The preponderance of the poems in G. O. Clark’s 25¢ Rocket Ship to the Stars (Dark Regions Press, chapbook, $6.95, 50 pages, ISBN 978-1-888993-43-1) concern themselves with astronomical tropes: abandoned patio furniture on the Moon; an enigmatic celestial smile that frustrates telescopes; Spot the Dog, of children’s book fame, orbiting the Earth. As such, these poems read like enchanting, nostalgic fables of the Space Age. And every now and then, Clark tosses in a surreal bombshell like “Sunday at the Virtual Beach,” with its “honeybees with the facial features of cherubs,” just to loft your pleasures to a new realm of imagination.

A very handsome cover and interior illos by Matt Taggart are the icing on the tasty cake that is Corrine De Winter’s demi-gothic Tango in the Ninth Circle (Dark Regions Press, chapbook, $6.95, 43 pages, ISBN 1-888993-42-1). De Winter’s poems are like Tori Amos’s songs: piercing, melancholy, reflective; unlike Amos, De Winter relies fruitfully on the supernatural as metaphor and talisman. She namechecks Leonard Cohen in “Enter Valentine” and that old bard’s mournful yet hopeful and ruminative tone is another apt comparison. In a poem like “The Body in Love,” De Winter perfectly fuses the corporeal limitations and exaltations of our material forms with the spiritual longings and imaginings of our souls.

Darrell Schweitzer is surely “tetched” in the head. I mean this in the most complimentary manner. Only one who had slept too long outside under the full moon and basked in infernal influences could have written The Arkham Alphabet Book (Zadok Allen: Publisher, chapbook, $4.00, 28 pages, ISBN unavailable). This is a Lovecraftian primer that lurches grimly and gleefully through the alphabet of madness, each page illumined in ghastly fashion by Allen Koszowski. If you wish to raise your children as anything other than fodder for the return of the Old Ones, send your useless human money to Darrell at 6644 Rutland Street, Philadelphia, PA 19149.

Readers of this magazine will certainly recall Bruce Boston’s excellent poem “Heavy Weather,” which took an Asimov’s Readers’ Award for 2005. It’s to be found nowadays in Shades Fantastic (Gromagon Press, chapbook, $6.95, 50 pages, ISBN 0-9776665-3-0), along with a wealth of other rich material, including several hitherto-unpublished items. Only from the mind of Boston could we learn, for instance, that the dogs of Atlantis have stolen their barks “from the heady dialogues of Philosopher-Kings.” Such startling imagery, as well as keen observations of life, loss, and love, are delivered in succinct and meaty lines. Like the multifarious women who fill “Visions of the Blue Clone,” Boston’s poems are easy to embrace and never twice the same.

Somewhat similar to Bruce Bos-ton’s sensibilities, but with threads of Steve Aylett’s gonzoness, we discover Jason Christie with his i-ROBOT Poetry (EDGE, trade paper, $19.95, 112 pages, ISBN 978-1-894063-24-1). Together, these scores of poems build up a surreal cybernetic future where the problems of machine intelligence assume positively Asimovian dimensions. A poem like “Merciless,” with its presentation of a suffering robot who wishes nothing more than the release of sleep, expertly walks the tightrope between pathos and sentimentality. Whether full narratives (“Everybody Do the Robot”) or only composed of single lines (“Robota!”: “Was the holographic turkey hot-looking enough when we had our paid friends over for a pretend dinner party on act-like-a-human day”), Christie’s poems achieve startling insights into non-human humanity.

Anything connected with the enigmatic and perilous SF writer named Jeff Lint (see Steve Aylett’s Lint [2005] for a biographical map of the crime scene) is subject to ambiguity. But I think that I can safely report this much: with And Your Point Is? (Raw Dog Screaming Press, trade paperback, $10.95, 109 pages, ISBN 978-933293-17-2), Steve Aylett has assembled a “Lint Companion,” so to speak, that is fit to live on in infamy next to Lint’s own mighty non-linear screeds. These mini-essays explicating “Scorn & Meaning in Jeff Lint’s fiction” all bear the true and accurate stamp of gleeful derangement so characteristic of Lint the man, Lint the books, and Lint the monster from the fourth dimension.

