"Tales of Nevèrÿon" strikes me as superb science fiction, although it deals with an ancient civilization, vaguely Mediterranean in flavor and presumably antecedent to the Sumerians, Egyptians and so on. As in his earlier science-fiction novels …, Mr. Delany explores the ways in which politics and economics affect our sense of identity, as expressed in art, sex and other forms of play.
His principal characters … are memorable. But Mr. Delany never makes the mistake of treating them as autonomous. They exist, as all characters in science fiction and fantasy must, as reflections of the world they inhabit. And because that world itself is a creation of the author, we are never very far from the realization that this story, like all stories, is simply a string of words, whose relation to "reality" is always problematical. Mr. Delany confronts this issue directly in an appendix, which "explains" that the tales of [his fictive] Nevèrÿon are an expansion of a 900-word "narrative fragment" called the Culhar' Text, which may be the oldest written document ever discovered.
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