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Samuel R. Delany
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Flight from Nevèrÿon (Return to Nevèrÿon) Kindle Edition

by Samuel R. Delany (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
4.7 4.7 out of 5 stars 29 ratings
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Two novellas and a full-length novel set in the land at the limit of history: “The tales of Nevèrÿon are postmodern sword-and-sorcery” (The Washington Post Book World).
  In The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals, a disease has come to Nevèrÿon. Men, rich and poor, have been stricken with it—but far fewer women. More and more die, and no one recovers. The illness seems to have first come from the Bridge of Lost Desire, a hangout for prostitutes male and female, but its spread through the city has been terrifying. And it will change Nevèrÿon forever, both its sexual and its political landscape.
Written in 1984, The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals is an astute fictionalization of New York City in the first two years of the AIDS crisis. Interwoven with the ancient story are Samuel R. Delany’s modern accounts of what went on in the meanest streets of Gotham during that time.
This wholly original novel (the first novel about AIDS from a major American publisher) is presented along with two other stories about mummers, prostitutes, and street people in the fantastic land of Nevèrÿon and its capital, port Kolhari—an ancient city that becomes more and more modern with each story.
This ebook features an illustrated biography of Samuel R. Delany including rare images from his early career. 
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  1. Book 3 of 4
    Return to Nevèrÿon
  2. Print length
    382 pages
  3. Language
    English
  4. Sticky notes
    On Kindle Scribe
  5. Publisher
    Open Road Media Sci-Fi & Fantasy
  6. Publication date
    January 7, 2014
  7. File size
    4810 KB
  8. Page Flip
    Enabled
  9. Word Wise
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  10. Enhanced typesetting
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  11. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

These two volumes conclude the story begun in Neveryona and Tales of Neveryon (Classic Returns, LJ 1/94). LJ 's reviewer asserted that Flight "may be the most successfully experimental work yet from an author for whom language and story are inseparable" ( LJ 4/15/85). "Delany's artistry as both writer and storyteller rises to the surface" in Return , originally published as The Bridge of Lost Desire ( LJ 9/15/87).
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

“Postmodern sword-and-sorcery . . . Self-conscious metafictions about social and sexual behavior, the play of language and power, and—above all—the possibilities and limitations of narrative.” —The Washington Post Book World on Tales of Nevèrÿon
“A major and unclassifiable achievement in contemporary American literature.” —Fredric R. Jameson on Tales of Nevèrÿon
“I consider Delany not only one of the most important SF writers of the present generation, but a fascinating writer in general who has invented a new style.” —Umberto Eco
“This is cultural criticism at its most imaginative and entertaining best.” —The Quarterly Black Review of Books on Tales of Nevèrÿon

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00HE2JK5I
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Open Road Media Sci-Fi & Fantasy (January 7, 2014)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ January 7, 2014
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 4810 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 382 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.7 4.7 out of 5 stars 29 ratings

About the author

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Samuel R. Delany

Samuel R. Delany

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Samuel R. Delany’s science fiction and fantasy tales are available in Aye and Gomorrah and Other Stories. His collection Atlantis: Three Tales and Phallos are experimental fiction. His novels include science fiction such as the Nebula-Award winning Babel-17 and The Einstein Intersection, as well as Nova (now in a Library of America anthology) and Dhalgren. His four-volume series Return to Nevèrÿon is sword-and-sorcery. Most recently, he has written the SF novel Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders. His 2007 novel Dark Reflections won the Stonewall Book Award. Other novels include Equinox, Hogg, and The Mad Man. Delany was the subject of a 2007 documentary, The Polymath, by Fred Barney Taylor, and he has written a popular creative writing textbook, About Writing. He is the author of the widely taught Times Square Red / Times Square Blue, and his book-length autobiographical essay, The Motion of Light in Water, won a Hugo Award in 1989. All are available as both e-books and paperback editions. His website is: www.samueldelany.com.

Photo by Alex Lozupone (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.