The newish firm of Payseur & Schmidt specializes in books that are also limited-run and signed art objects. But this is not to say these publishers neglect content. Far from it! Their recent offering should prove just how invalid such a notion is. John Clute’s lexicon of critical terms for the horror field, The Darkening Garden (hardcover, $45.00, 162 pages, ISBN 978-0-9789114-0-9) has enough intellectual heft to make your brain expand like the Scarecrow’s once Oz rewarded him. Translating his “four season” schematic for fantasy novels to a similar circuitry for horror novels, Clute imposes brilliant rigor on a sprawling canon, and illuminates its darkest corners. Also, check out the accompanying postcard set done by thirty very talented artists.

Anyone lucky enough to have heard John Crowley read aloud—or actually, even those who have intuited his mesmeric natural speaking voice from his fine fictions—will once more hear his distinctive tones and will encounter the same mix of keen intelligence, quirky affections and wry wisdom that they have come to expect from the man in person through the pages of In Other Words (Subterranean Press, hardcover, $35.00, 206 pages, ISBN 1-59606-062-X), a collection of his non-fiction. Whether writing about the craft of writing, the deep structures of narrative, or simply (never simply!) reviewing novels and nonfictions, Crowley’s essays convey his perpetual fascination with and amazement at the “labyrinth of the world and the paradise of the heart.” Just the piece on Walt Kelly’s Pogo alone is worth the cost of this volume.

With his new book of essays, Full Metal Apache: Transactions Betweeen Cyberpunk Japan and Avant-Pop America (Duke University Press, trade paper, $22.95, 272 pages, ISBN 0-8223-3774-6), Japanese master critic Takayuki Tatsumi provides an invaluable window into the complex cross-cultural flow of ideas between two countries arguably at the bleeding edge of futurism and SF. Not only will the lucky reader be exposed to a myriad Japanese works of fabulism probably little known to most of us Westerners—such as Shozo Numa’s Yapoo the Human Cattle (1956-1999) and Kunio Yanagita’s Tono Monogatari (1910)—but that reader will have his head rewired in terms of understanding literary landmarks of the English language, such as Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland (1990). And all of this will be accomplished through Tatsumi’s spark-filled, spunky, spontaneous bop prosody.

Just as rude and graphically assaultive as any classic punk fanzine, but infinitely more sophisticated, Jon Farmer’s Sieg Heil, Iconographers (Savoy Books, trade paper, £25.00, 608 pages, ISBN 0861301161) continues—after D.M. Mitchell’s A Serious Life (2004)—to tell the history of Britton & Butterworth’s Savoy empire. More a survey of the personalities and individual publishing landmarks than a linear chronicle, the book makes a bold case for locating Savoy closer to the heart of SF publishing than the fringes. With Michael Moorcock looming like a deity over the whole thirty years of the scandalous firm, Farmer paints a vibrant picture of a cabal of free-speech-crazed creators delivering harsh truths.

Mark Finn, biographer, is, in his literary fashion, as large a hero as Conan, the most famous creation of Robert E. Howard, who happens to be the subject of Blood & Thunder (Monkey Brain Books, trade paper, $15.95, 272 pages, ISBN 1-932265-21-X). Battling manfully through the hordes of lies and legends surrounding REH, Finn delivers a clear-eyed, sympathetic yet objective portrait of this seminal writer. Depicting the man, his place and times, and his story-telling accomplishments vividly and discerningly, Finn shows that journalistic accuracy is actually more powerful than sleazy mythologizing. This book will be enjoyed by veteran fan and newbie alike.

