own work as a computer character, while the latter has a computer that is explicitly identified as one Muels Aranlyde.
Matt Cheney thinks that Empire Star is a good introduction to the writing of Samuel R Delany. I think it (his seventh novel) is a better novel than Nova (his ninth) or Babel-17 (his sixth). As Ray Davis puts it, in a comment to Matt’s post, “there’s something perfectly in place about its form and ambition, like a really great 1966 pop song.”
I think the exposition in Nova and Babel-17 is what stops me liking them better. There is a lot of exposition in this novel as the protagonist is pushed out of a low tech mining colony, but here the exposition isn’t just slapped down on the counter. Here the exposition sings like poetry, as it often does in Grant Morrison (or, I would say, more precisely, like AE van Vogt or Cordwainer Smith, but I can’t remember which). Given that Delany perfected smooth exposition in his seventh novel, the fact that in-your-face exposition makes a comeback with a vengeance in his ninth novel makes me suspect more than ever that he is up to something with it, but that doesn’t make me like it any better.
The entirety of Empire Star can in fact be seen as an elegant, multi-levelled exposition of Delany’s categories of thought: simplex, complex, multiplex. That is: considering the world as objective and transparent, considering the world as relative, considering points of view to be structured by large scale forces.
(In light of these categories, I see the recurrence of the Grail Quest in Nova as evidence of a structural effect. The curtailed ending, an affirmation of that structuring’s power, then, doesn’t collapse the story in on itself, or refer to similar tales, but points outward to the context that makes them necessary.)
Empire Star’s own ending avoids the already-a-cliche-in-1966 complex ending of time paradoxical hermeticism by pointing out the size of space—which is large enough to take in the discontinuous continuities between Aranlyde’s Empire Star and Delany’s Empire Star.