Incredibly strange, sometimes self-indulgent, often brilliant. As I've been reading it I've been comparing it a lot to The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions by Larry Mitchell--radically different books in almost every way, but still, something about these two gay writers in the 70s writing about shambling collapsing cities and people with intricate chosen names and networks of connections and a combination of filth and fantastic creatures and an eye for the materiality of experience that I want to mine into. ( )

I’ve read this before, and each time it is a different experience. As a young man, the sex scenes, and there are a lot of them, were highlights. My hair was longer then and I had reluctantly served my time in the army so I recognized some of the characters. I read a lot of sci-fi and knew this was bound to become a classic. Kid, the hero, was a persona that I could imagine inhabiting while trying to adjust to my own life in the 70s.
Now, I am much older, and the slippage of time in the city along with the constant low cloud cover, smoke, and fog seems symbolic of my own fading short term memory that makes events seem disjointed, difficult to put in the proper order, and separated by darkness. Still, I remembered all the scenes in the book quite well even if last night’s dinner takes a moment to recall. The mental distress of Kid, which makes the city and the time he spends in it seem like nothing more than madness or a nightmarish dream, is of a much different style than that written about by Philip K. Dick.
Now, I have also become a writer of science fiction. Kid’s notebook, and the whole theme of the book as it relates to creativity is much more interesting than the sex. But the style is what fascinates me now. The book is long, very long. Hemingway would consider Delaney a literary Lucifer wandering aimlessly around Bellona. Each description of the minutiae of existence, the pink streak of polish on the brass plate at Calkin’s mansion, the threads on the square spindle of the loose doorknob, picking the thin strip of paper out of the wire spiral at the top of the notebook with his pen cap, is so perfect that its reality pierces the mystical clouds over Bellona and sews the unreality of the city together with the everyday life of the reader.
This book is not for everyone. I find it surprising that in this modern woke world of political correctness the culture warriors have gone after Dr. Seuss and Ian Fleming and not Delaney. They would have much to be horrified at. But if they try to alter Delaney’s world, the scorpions will come after them.
But, this book is for those of you brave enough to cross the bridge and enter the city. Spend some time there, the memories you bring back will haunt you. ( )

The book which I have been constantly re-reading since first read in around 1983. Now, more recently, listening to in this version. Just endlessly fascinating. ( )

um ..
brain has since changed shape, function slightly different than it was before.
( )

What did I learn from this bk?! Probably nothing.. but it's still one the greatest SF novels I've ever read. On the back-cover of my smoke-damaged copy there's a ball-point pen created arrow pointing to the publisher's blurb. This blurb consists of 10 lines. I scratched out the 1st 9. I can barely make them out:

"THE SUN
HAS GROWN DEADLY
THE WORLD HAS GONE MAD; SOCIETY HAS
PERISHED; SAVAGERY RULES
OVER ALL. ALL THAT WAS KNOWN
IS OVER, ALL THAT WAS FAMILIAR IS
STRANGE AND TERRIBLE. TODAY
AND YESTERDAY COLLIDE WITH TOMORROW
IN THESE DYING DAYS OF EARTH;"

Those are the lines I scratched thru. You'd think they were describing "Planet of the Apes" or something. The line I left is:

"A YOUNG DRIFTER ENTERS THE CITY..."

That's more like it. This back-cover blurb tries to sensationalize a bk that's anything but. It tries to sell it as a disaster novel - but what is it really? Yeah, the sun has changed & that's a vague pretext for what's changed socially. I must've read this around 1984 (24 yrs ago) & my memory of it's pretty vague too but I do remember it as being close to a description of urban decay (or is it just urban change?) in the mid-late 20th century - in an only slightly alternate universe. There's the middle-class white family trying to hold their old world together in the face of a new society where all the support mechanisms just aren't there anymore. Like so many of Delany's novels, lawlessness prevails.. but w/ the sensitivity of an anarchist (& I have no idea whether Delany IS an anarchist) 'lawlessness' doesn't necessarily mean "savagery": it means the characters who want to keep their delicateness intact have to adapt, they have to be clever & alert. They can be KIND, they can be GENTLE, but they can't necessarily rely on an externally imposed 'order' to protect them. ( )