Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)This volume is by far the best one so far. The first book ("Tales of Neveryon") was a bunch of neat stories with ulterior meanings that were sometimes obvious and sometimes no so obvious, and the second novel was good but meandered a bit more than it needed to. Here, however, it all comes together. Delany seems far more focused here than in the other volumes. In the earlier stories Delany seemed more experimental than anything else, cloaking a variety of topics in the sword and sorcery genre just to see if he could, in this volume he's decided to explore subjects that mean a lot more personally to him, and this causes an incredible jump in quality (which was high to begin with). The three stories are uniformly excellent here, and all are vastly different. Delany seems to be trying to look into the nature of reality and myth here, trying to figure out the difference between what is "real" and what people perceive and how it might get like that. This is more intellectual stuff than fantasy is normally used to, and far from the typical "good vs evil" simplicities that usually inhabit the fantasy genre. The reason Delany can pull this off is because the fantasy here feels "real" when he focuses on minor events and characters who are really just regular people it gives the story added weight. His Neveryon comes across as a real place with an active and complex culture, from the admirable to the hedonistic. He's probably also the first to inject homosexuality into fantasy, in all its forms, which is something that has always been noticably absent from fantasy over the years (not that it needs to be there, but it's about the only major genre to not even acknowledge it . . . except for the usual fey, pale, lisping princes and the like . . .) and is very prominent in this volume, moreso than the others, which it was acknowledged but not really addressed. The last story especially "The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals" is really an amazing story, nominally about the emergence of an AIDS like illness into Neveryon while also an account of Delany's experiences in NY in the early eighties when AIDS was first becoming more prevalent. He captures both times well and the story jumps back and forth from his recollections to Neveryon to his thoughts on writing the book and eventually does a lot to blur the line between our world and Neveryon. It alone is worth the purchase of the volume. Overall these stories are some of his best post-"Dhalgren" work and for anyone who thinks that fantasy can be more relevant than beating up trolls, they owe it to themselves to track down this series.
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