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Let us now, so as to avoid the dreaded trap of "well let's not think too hard about what we read, let's just read fun books and have fun with them," confront the issue of sci-fi. The issue of sci-fi, to my vision, looks a little like this. Sci-fi fans claim that it's an unfairly marginalized genre, especially when compared to more serious literature. Indeed, works by Philip K. Dick, William Gibson, Ursula K. Le Guin, Kurt Vonnegut, and others (ignore the overwhelming dudeliness of these names at your own peril, because this becomes important in a moment) have either been so thought-provoking or so aesthetically innovative as to stand alongside more canonized works. Things get muddy when you consider that many of these authors are not only white men, but white men whose agenda is explicitly sexist and homophobic and, in many cases, implicitly racist. Good old Heinlein, whose work is often excused on the grounds of being "fun" even though there's this brilliant Michael Moorcock essay floating around, for all interested parties to read, that makes a convincing case that his (i.e. Heinlein's) work is a wet dream for the fascists in the audience. But I just don't like Heinlein. Also guilty is Herbert, whose work is entertaining and imaginative but not exactly worthy of great literature, Stephenson, who'd be pretty cool if he'd just never open his mouth about how political correctness ruins everything, and Dick, who I'm still fascinated with despite his blatant misogyny and barely competent prose. I suppose it sort of helps, a little bit, that PKD's only sexist and kinda-homophobic and not really racist, but let's not get too ahead of ourselves here.

Into this mess steps Dhalgren, which strikes me as a solution to the dilemma - a sci-fi novel of ideas that not only acknowledges but celebrates neglected perspectives! And here I was losing my faith in all sci-fi authors, exceptions for Le Guin and Gibson and some of the less virulent PKD and Stephenson moments, but this Delaney guy? Him I can get behind, and not just what he stands for, although what he stands for is miraculous, because there I was thinking that sci-fi had gotten off on the wrong foot from the moment Lovecraft decided to merge sexism and racism with his gross-ass monsters-raping-white-women fantasies ("but it's cool! I mean, it's not every day that you get to see a TENTACLE MONSTER..." the apologist in question was at this point defenestrated. The management is sorry for any inconvenience this might have caused). Of course, Dhalgren was not written by a white man, or a straight white man, but a gay black man, and maybe it'll take some time before such a progressive sci-fi novel comes from the good ship straight white dudes, but in the meantime, let's appreciate Dhalgren and the Left Hand of Darkness, and let's toss the Good Ship a bone because Gibson really is just that good.

This is all worth mentioning not just because it's always worth mentioning, but because race and gender and sexual orientation are at the heart of Dhalgren, every bit as much as the mysterious city is. Racial tension brims across the city, while the lines of sexuality are erased. To get this right out of the way, the mysterious city is an amazing thing, portentous and chaotic and teeming and shadowy, full of mysteries that Delaney never attempts to resolve, because he doesn't have to resolve them. It strikes me as almost a minor point to say that it doesn't matter why Bellona has become what it is; what matters is that it is that way, and now protagonist Kid, must react to it. He must make sense of the chaos in front of him, what he has wandered into. The Kid's journey through this city, with its shifting landmarks and its ever-burning buildings, its ominous skylines and the never-explained violence within its homes, takes him through this astonishing cavalcade of identities. He joins a hippie commune, throws himself into the hard-workin' American dream, lives as a bohemian, leads up a gang, and pushes the boundaries his sexuality. Yet, as revealed by the novel's brilliant last segment, he comes no closer to answers, and in fact only opens up new questions. As the snake that is this novel winds on, his already fractured mental state grows worse and worse, until it splinters into shards that never quite form wholes, close as they may come.

What strikes me about this guy, too, is how indifferent everyone seems to the weirdness. Oh, don't get me wrong, they're concerned when it directly affects them, whether it's in terms of the climactic and super-relevant race riot that caps the book off or the descending sun that almost scorches the city, but look. There's this extended and harrowing chapter, the longest in the book I think, set in an apartment. There's obvious, horrific violence in one room, and the Kid works for a family, the Richards, who live in another. But the screams mean nothing to the Richards; they're only there to annoy. And I mean, to wind it back to my intro, isn't that so much like sci-fi's own warped ideology? Push the oppressed under the rug with another cheap Heinlein joke about how much women gossip? Fuck Heinlein. Fuck this "dean of science fiction" shit. Delaney all the way.

So Delaney's characters and formal experimentation are wonderful, but what of his prose? His prose is a wonder to behold. The man has a way of zeroing in on just the right word from a particular sentence, and from there expanding out, building his sentences on complex echoes of sounds and phonemes: "a prism nipped my wrist," he says at one point, and if you're a prose-hound like I am, I hope you understand why I love that phrase so much, why the sheer craft of it just bowls me over. Even the sex scenes are well-written, and you KNOW how often that turns out (i.e. never, unless we're talking about Don DeLillo's deliberately awkward sex). It's not just that he can spin an engaging and endlessly complex narrative - character after character can serve as the Kid's double - but that he can write better sentences than Heinlein or Herbert. Maybe that's why Dhalgren never found a home in the sci-fi community - the guy takes the great big snow globe o' paternalistic conventions, shakes it up, and has a blast with what's left over.