Spilt Milk Press shows the world how to produce an attractive chapbook. The Sense of Falling ($5.00, 62 pages, ISBN unavailable), consisting of stories by Ezra Pines, features handsome design; an introduction by an author with a certain level of name recognition (Hal Duncan); some original stories as well as reprints; clear copyright acknowledgements for nerdy bibliographers such as I; attractive interior art by Mark Rich; and an author’s Afterword. But of course all this would avail naught if not for the magnificence of the fiction herein. Pines writes like an R.A. Lafferty raised on a diet of the TV show Lost and the prose of André Breton. His “Mr. Brain” sequence of stories is hilarious, while his other pieces are disturbingly surreal, yet emotionally close to the bone. The unstable nature of reality is Pines’s theme in all cases, and seldom has a sense of falling felt so right.

Just as impressive as the Pines volume is Show and Tell and Other Stories (Tropism Press, chapbook, $6.00, 56 pages, ISBN unavailable), containing six marvelous tales by Greg van Eekhout (with the author’s own illos!), plus his informative notes. Van Eekhout’s language is zestily inventive, his story premises splendidly wacky, and his execution flawless. Whether he features Santa Claus as an end-times superhero á la Captain Future (“In the Late December”) or posthuman school kids striving for a good grade (the title story), he can be counted on to amaze, entertain, and illuminate the sapient condition.

If you crossed Franz Kafka with Thomas Ligotti and Warren Ellis—well, you’d be one sick puppy. But the result might be Rhys Hughes—at least in his particular authorial incarnation on display in At the Molehills of Madness (Pendragon Press, trade paperback, £7.99, 187 pages, ISBN 0-9538598-8-6). This volume assembles all of Hughes’s horror or dark fantasy stories, and a splendidly scabrous and scaly and squamous lot they are. As Hughes explains in his “Pompous Afterword,” this type of fiction is (or should be) a window into the neuroses of the author. Hughes has the courage of his convictions, and the talent to bring it all off. Just check out, for instance, “The Crippled Gollywog’s Fox Hunt,” which rakes the British upper classes over surreal coals.

Glen Hirshberg has immense range, sharp chops, an assured voice and vision. What more could you want from a short-story writer? He can do an over-the-top performance like “Safety Clowns,” about drug dealers hidden in ice-cream trucks; or an atmospheric historical saga like “Devil’s Smile,” focused on new England maritime mysteries; or a Bradbury-style piece about a brother and sister dealing with the death of their beloved grandfather, as in “The Muldoon.” All these Guises of Glen, and others, are on display in American Morons (Earthling Publications, hardcover, $24.00, 191 pages, ISBN 0-9766339-8-1). You’d practically deserve the book’s title if you didn’t check it out.

The four editors who have assembled The James Tiptree Award Anthology 3 (Tachyon, trade paperback, $14.95, 276 pages, ISBN 1-892391-41-4)—Karen Joy Fowler, Pat Murphy, Debbie Notkin, and Jeffrey D. Smith —wisely do not feel constrained by mere calendar years in assembling relevant stories and non-fiction. Thus, while we do indeed get to see the most recent prizewinners, we are also treated to such timeless goodies as Tiptree’s own “The Girl Who Was Plugged In,” and a 1990 essay by Dorothy Allison on Octavia Butler. The mix of old and new serves well the cause of highlighting gender issues in our field, and how it’s been a long hard slog from days of willful ignorance and exclusion about such matters to a relatively enlightened present. Let a thousand bake sales bloom!

It’s been much too long since the world has been graced by new fiction from Rachel Pollack, and we have editors Richard Labonté and Lawrence Schimel to thank for the latest such eruption, to be found in the pages of their new anthology, The Future Is Queer (Arsenal Pulp Press, trade paperback, $17.95, 213 pages, ISBN 978-155152-209-8). Pollack’s primo story, “The Beatrix Gates,” about an alchemical, transexual future, is the standout in my eyes. But every contributor here has intriguing things to say on the theme of differently gendered, differently sexed worlds. Writers such as Candas Jane Dorsey and L. Timmel Duchamp prove that any future worth living in, whatever its failures or successes, must be open to all persuasions.

