The Jewels of Aptor by Samuel R. Delany

If you’ve been paying any attention to this blog over the past few weeks, you will know that I am soon to acquire a child.

Rather, though, than allow this experience to utterly overshadow anything else that I might be doing atm, I have decided that not only will this be the Summer of Baby, it will also be the Summer of Delany (#SummerOfDelany) as I read through the accidentally deep pile of Samuel “Chip” R. Delany books I have acquired over the past few months since I read and really effing vibed with, yeah, Driftglass, the guy’s 1971 super acclaimed short story collection.

I’ve bought a few since then, yeah, mostly thanks to a cache I found, unloved, in one of the rooms in that Windsor, Ontario, secondhand bookstore that’s absolutely massive and set up inside what was once a house and a few more from that comic book shop by Notting Hill Gate, London, that also has books without pictures in it.

Delany – despite that sexy Penguin paperback edition of Driftglass being pushed in all ya hipster bookshops and Dhalgreen being prominently displayed in the ICA bookshop for a Summer or two (I noticed that book before I read Driftglass, and basically everyone I spoke to while reading Driftglass mentioned it in a “oh ye I saw a massive red book by them in the bookstore of the ICA”. I do – of course – have that to read later this Summer of Delany, baby. But first I am starting where Delany started: with The Jewels of Aptor.

First of all – and I don’t mean this like a cunt – the difference between this and the contents of Driftglass is astronomical, and not because this is terrible, but because this is not incredible, and it’s rare to still organically find juvenilia by latterly acclaimed writers. (Like with musicians, in the second half of the twentieth century, writers now seem to peak with their first book. Oh for a time when writers could develop in public, rather than siloed and alone!)

I say find organically, but that isn’t strictly true.

One of the Delany books I bought in Windsor was the second book in a trilogy, which – known as The Fall of the Towers – is a Delany book still in print (I think) and in trying to order online the first book in that series, I accidentally bought this: Delany’s first novel, The Jewels of Aptor, a 1962 text originally published in one of those double-header ACE paperbacks when Delany was either 19 or 20.

Again, not wanting to sound like a prick, you can fucking tell. Again, not that it’s terrible! Just that this is someone learning what storytelling, what literature, what language, what world-building, what characterisation, can do…

There’s a reason why you can buy this in a rough and ready POD edition that accidentally includes the blurb from the original book as a final paragraph of the text, and not as a big sexy red French-flapped paperback in the Institute of Contemporary Arts or in a sexy pocket-sized paperback you can find in a bookshop people who both gentrify and roll cigarettes shop in…

It’s not terrible, but it is unrefined. It is messy. It is a little jarring and confusing (to me at least!) and it has a few too many narrative twists that feel less like someone playing with narrative convention and more like a nineteen year old not quite nailing the plot outline of their first novel-length story.

The Jewels of Aptor opens with a young woman watching a video of someone being tortured, before cutting to a student/poet and his big friend (lover?), a sailor who killed someone on his previous berth, looking for work down by the docks. They meet a four armed telepathic thief whose tongue has been cut out and the three of them join up on the crew of a ship that’s been hired out by a priestess from the city’s biggest temple to go and rescue her kidnapped sister from a temple on a mysterious, possibly magical, island a long journey away from the city…

Lots of the previous crew died or ran away on the previous attempt (with only two people who set foot on the island in the previous journey still on the crew), but the captain and his evil first mate are all set to head out again with fresh blood.

When they near the other island, the evil first mate kills one of the two people who survived the initial attempt and tries to kill the other by pushing them overboard, then the three main characters also end up in the sea two weeks later and then they – and the guy pushed in before – wake up healthy and rested on this magical island, having been borne there by water spirits of some kind.

So, it then turns out that the fourth guy was also a student on his summer vac, and then the four of them begin a quest to find the temple cult where the missing priestess is likely held. Then, in numerous twists and turns that are a few too many imo, it turns out that rival cults are splinterings of the same religion, not worshipping disparate gods at all… And it turns out that this isn’t a magical fantasy land, it is a POST NUCLEAR FAR FUTURE EARTH, where technology has deteriorated in most of the world, except for places where “ancient” knowledge is hoarded and exploited. Oh, and there are also some like ancient ancient ancient water spirits and/or aliens who appear at one point to explain the entirety of human history (as per this fictional “world”) as outsiders who have lived beside “us” for millennia.

There are also some magical jewels (hence the title), but they never really do anything that feels particularly important to narrative or characterisation, and it’s really the the the the the religious cults and the post-technological, post-nuclear thing that holds the weight.

Oh, and the poet’s big guy friend dies in an act of heroic self-sacrifice at the finale and the telepathic four handed thief implies – but doesn’t state – that there was something meatier about the poet-sailor friendship than Delany’s 1962 pulp publisher felt comfortable stating directly. I presume they were lovers.

Was The Jewels of Aptor fun? Yes. Was it wildly inventive and evidence of an exciting, enervating and expanding creativity? Yes.

Was it a great and flawless read that deserves to be in sexy bookshops for sexy people? No, sadly not, but it’s absolutely an interesting and important opening flourish from an important late 20th century writer.

More Delany coming soon!!!