Tales of Neveryon

TALES OF NEVÈRŸON

Samuel R. Delany

www.sfgateway.com

by K. Leslie Steiner

Humankind still lives in prehistory everywhere, indeed everything awaits the creation of the world as a genuine one. The real genesis is not at the beginning but at the end, and it only begins when society and existence become radical, that is grasp themselves at the root. The root of history, however, is the human being, working, producing, reforming and surpassing the givens around him or her. If human beings have grasped themselves, and what is theirs, without depersonalization and alienation, founded in real democracy, then something comes into being in the world that shines into everyone’s childhood and where no one has yet been – home.

– Ernst Bloch,
Das Prinzip Hoffnung

Come to a far when, a distant once, a land beyond the river – but a river running no-one-knows-where. That’s the invitation the following fantasy series here holds out. But where does its landscape lie? Some have suggested it’s Mediterranean. Others have thought it Mesopotamian. Yet arguments can be made for placing it in either Asia or Africa. And its weather and immediate geography (sun, fog, rain, but no snow, in a city on the sea surrounded by mountains) makes it sound like nothing so much as prehistoric Piraeus – or San Francisco, in both of which modern cities, in the years before he began this series (if we are to trust the several books on him by over-eager commentators), Delany lived.

What’s certain, however, is that it was a long time ago.

But four thousand years? Six thousand? Eight thousand?

The most accurate placement is, after all, a happy accident of the advertising copy on the back of one of the
paperbacks in which some of the tales were first published, putting it at ‘the borderland of history’. For before this ancient nation there is only the unrectored chaos out of which grew (and we watch them grow page on page) the
techne that
make history recognizable: money, architecture, weaving, writing, capital … Yet a whiff of magic blows through it all, now as the flying dragons corraled in the Faltha mountains, now as a huge and hideous monster, part god, part beast, turning back would-be defectors as it patrols the ill-marked border.

Re-readers of these tales may be curious why I, who am after all only a fictive character in some of the pieces to come, have taken this preface on. Yes, it’s an odd feeling – but finally one I like. The publisher wanted me to jot something on the stories’ cryptographical origins. (You may have already encountered a note on their archeological ends.) I agreed, under condition I might include this extended historical disclaimer. But something about these stories defers origins (not to say endings) in favor of fictions. Still, for those readers, old or new, who do not recall, I will (again) explain:

Picture me (if it will help) as your average black American female academic, working in the largely white preserves of a sprawling midwestern university, unable, as a seventies graduate student, to make up her mind between mathematics and German literature. (The politics required eventually to secure a joint line in our Math and Comp. Lit. departments are too rococo to recount.) Category theory was all the rage when I emerged from my first meaningful degree. But there was an intriguing spin-off of it called naming, listing, and counting theory, which perhaps seventy-five people in the world knew anything at all about and another twelve could actually do anything with. There, on these rare and stilly heights, I decided to
dig in my heels – while, during summers, I ran around the world reading as much as possible in the oldest and most outré languages I could find.

Well.

Sometime in the mid-seventies, my mathematical work led me to apply a few of naming, listing, and counting theory’s more arcane corollaries to the translation of an archaic narrative text of some nine hundred or so words (depending on the ancient language in which you found it), sometimes called the Culhar’ Fragment and, more recently, the Missolonghi Codex. That fragment has come down to us in several translations in several ancient scripts.

The occasion for my own translation was the discovery, in a basement storage room of the Istanbul Archeological Museum, of a new version of the Culhar’ in a script that was, by any educated guess, certainly older than most previously dated. Appended to it was a note in an early version of Greek (Linear B) to the effect that this text had been considered (at least by the author of the note) to be humanity’s first writing.

And Linear B has not been written for a very, very long time.

But since the Culhar’ only exists in its various partial and, sometimes, contradictory translations, we do not know for
certain
which script it was initially supposed to have been written in; nor can we be sure of its presumed initial geography.

The origins of writing are just as obscure and problematic as the origin of languages in general. Some of those problems are discussed, in the appendix to Delany’s first published volume of Nevèrÿon stories, by my friend and sometime colleague S. L. Kermit. Yes, that appendix was written at my request. For, though I have (still) never met him, Delany, after he had written his first five tales, sent
me at my university a warm and appreciative letter about what my work had meant to him. (Till then, bits had been scattered only in the most recondite journals; though soon – praise the gods of tenure – they were to coalesce into the precious, precious book.) He also asked if I, or someone I knew, might write a piece about my cryptographic successes that would serve as an appendix to his collection. On his behalf, then (regardless of what my old and dear friend claims – though I’ll admit the circumstances were confused, the time period rushed, and the weather just frightful), I
asked
Professor Kermit to lend the entertainment his limpid expository manner.

But anyone interested in the details may consult the appendix to this first volume and pursue the matter through the first appendix to the second.

I have worked with that ancient, fragmented, and incomplete narrative, with its barbarians, dragons, sunken cities, reeds and memory marks, twin-bladed warrior women, child ruler, one-eyed dreamer and mysterious rubber balls, for many, many months, spread out over what has become many years; and I’m delighted that the pressure of my own attentions drew Delany to pose (with the help of my commentary) his own land of Nevèrÿon.

Professor Kermit’s generous essay, which concludes this volume, is rich in suggestions as to ways the Culhar’ may have prompted Delany to elaborate elements in his fantasy. But to say too much more about that, especially before you have read the stories themselves, is to suggest there is a closer juncture between post-modern tales and ancient Ur text than there is. For the relation between the Culhar’ and these stories is one of suggestion, invention, and play – rather than one of scholarly investigation or even scholarly speculation. If anything, Delany’s stories are, among
other things, a set of elaborate and ingenuous deconstructions of the Culhar’ – a word I take to mean ‘an analysis of possible (as opposed to impossible) meanings that subvert any illusions we have of becoming true masters over a given text,’ a word which I have, like so many in the last decade, become rather fond of; and one which Professor Kermit abhors.

Still, I am as happy to fulfill the publisher’s request for a general introduction to the series as I was first pleased by the fact my translation called Delany’s attention to the Culhar’ in the first place.

But there, really, you have it.

This recompilation of Delany’s immense and marvelous fantasy will mark a return to the series for thousands on thousands of readers, some of whom may even recall when the first piece, ‘The Tale of Gorgik,’ appeared in
Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine
for Spring of 1979. That story was nominated for a Hugo Award; and the collection of the first five tales (with Kermit’s intriguing appendix) in a paperback volume that same year became an American Book Award nominee. And, lo, the opening tale is now longer.

Taken all together, Delany’s mega-fantasy is a fascinating fiction of ideas, a narrative hall of mirrors, an intricate argument about power, sexuality, and narration itself. In the second piece, ‘The Tale of Old Venn,’ we can watch sophisticated intellection and primitive passion play off one another. By the third, ‘The Tale of Small Sarg,’ sadomasochism has reared its endlessly fascinating head; while the ninth, ‘The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals,’ explores the impact of AIDS on a major American city.

Where did the fantasy go …?

But that is precisely the fascination of the series.