It’s always a grand moment when a major new line of SF/F/H books premieres, and our field, rather marvelously, has recently experienced it twice. There’s the USA branch of the UK’s long-running Orbit line, and we’ll be encountering their offerings in later columns. Also originating in the UK, and distributed maximally in the USA, is Solaris, under the very capable hands of editor George Mann.

And one of the first volumes from Solaris consists of a debut novel. Now, that’s leading with confidence and brio and forward-thinkingness.

Thief with No Shadow (mass-market paperback, $7.99, 463 pages, ISBN 978-1-84416-469-1) by Emily Gee is, within the tight parameters it sets itself, a highly accomplished work, rewarding on any number of levels. It’s a fable of sorts, almost something by the Brothers Grimm. As such, it shares affinities with work by Jane Yolen and Patricia McKillip. What it does not do is to build the typical extended subcreation of a Tolkienesque fantasy (and that’s actually kinda refreshing). The world Gee sketches out is just dense enough not to put your foot through its scrim as you speed excitedly down the taut tightrope of plot. A name or two of a king and a kingdom. A sketched-in town. Some exotic sentients to rival humans. A little bit of countryside. A couple of tales-within-the-tale as cultural touchstones. And a single mundane household that constitutes about 75 percent of what we see. Out of these components, Gee succeeds in fashioning a melodrama (in the best sense of the word) of sacrifice and redemption.

Our four main protagonists are two brother-sister pairings. Melke and Hantje are wraiths, humans possessed of the power to go “unseen” by others. Many wraiths naturally turn their talent for invisibility toward a life of crime. Melke and Hantje have higher moral standards. But, forced to flee to a strange land by political persecution, they reluctantly in their poverty detour to thieving. Their clumsy initial foray—Hantje’s idea, really—goes dreadfully wrong when Hantje is captured by salamanders. (There are four supernatural races besides man: salamanders, lamias, gryphons, and psaarons, corresponding to fire, earth, air and water.) To rescue Hantje, Melke must steal a unique magical necklace from Bastian and Liana sal Vere, the scions of a cursed estate. Bastian has the power of conversing with dogs (his own dog Endal is one of the brightest lights in the book), while Liana is a healer.

Now the fates of the magical foursome are inextricably bound together by the thefts. Melke and Hantje end up on the ruined farm of the sal Veres, and the quartet undergo shifting balances and counterbalances of emotions, interspersed with bouts of danger.

Gee’s schema for her tale, consciously or not, almost perfectly mirrors John Clute’s famous stage-by-stage progress of the Ur-fantasy as “an earned passage from bondage.” As such, Gee’s novel possesses a rich share of archetypical power. Although one might question whether the plethora of domestic scenes could have been trimmed a bit to avoid some small repetitiveness.

Her language is sharp and colorful, subtly shifting depending on whether Melke or Bastian hold the reins of POV. Her subplot in the village of Thierry proves to be integral to the main thread. And her depiction of the alien races is nicely otherworldly and erotically spooky, a la Yeats. It should also perhaps be mentioned that Gee inverts the standard damsel-under-threat-of-rape scenario in inventive ways, without being programmatic or tendentious.

Haruki Murakami resembles no other creator possibly more than he resembles filmmaker David Lynch. Both men delight in the surreal, in bizarre patternings and weird symbols whose meanings linger on the edge of vocalizing, in depicting existential life-or-death quandaries, in walking the edge between innocence and perversity.

