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When Delany, Hacker, and their one-year-old daughter flew back to the States just before Christmas Eve in 1974, they saw copies of Dhalgren filling book racks at Kennedy Airport even before they reached customs. Dhalgren, his story of the Kid, a schizoid, amnesiac wanderer, takes place in Bellona, a shell of a city in the American Midwest isolated from the rest of the world and populated by warring gangs and holographic beasts. In 1971, he completed a draft of a book he had been reworking for years. Even when set in fantastic worlds, like the Star-Pit, a city that squats at the galaxy’s edge, or Nevèrÿon, an ancient, dragon-filled land whose inhabitants are just learning to write, Delany’s work mirrors the generational shifts and concerns of his times. Even then, his exploration of issues of sexuality, ethnicity, and gender-like the polyamorous love between three spacecraft navigators in Babel-17, or alien colonization and the relationship between the marginalized and history in The Einstein Intersection-distinguished him from other authors working in the genre. Over the next six years, he published eight more science-fiction novels, among them the Nebula Award winners Babel-17(1966) and The Einstein Intersection (1967). There, Delany wrote his first novel, The Jewels of Aptor. He was nineteen. In the early sixties, the newly married couple settled in the East Village. In 1956, he earned a spot at the Bronx High School of Science, where he would meet his future wife, the poet Marilyn Hacker. Philip’s, Harlem’s black Episcopalian church, composed atonal music, played multiple instruments, and choreographed dances at the General Grant Community Center. During the day he attended Dalton, an elite and primarily white prep school on the Upper East Side at home, his mother, a senior clerk at the New York Public Library’s Countee Cullen branch, on 125th Street, nurtured his exceptional intelligence and kaleidoscopic interests. Delany grew up above his father’s business. His father, who had come to New York from Raleigh, North Carolina, ran Levy and Delany, a funeral home to which Langston Hughes refers in his stories about the neighborhood. Instead, he laughs, and more often than not it is a quiet chuckle expressed mostly in his eyes.ĭelany was born on April 1, 1942, in Harlem, by then the cultural epicenter of black America. Yet he seems hardly bothered by such attempts to figure him out. He is a gay man who was married to a woman for twelve years he is a black man who, because of his light complexion, is regularly asked to identify his ethnicity. Such intrusions are common, because Delany, whose work has been described as limitless, has lived a life that flouts the conventional. “You are famous, I can just tell, I know you from somewhere,” a stranger tells him in the 2007 documentary Polymath, or the Life and Opinions of Samuel R. His beard, dramatically long and starkly white, is his most distinctive feature. Dressed in what is often his uniform-black jeans and a black button-down shirt, ear pierced with multiple rings-he looks imperial. We sit near the window, and Delany, who is a serious morning person, presides over the city as it wakes. It is a classic greasy spoon that serves strong coffee and breakfast all day.
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The first time I interview Samuel Delany, we meet in a diner near his apartment on New York’s Upper West Side. So, brace yourself as we look at the most terrifying Star Wars creatures that haunt fans as children and delight them as adults.Interviewed by Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah Issue 197, Summer 2011
THE STAR PIT SERIES
The hefty expansion of the Star Wars canon, from standalone films like Rogue One and Solo to series like Clone Wars and The Mandalorian, offers even more knowledge and screen time for both the beasties we fell in love with during the original trilogy and new ones from its various sequels and spinoffs. But while we'd probably die if we visited all the planets depicted in Star Wars since 1977, no one can argue that the series doesn't contain rich worldbuilding with impeccably designed creatures.Īnd all these years later, the Star Wars universe continues to grow, bringing with it a wealth of terrifying new monsters to wig out audiences, whether in theaters or watching Disney+ on their couch.
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Most Star Wars fans wish they could fly to Tatooine until they remember the creatures that live under the picturesque sand and the piercing glow of the planet's dual suns.