Review: Dark Reflections, by Samuel R. Delany
Samuel R. Delany (2012?). Photo lifted from his Facebook page.
June 21, 2020 — Now 78 years old, Samuel R. Delany is a multiple award-winning writer and a retired professor of English literature. He is best known as a science fiction writer, but his work encompasses not only that genre, but fantasy, comics and pornography, as well as non-fiction.
His first novel was published in the early 1960s, when he was still a teenager, and his most recent (which I have on order) was published only last week. He is, to my mind, still the best living American writer, and his 2012 masterpiece, Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders, was a radical (and very successful — I hope to have a review of it up here soon!) fusion of gay erotica with science fiction.
Despite the genres mentioned above, Delany's books are anything but alike; he is a writer forever exploring and both de- and re-constructing genre tropes and conventions.
So, when I bought Dark Reflections back in 2009, I was not really surprised to be surprised by just how very different that novel was from those that had come before.