But in his newest novel, After Dark (Knopf, hardcover, $22.95, 191 pages, ISBN 978-0-3072-6583-8), I believe Murakami is paying homage to a different filmmaker and to one of that director’s more anomalous offerings: namely, Martin Scorsese and his 1985 film After Hours. Aside from the unmistakable similarity of titles, the action is just too kindred to be coincidental. Whereas in Scorsese’s film, Griffin Dunne found himself embarked on a screwball nocturnal odyssey across SoHo, New York, in Murakami’s book we find our characters swept up in a similar round of events in urban Japan. Perhaps a tad less slapstick and extroverted, and more sober and internalized—but kissing-cousin journeys nonetheless.

Mari, our heroine, is a shy, quiet nineteen-year-old student living with her parents. But this particular evening (the action of the book occupies a mere eight hours, each short chapter cued to a certain interval) she feels the overwhelming urge to escape for a time from a certain set of circumstances at home. So she resolves to spend the night awake, sitting in fast-food joints, reading. Unfortunately, she picks a rather rough neighborhood to frequent. There she meets a friendly, good-hearted musician named Takahashi. Her casual instant involvement with him sweeps her up in a sordid situation at a love hotel named Alphaville. The night will spool out from there, and we will ultimately get the sense that all the events cosmically revolve around Mari’s sister, Eri, who has undertaken a vow to sleep indefinitely until her unstated problems are solved.

Eri proves to be rather like a certain Dunsany figure: “The chief of the gods of Pegana is Mana-Yood-Sushai, who created the other gods and then fell asleep; when he wakes, he ‘will make again new gods and other worlds, and will destroy the gods whom he hath made.’ ” Murakami slips back and forth across planes of existence, in classic butterfly-or-philosopher mode, employing the tactic of a nameless, first-person, bodiless narrator.

As always, Murakami’s prose stylings and vocabulary (as ably translated by Jay Rubin) are extremely primal and spare, yet somehow cohering into subtle and colorful and beautiful cadenzas. He’s the ultimate global cosmopolitan, in that his characters partake of a world-spanning set of touchstones. And yet there’s something undeniably Asian and Japanese about his work—how could there not be?

Murakami specializes in pulling the rug out from under any sense of certainty his characters long for—and out from under the reader as well. As a character named Korogi observes, “The ground we stand on looks solid enough, but if something happens it can drop out right from under you. And once that happens, you’ve had it: things’ll never be the same. All you can do is go on living alone down there in the darkness.” (Recall that one of Murakami’s most famous protagonists spent plenty of time literally immured in a well!) This is the most pessimistic formulation of Murakami’s thesis, and Mari rightfully rejects Korogi’s words to some degree. Mostly, this sense of unpredictability instead brings a kind of deliciously scary joy to his characters, who might often be stuck in a rut anyhow. If you survive your trials, you’ll emerge somehow richer, even ennobled.

The French pioneered this kind of “anti-novel” half a century ago. (Murakami makes the tie explicit with “Alphaville” and a Godard reference.) Brian Aldiss did an SF one with Report on Probability A (1968). But Murakami imbues his books with less of the clinical and more of the humanistic. They’re tender meditations on the impossibility and utter necessity of being human.

The history of genre literature in the twentieth century needs to be documented even more extensively than it has been (and the semi-neglected visual aspect of the field even more so than the bibliographic side). The people who lived it, who contributed to it, are all mortal, and slipping away fast—as the obituaries in Locus and Ansible remind us every month. Much fascinating material about the larger-than-life characters who built the field of fantastical literature we all love is on the point of vanishing.

With this goal in mind, author Luis Ortiz has succeeded admirably in chronicling one of the more historically important and still vital careers—actually, joint careers—in the field, that of Ed and Carol Emshwiller. The main focus in Emshwiller: Infinity X Two (Nonstop Press, hardcover, $39.95, 173 pages, ISBN 978-1-933065-08-3) is on polymath Ed, his paintings and films, but Carol’s life as a writer is treated in honorable and comprehensive fashion as well. The loving synergy that was their marriage assumes almost the role of a third character in the biography.

