Tales of Neveryon Read Free

and Neveryóna, the old aristocratic neighbourhood of the capital port, Kolhari, which briefly lent its name to the entire town, is pronounced Ne-ver-y-O-na: five syllables with the primary accent on the penult, and a secondary one on the second syllable: the word rhymes – roughly – with ‘Defer Pomona.’
    There. Now doesn’t that allay just a
little
of the anxiety?
    Oh, and ‘The Tale of Rumour and Desire,’ the editor told me (at our own lunch), was one Delany wrote whena two-volume collection of all the shorter Nevèrÿon stories and novellas had been planned. That last written story was crafted to make a transition between ‘The Tale of Dragons and Dreamers’ and ‘The Tale of Fog and Granite’ for readers who would not be able to make the journey through the full-length novel,
Neveryóna, or the Tale of Signs and Cities
, which, while it naturally falls out as tale number six, was simply too long to include in that bipartite omnibus – alas, since scuttled. That terminal tale’s major events occur just after the end of
Neveryóna
. Read it there if you must. But I can assure you that – there – it will make no thematic sense whatsoever. And its particular play of discontinuities will – there – only disorient you the more as you broach the considerable mists of volume three.
    But surely Delany intends his ‘return’ not only for readers who are actual re-readers of his sword-and-sorcery series. Recalling the passage from German philosopher Ernst Bloch’s three-volume
Principle of Hope
I’ve set at the head of this preface, Delany writes at the beginning of Chapter Three of his SF novel
Stars in my Pockets Like Grains of Sand
(written concurrently with the first Nevèrÿon stories):
    Home?
    It’s the place you can never visit for the first time, because by the time it’s become home, you’ve already been there. You can only return. (You can never go home, only go home again.) 2
    There is a suggestion of Nietzsche’s ‘eternal return’ in these tales Delany asks us to return to. In the strict sense that one can never initially ‘go’ home, Nevèrÿon is not a place one initially visits; it can only be revisited – in much the way Delany revisits (and revalues) a certain romantic stance connected with the Thomas Wolfe title he lightlymocks in the parenthesis above. And in his essay on Joanna Russ’s beautiful and meticulous science fiction cum sword-and-sorcery sequence,
The Adventures of Alyx
3 , in a section dealing with the puzzling but persistent relation between sword-and-sorcery and science fiction, we find:
    As one can speak of the simple calculus implicit behind the set of algebras called Boolean, the comparatively limited landscape of sword and sorcery may be the simple fantasy behind the extremely varied set of future landscapes we call science fiction … More precisely, I suspect, sword-and-sorcery represents what can, most safely, still be imagined about the transition from a barter economy to a money economy … By the same light, science fiction represents what can most safely be imagined about the transition from a money economy to a credit economy. 4
    The suggestion is that in such fictions the place we are returning
to
is deeply and historically implicated in the place we are returning
from
.
    The nostalgic fictive recreation of a primitive past is always constructed from the contemporary cultural materials around us – precisely to the extent the primitive is seen to be one with the mystical, the unknown, and the unknowable. Even as they speculate on the workings of history, such creations are insistently ahistorical – or are, at any rate, historical only as they are products of our own historical moment.
    The panorama of material life Delany evokes in his fantasy epic has little or nothing to do with any specific society or culture of some long-ago epochal period, some distant geographical site. These stories do not move toward research into lost time. And it takes