A Summer of Samuel: Reading Every Samuel Delany Science Fiction and Fantasy Novel.

In April, I suffered a minor concussion. The after-effects have been anything but minor. What I thought would be a speedy week (at most!) of recovery has ballooned into months of post-concussive syndrome symptoms. For about a month, I could not write, read, or look at screens. I am still struggling with severe screen sensitivity, and looking at computer, TV, or phone screens without light filtering glasses and adjusted color temperature settings causes almost instant headaches.

As I’ve worked through physical therapy and with my doctors, I’ve begun being able to do the things I love most, read and write, again. I was able to start reading before I could write. Going a little stir crazy, I decided to give myself a reading project, so that I could feel I was working towards and achieving something, something that I desperately needed throughout the slow, painful, and frustrating stages of recovery.

The next question was what that project should be.

I have always been a bit of a completionist. In open-world games, I do all the side-missions, discover all the mysteries, and finish all the shrines, before I earnestly embark on the main story (sorry Zelda, I know you’re holding back Gannon, but I have Korok seeds to find). So, when deciding on my summer reading mission, reading all of someone’s work was incredibly enticing.

Whose work, then? I wanted someone with a voluminous catalog of writing, someone whose writing I knew I loved, and someone whose work could help me better understand the genre I, myself, work in.

So I picked Samuel Delany, whose science fiction stories (not single-handedly, but tremendously) inspired me to begin writing stories of my own. If you read the landing page of my website, you’ll see a Samuel Delany quote. His book, On Writing, was formative during my college years as I began to try and develop the writerly muscles and habits that would enable me to write good (someday, hopefully, great) fiction. Yet, I had read very few of his novels.

So I decided to change that, and embarked on what my friends began lovingly calling my “Summer of Samuel.”

I resolved to spend my summer, like the wild socialite I am, reading every Samuel Delany science fiction and fantasy novel. I decided to give into my completionist tendencies and immerse myself in a single author’s work and writing.

What do I hope to find? Great stories, well told, to begin with. A deeper understanding of a grandmaster’s career, and a deeper understanding of the genre I love. Since I am reading Samuel Delany, I am hoping to have the furniture of my mind rearranged and the walls and strictures of science fiction shattered. I hope to better understand, as Samuel Delany had originally planned to name his novel, The Einstein Intersection, the “fabulous, formless darkness” that roils and writhes within us all, and, I guess a little, I hope reading him helps me capture that darkness in my own writing as well.

So! I’ll be posting my thoughts, my questions, and my journey through this great writer’s work all throughout the summer on this blog. Let’s be dragons; let’s read.