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his fiction, as well as the nonfiction Hugo for his autobiography,
The Motion of Light in Water
. His numerous studies of the history and rhetoric of science fiction have moved his colleague Ursula K. Le Guin to call him “our best in-house critic.” 8 Delany has also writtenfor comic books, and has produced a remarkable trio of pornographic novels (or “anti-pornographies,” as his critical alter-ego, K. Leslie Steiner, calls them):
Equinox, Hogg
, and
The Mad Man
. And he has recently made a foray into historical fiction with the short novel
Atlantis: Model 1924
, which details a meeting between characters modeled after Delany’s own father as a young man and the poet Hart Crane, on the Brooklyn Bridge one bright afternoon in, yes, 1924. Over the course of his career, Delany has again and again thrown into question the world-models that all too many of us unknowingly live by—particularly, but certainly not restricted to, those models which relate to sexual identity and practice. For this aspect of his work, in 1993 he was given the fifth William Whitehead Memorial Award for Lifetime Contribution to Gay and Lesbian Literature, an honor he shares with Edmund White, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, and James Purdy.
    These accolades have not come without controversy. Examples: in 1974, Delany published an 879-page novel,
Dhalgren
, which—with its story of a bisexual amnesiac’s rise to fame in a mysteriously burned-out midwestern city, its frank depictions of marginal sexual practices and the social forces surrounding and pervading them, and its notoriously complex formal structure—inspired a heated discussion within the sf community about, among many other things, the very nature of science fiction, which continues in various circles to this day; and in 1979, Delany published the first of what would become four volumes of interlocking narratives collectively known as Return to Nevèrÿon, an experiment in paraliterary form which—with its unlikely combination of the hoary formulas of sword-and-sorcery fantasy with the sophisticated rhetoric of structuralist and post-structuralist theory, as well as its exploration of marginal sexuality—inaugurated a spirited debate over the question of what sort of rhetoric is “proper” to the paraliterary fields of science fiction and academic criticism. Over the course of these ongoing genre-bending interventions, Delany has had a huge influence over a whole generation of writers and thinkers: he is regularly cited as arguably
the
major sf influence, in both style and subject matter, on the cyberpunk movement, and is cited with equal regularity as a major force behind the current academic recognition of science fiction as one of the most vital and innovative fields of contemporary American writing.
    In his previous critical work—collected in
The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, Starboard Wine
, and
The Straits of Messina
—Delany has more or less restricted himself to the expository form of the “standard” critical essay. (Exceptions to this restriction are “Shadows” from
The Jewel-Hinged Jaw
—included as an Appendix to this collection—and
The American Shore
, abook-length, microscopically detailed “meditation” on the sf short story “Angouleme” by Thomas M. Disch.) In the present collection, Delany turns his considerable creative and analytical energies toward a radical reworking of the essay form. He does this in part by combining, at various strategic points, the “impersonal” rhetoric of literary analysis with the “personal” voice of the Montaignean essay—a mixing of rhetorical modes which has attracted increasing interest over the years, in light of the critiques of the Western discourse of the sign and the subject put forward variously by post-structuralist, feminist, and Frankfurt School critics, among others. Delany also deploys formal tropes which he has developed