Primarily, fans today know and revere “Emsh” for his magazine and book illustrations, and this aspect of his career receives top billing and the largest amount of space. Printed on nice rich stock, the cleverly arrayed reproductions of Emsh’s marvelous paintings leap off the page, conveying just what a unique visionary he was, and how his work helped codify the look and feel of modern SF. Ortiz’s capsule descriptions of the paintings capture their most intimate craftsmanly and thematic secrets. Moreover, Emsh’s non-SF art in the mystery and men’s mags outlets gets a good airing as well.

But Ed Emshwiller eventually came to see himself essentially as a creator of films, and Ortiz documents Emsh’s progress in this arena with lots of verve and insight. This part will be a revelation to most readers. And, as I mentioned above, Carol’s arc of literary self-discovery, and her co-creative support for her husband, emerge in tandem with the main arguments.

Ortiz superbly evokes the vanished era of the fifties and sixties, arguably Emsh’s heyday. He places Emsh’s work into context with other leading artists of the time such as Richard Powers. And he conveys the struggles of a pair of creators who never had much regard for social conventions or riches, without either romanticizing or downplaying their chosen lifestyle.

An early example of such scholarship is Ron Goulart’s classic survey, Cheap Thrills, originally published in 1972, when studies of pulp literature constituted but a fraction of what we have today. The book was a landmark, due to Goulart’s extensive primary reading among the many genres of pulp magazines, his affectionate tone, and his first-hand research conducted with the survivors of that milieu. He paved the way for later scholars.

Does his book hold up today? We have the chance to find out, thanks to Hermes Press, which has just reissued a splendid oversized hardcover reprint ($49.99, 208 pages, ISBN 1-932563-75-X).

Visually, the book still delivers plenty of thrills. The covers that Goulart chose to reproduce are real winners, and not often duplicated in later volumes. (Oh, sure, there’s some overlap, but you can never look at some of these specimens often enough.) The stock and reproduction is top-notch too. My one beef? No artist credits! It’s an affront to these painters, and would have been quite easy to remedy.

The text, at this late date, is not going to deliver any major surprises. Although Goulart does manage to provide a tidbit or two I had not encountered before. I never knew, for instance, that Doc Savage’s early appearance was based on Clark Gable’s. But additionally, and more vitally, we get Goulart’s analysis of societal trends, marketplace conditions, literary fads and fashions, and a host of other pertinent matters. These insights remain exemplary.

Lastly, the final section of the book reproduces correspondence that Goulart received from various pulpsters during his researches. Seeing these typed letters from the late sixties, with their strikeovers and penned corrections, is now almost akin to examining the pulps themselves: an exercise in nostalgia and melancholy and joy.

Is philosophy a science? It’s a discipline, certainly, and much good SF has been written to examine philosophical questions, mainly in the areas of ontology and epistemology. Where would PKD be, for instance, if he couldn’t play out his thought experiments on the nature of reality?

In any case, I probably shouldn’t push too hard to label Paul Hornschemeier’s The Three Paradoxes (Fantagraphics, hardcover, $14.95, 80 pages, ISBN 978-1-56097-653-0) as SF, since that’s likely a betrayal of its real nature as autobiography. Still, it does deal in a genuine speculative manner with Zeno’s famous three paradoxes involving motion and change, as exemplified in some lived-in historical moments from the life of its narrator.

We encounter young Chicago artist Paul as he’s visiting his parents in his childhood town in Ohio. He struggles with a graphic novel story he’s currently composing; he takes a walk with his father; he has flashbacks to his childhood; then he drives away when his visit is over, to meet a woman he’s never before seen in the flesh. A simple enough arc, but one that becomes dense with interplay between memory and consciousness, illustrating the mutable nature of reality.

Hornschemeier’s masterstroke in the telling of this tale involves his formalistic gameplaying. There are five modes or visual styles on display here, all superbly rendered. Predominant is the naturalistic mode that’s used for the realtime parts, reminiscent a bit of Dan Clowes’s work. Then there’s the naked, cartoony pencils of the graphic novel in progress. There’s some Dennis the Menace-style art for one flashback thread. There’s a kind of early-sixties romance comic or EC comics look for another flashback. And finally, we travel back to the philosophers of ancient Greece via a kind of Peanuts blended with Classics Illustrated format.