Customer reviews

4.7 out of 5 stars
4.7 out of 5
29 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Yueyang Fan
5.0 out of 5 stars Worth reading
Reviewed in the United States on November 4, 2020
Verified Purchase
Great book! Love the last chapter!
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Melaina Lara
5.0 out of 5 stars Sublime
Reviewed in the United States on June 19, 2000
I read this for my college English course. At first it was a bit daunting, but since I had to stick with it for the class I pressed on. Suddenly all the words just started to flow and it quickly became an involving tale. I love the book so much that I've given it as a gift to more than a few of my friends.
4 people found this helpful
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PH
4.0 out of 5 stars Delany hits (and loses) his stride
Reviewed in the United States on July 22, 2021
“...In the same ten years Steiner's ingenious translation methods (highly speculative and mathematically based) have inspired several volumes of stories and novels by Samuel R. Delany about Nevèrÿon, of which this volume—now that the site grows less and less imaginary, more and more real—is the third.”

One of the ironies of the closing line of Delany’s preface to Flight from Nevèrÿon is that, by expanding the contrivances around the fictitious Culhar Fragment that forms the basis of the series (such as by introducing a fictional archaeologist seeking the fragment’s origin), the more imaginary and by extension less real, the series has become.
Another irony comes from a second reading of the line, a reading which only becomes possible after one has completed the first two stories in this volume and at least begun the third: The tales themselves are shifting closer and closer to the autobiographical Delany and his life in modern day New York City, in a literal sense are becoming less imaginary, and more real than the stories in the previous volumes. Returning to the preface after this realization, the second reading struck me as somehow both perfectly obvious and unavoidably surprising. It’s a preface as subtly clever as the two stories to follow.
Elsewhere, another reviewer has suggested that the first two books in the series are ok, but that this third volume is where Delany really hits his stride, and I agree up to a point: The first two stories, “The Tale of Fog and Granite” and “The Mummer’s Tale” are elegant, sophisticated, beautifully constructed, and within them Delany’s complex philosophizing never seems awkward or out of place in his uncivilized world, as it often did in the first two Nevèrÿon books, but seamlessly integrated, and he’s largely given up the pretense of an adventure yarn, narrowing his focus instead onto events that are noticeably more commonplace and relatable. It works, and these two gems represent Delany at his very best.
“The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals” (the third, final, and novel-length story which tells the overlapping tales of an AIDS-like plague in Nevèrÿon and the burgeoning AIDS crisis in early ‘80s New York) however, I found disappointing. Not surprisingly, Delany’s reflections on AIDS after its first few years are less developed than the literary and philosophical concepts explored in the rest of the series, concepts he’d devoted half his life to, and what he does have to say he so clearly struggles with that he awkwardly breaks the 4th wall to admit it (here he compares TPC to Barry Malzberg’s Galaxies, but for Malzberg, the meta-fictional mea culpa was as much “the story” as the story was; for Delany it’s offered as something of a late aside). The new characters and events seem thinly sketched, while the cameos from familiar characters seem forced. The split narrative creates problems as well: The Nevèrÿon sections interrupt the candor and intimacy of the memoiristic New York sections while the New York sections interrupt the suspension of disbelief needed for the Nevèrÿon sections to carry any emotional weight of their own. Despite some early glimmers of what magic might come from weaving together these two worlds, such as when Delany describes the single acquaintance of his who’d at that time died of AIDS and, shortly after, rather poignantly “reincarnates” him as a character in Nevèrÿon, and a handful of other scattered highlights, after the two preceding stories, and given its strong reputation (I’d been looking forward to TPC even before I began the series) it was a bit of a letdown.
One person found this helpful
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Gotham Hawkeye
4.0 out of 5 stars Historic
Reviewed in the United States on June 13, 2009
Delany's "Tale of Plagues and Carnivals" (a tale in "Flight from Nevèrÿon"), is a milestone in American literary history insofar as it was one of the first works of fiction, perhaps the first, at least among those we know of because they were subsequently published, to be informed by the beginning of the modern AIDS pandemic, the inauguration of the manuscript having been inspired by AIDS before the disease even had name.

It is interesting to me that so much fantasy is obviously more inspired by the medieval era than any other, in which disease and plague were significant factors in the lives of everyone and shaped the imagination of the people of that day, and yet disease and plague go virtually unmentioned, certainly rarely detailed, in most published fantasy writing.

This is not to suggest that disease or plague is a major factor throughout the four-book Nevèrÿon series. But in focusing one of the Nevèrÿon tales, and a particularly haunting one, specifically on disease--including its social context in a pre-modern, urban, fantasy setting--and in managing to make that tale so compelling, Delany becomes all the more noteworthy as a fantasy writer.
2 people found this helpful
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