Out of the Dead City by Samuel R Delany

My #SummerOfSamuelDelany continues with this, Out of the Dead City, which both is and isn’t his second long form text.

Originally published in 1963 soon after The Jewels of Aptor as another one of those ACE double novel paperbacks and at that point titled Captives of the Flame, it – and apparently the two sequels that followed it to form a trilogy (thoughts on those coming soon here on TriumphOfTheNow.com!) – was revised, re-edited and republished in this format in 1968. Remember 1968? I don’t, but I’m so old that I probably look like I do!? Ammariiiiiiight????

I imagine the changes made in that five year gap were needed and were worth making, because this text feels far more like something (nearly) on a par with Driftglass than on a par with The Jewels of Aptor (currently out of print). This is much cleaner, much clearer, much more coherent and much more interesting than that very first novel-length work…

My brief research on this book has told me that that first edition contained several direct references to the setting and narrative of the earlier book (The Jewels of Aptor), which was set in a post nuclear futurized Earth. And although this one is also set in a sort of damaged futuristic setting, there’s nothing other than this similarity (radioactive wastelands and humanity living on a planet to which they no longer have total explorative access) to link the two.

There aren’t any intentional overlaps any more…

This book is one of three in a series known as The Fall Of The Towers, but as I haven’t read the other two yet and as I haven’t ploughed my way yet through the field of Delany’s oeuvre, right now I’m ignorant as to whether there are any other intentional links to any other Delaney texts. What a trite fucking paragraph lol sorry.

In a future, then, Out of the Dead City opens with someone having escaped from a penal colony. The crime was doing a prank at the behest of the heir to the throne in their city state, but then grassed up to the authorities by that very same princeling and the prank treated as an act of treason.

The penal colony is considered inescapable due to its location, behind a radioactive barrier which everyone believes is the result of a long ago war. The known world within this novel consists only of the main city where the action takes place, then, across a sea, a strip of forest/rainforest/woodland, and then (a little bit farther away) this penal colony mine.

In the wooded area there are lots of people who have been born deformed and damaged by the high levels of radiation in the land that is close by, with many people now gifted with telepathy.

This doesn’t really become a major plot point here, and the society that exists in the wooded part of the world is very different from the hyper-technologised (and also hyper-socially stratified) dystopia type location in the main city.

The novel then has this escaped convict guy arriving at an unfamiliar City he has never been to before, which he realizes (at the ending of this opening chapter) is a city constructed a hundred years or so ago that was enveloped unexpectedly in the extremely high levels of radiation that had previously been stable beyond the penal colony. Oh em gee.

The known world for these characters was reduced less than a lifetime earlier, and in this radiation-filled city, built to be a counterpart to the one where he is from, the convict wanders, surrounded by corpses of the dead.

How is he among this high high radiation and not himself dying?

We don’t find out why until much later in the novel, but it turns out that it is because he was found on the edge of life (when he escaped from the penal colony) and his entire body was restructured by an alien life form that is billions of years older than humanity and exists in a completely different plane of reality to us.

His whole body has been taken apart and reconstructed in such a way that he is no longer susceptible to radiation in the same way as a natural body. This also means that he is able to become invisible.

The rest of the novel bounces between a few different threads and themes. We get:

• conspirators involved in trying to begin or prevent (different sides) a war started in the main city against a perceived and presumed threat existing beyond the radiation barrier, which they believe is responsible for destroying the other City
• the high level socialites of the city, which includes the sister of the escaped convict we opened with, who is invited to a ball hosted by The King, and her father is an important and somewhat sinister fishmonger/fish dealer/fish farmer
• a conspiracy to kidnap the younger brother of the King, intentionally in order to keep him separated from the expected war violence, as the entities that exist beyond the radiation barrier are much stronger and much more dangerous than any human is able to fight against;
• a young Acrobat who is involved in this kidnapping who is then brutally tortured by the Queen;
• the main guy (the one who has been reconstructed by the aliens) then finds two other people (one of which is the cousin of the King?) and another guy who have also been reconstructed and then the three of them journey as close as they can get to the radiation barrier and then are sort of sucked into a weird trance like, extended set piece like the layers of Inception, like towards the end of Everything Everywhere All At Once (remember crying at rocks with googly eyes??? The pandemic did big damage to all of us, I think!), where they end up fighting against the some kind of sinister alien force in a multiple different times, locations, body forms, atmospheres and universes.

This ending then, has a great escalation, switching from intergovernmental conspiracies through to a fight for the very existence of reality against an interdimensional villain, and with its rapid pace denouement bouncing between myriad rapidly created and evoked alien worlds and species here, it feels difficult to imagine a sequel following this that doesn’t feel a little bit like a sudden reversal in stakes.

The stakes at the end of this book become the entire known universe and all known reality, and as everything is all kind of sorted, it’s difficult to know how two more books exploring these characters and this world will follow on…

But, well, I’m gonna find out because I am going to read both of those.

How did I feel about this one?

I liked it a lot… there was rich characterization and evocation of a highly imagined world, there was strange technology that was coherent within itself, there was a rich and confusing civilization and setting, and there were engaging and exciting narrative adventures.

How much tidier and cleaner this was than the book when it appeared in 1963 I don’t know, and it may well be that all of the clarity, cohesion and consistent description etc is only there because the book was reedited at length half a decade later, once Delaney had really worked on their skill sets.

Either way though, I’ll be back for more.

Nice.