This was a favorite read of mine back in my twenties. I used it as proof that SF wasn't a literary wasteland, that innovative stuff was being done in the field and there were voices that the most exacting style-snob couldn't scruple to include in hifalutin' conversations.Boy, was I wrong.It's turgid, it's obfuscatory, and it's mutton dressed up as lamb. "Cut through the galaxy's glitter; slice away all night. What thoughts did I dole out to that world (out of the six thousand, which, according to a rumor that had crept worlds and worlds away, corroborrated only by a certain certified psychotic, may have been) destroyed by the XIv?Certainly I thought about it.Yet after a week, after a handful of weeks, now at home, now away, somehow the rational part of my mind had accorded it much the weight one gives to the most insubstantial notion."What the...? Six thousand worlds, or one, destroyed and the thought is insubstantial. I am reminded of the moment I stopped reading Susan Cheever's work, when she described a moment in a character's life as "soft as loss." Loss, soft? Funny, that isn't how I've experienced it. And this farrago, what is the insubstantial notion that the author gives to the possible destruction of a large number of planets? Too big to understand, too hard to grasp entirely, what? But insubstantial?That's the beginning of chapter four. It's one example of a repeating problem that I see at fifty that I didn't at twenty-five: write lots of words, no one will notice that you're not saying much.I haven't re-read Dhalgren, Delany's claim-to-fame book, and now I don't think I will. This re-read wasn't a success at all. It's a book I think is second rate, about ideas I think are unoriginal and pretty uninteresting. And that makes me sad.
