“The Recombinant City”
1995 Forward by William Gibson to Dhalgren
This is how Gibson begins…
Samuel Delany’s Dhalgren is a prose-city, a labyrinth, a vast construct the reader learns to enter by any one of a multiplicity of doors. Once established in memory, it comes to have at the feel of a climate, a season. It turns there, on the mind’s horizon, exerting its own peculiar gravity, a tidal force urging the reader’s re-entry. It is a literary singularity. It is a work of sustained conceptual daring, executed by the most remarkable prose stylist to have emerged from the culture of American science fiction.
No single metaphor to pin it down.
And so for day 2905
25.11.2014