Filling his works with intricate meanings, literary and cultural symbols and allusions, flashbacks, and unusual page designs, the author attempts to provide experiences for his readers that parallel the quests of his protagonists. Delany's audience is invited to question themselves and their societies while participating in the act of reading to its fullest extent. In his essay on Delany in
Dictionary of Literary Biography, Peter S. Alterman notes, "His are stories in which the creative experience of the reader is as important as the narrative. They invite, wheedle, and bully the reader into confronting the process of his reading and thereby participating in both the creation and the experience of the story." At the center of the web of personal, cultural, artistic, and intellectual concerns that provides the framework for his books is Delany's examination of how language and myth influence reality by shaping perceptions. In his science fiction, the author "creates new myths, or inversions of old ones, by which his protagonists measure themselves and their societies against the traditional myths that Delany includes," observes Jane Branham Weedman.
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