These mixed media, so to speak, convey the varying levels of reality, which begin to bleed into one another, especially when the Dennis-type characters are seen in the background of a naturalistic panel. Such a formalistic achievement conveys thematic points in ways more subtle—and, paradoxically, more forceful—than most strictly textual material could.

As Jonathan Lethem says in his blurb for this neat book, there’s no ultimate resolution of all these matters. But simply watching the heretofore hidden machinery of the cosmos and consciousness in action through one man’s life is reward enough.

Another volume at hand is both autobiography and more than autobiography. In fact, with Dark Reflections (Carroll & Graf, trade paperback, $15.95, 295 pages, ISBN 978-0-78671-947-1), our old pal Samuel Delany, proving himself still an innovator after such a long and illustrious career, seems to have invented a new format entirely: call it “counterfactual autobiography” if you will.

What precisely do I mean by this?

Well, first consider counterfactual fiction, or uchronias, or alternate histories, as we commonly know them in the genre. They are thought experiments designed to highlight how subtle (or major) alterations in recorded consensus events can lead to strange and different and unexpected outcomes.

In this book, Delany has done a counterfactual run on his own life.

Here’s a quick snapshot of the protagonist of Dark Reflections, Arnold Hawley: he’s a gay black man, a poet, who teaches on the side. He lives in a book-cluttered, rent-controlled apartment in New York City. His aunt is a charismatic, educated figure in his life. He had a brief marriage to a young woman when he too was young, followed by a nervous breakdown. He’s won an award or two, and has a good critical reputation, but his work is considered rather abstruse.

Wow, you think, that’s pretty close to Delany’s C.V. This is going to be a novelized version of Chip’s actual autobiography, The Motion of Light in Water (1988). But you couldn’t be more wrong.

 For despite the surface affinities, Hawley is almost the anti-Delany. (He’s the “dark reflection” of the author, although the multivalent title here also refers to one of Hawley’s own books.) And his life’s story, told in exquisite and aching detail, serves to illuminate both Delany’s own career and vast sociocultural-political wavefronts.

Born five years prior to Delany, in 1937 versus 1942, Hawley is just older enough to be stuck in the binding mentality of the closeted gay man. And his natural temperament reinforces this isolation. Timid, fearful, full of misinformation, Hawley never embraces his sexuality. Instead, he buries his passion, deliberately killing it and sublimating it after some hasty, botched experiments.

And esthetically speaking, Hawley is no innovator like Delany. He’s rather stodgy and traditional in his writing, his likes and dislikes, his literary heroes. But he does proudly embrace the African-American experience in American literature, and thus his stifled, less-than-ideal career will serve as a useful vessel for Delany’s history of change in the field, how cultural attitudes have progressed over the latter half of the twentieth century and into the new one.

And although there is nothing overtly fantastical about this book, this very impulse of examining sociopolitical trends and paradigm shifts through representative characters is SF’s core methodology.

But let me also be clear on this: the main thrust here is toward a portrait of Hawley and those in his sphere, and Delany does a superb job limning a writer’s marginal life. One might think of Saul Bellow or Philip Roth or John Updike—if one didn’t know that Delany himself has done this task ably time and again, only in more fantastical settings. Another fruitful comparison is John Crowley’s The Translator (2002), which likewise evokes a vanished era.

Delany’s writing retains its immaculate sheen when it comes to depicting action, texture, physical reality. Hawley might be a failed poet to some extent, in the world’s eyes, but he still possesses a poet’s sharp perceptions, and Delany crystallizes Hawley’s vision for us with precise and robust language.

This book supplements Delany’s previous assessments of contemporary society through a most unlikely messenger—one who comes fully alive even though he is living a buried life.