The Ballad of Beta-2 & Empire Star by Samuel R Delany

Okokok, yes, i know, maybe I’ve read too many Delany books recently but all regular readers of TriumphOfTheNow.com know that this is how the blog works: I find a writer I like (or think I like) and then read lots and lots and lots of their books, possibly everything they’ve ever published. And repeat.

Yes, Samuel R Delany is the writer I’m currently reading lots and lots of books by (in a long-lasting habit that has included Doris Lessing, Joan Didion, Jarett Kobek, Malcolm Lowry, Karl Ove Knausgaard and – in the distant past before this long-running blog was even a twinkle in my eye – I did the same with DH Lawrence, BS Johnson, E.M. Forster and – possibly the first – Ernest Hemingway (basically F. Scott Fitzgerald for people who are mentally ill but not in a fun way)). Samuel R Delany.

(You could also argue I’m doing the same thing with Charlaine Harris but I don’t agree that I am. Yes, I’ve read 12 books by Harris since July 2023, but that’s different. That’s different because I consider the 13 (plus 2) volumes of the Sookie Stackhouse series one singular work, a la À la recherche du temps perdu. You wouldn’t claim to have read seven “texts” by Marcel Proust if you’d only read his one multivolume novel, would you, hahaha!?!? Similarly only a fool, an absolute fool, would claim to have “read” Proust when they’d only read a portion of a text… Responding to “Have you read Proust?” with “Yes, all of Swann’s Way” is the equivalent of responding to “have you learned how to swim?” with “Yes, I have taken a bath.” It’s really very much step one!!!)

Anyway, yes, another Delany. And, thankfully, it’s another really excellent one!

The Ballad of Beta-2 & Empire Star is a book from the late ’60s (I think, maybe early seventies) that collates two Delany novellas that were first published as separate halves of those Ace Double Feature paperbacks, those books that have two half-length books stuck to each other, one upside down from the back and visa versa.

The first was initially published in 1965, after The Fall of the Towers (Delany’s early and often frustrating trilogy) with the second following a year later, as latterly published prize-winning successes Babel-17 and The Einstein Intersection were being drafted or (at least) thought about.

For me, out of all of the early Delany I have read, this is where he really starts coming into his own.

Although Empire Star teases toward the kind of slightly-too-ambitious-to-be-satisfyingly-realised territory of The Fall Of The Towers, because it’s shorter – and because there’s no attempt to answer all questions raised by the plot – it doesn’t leave one feeling unsatisfied in the same way… tho it possibly could if you were looking to be unsatisfied, which I’m not.

(I’m not looking to be unsatisfied in any aspect of my life tbh, I’m very much committed to not doing things in order to not enjoy them. I’m choosing to not spend my time engaging in things that cause misery, I don’t (actually) think that schadenfreude is a very enjoyable feeling at all (actually), which I know isn’t very English of me (actually), but I think there has to be more to life than cheering when someone else is less happy than you (actually), and I think only someone committed to misery could convince themselves otherwise. I’m trying to enjoy things, and thankfully that wasn’t so hard to do with The Ballad of Beta-2 & Empire Star.)

Empire Star, the second novella in the book, follows a young spaceman on a distant planet who finds a crystallised alien being and takes it to the heart of the intergalactic empire in order to help with a plot to free a race of super powerful – yet enslaved – aliens.

As it goes on, strange things happen, characters appear and disappear who seem to be very similar but not the same as other characters who have been introduced, and by the end of the novella it is revealed that in the heart of the universe there is a time hole, and that these people have all danced in and out of it at various points in their lives.

It doesn’t all neatly tie up, as things with this amount of time travel in them often don’t (I’m about halfway through the second (and unintended final) season of Outer Range, and I watched Lost to the end, so I know what I’m talking about), but it offers the promise of potentially all neatly tying up if you did multiple readings of the book, and maybe it does, but I’m not going to do that, I’ve got better things to do with my life than to reread anything, anything at all…

(I mean there are some things I’d reread but I can’t think what that would be on the top of my head and I’m not going to be rereading them today.)

So yes, Empire Star is good – maybe very good – but it’s not breathtaking, it’s not perfect… However, The Ballad of Beta-2 is.

The premise of this one is fucking brilliant, and the execution and delivery of it is just as effective, just as efficient, just as a satisfying.

In the far distant future, a young student is given a assignment that they are very annoyed about – they have to look into the human colony known as “The Star People”, some of – they believe – the most boring people in the universe.

The Star People were the first humans to set out from Earth in order to colonise space.

They set out in twelve giant spaceships, all known as cities, travelling for hundreds of Earth years through the heart of the galaxy to arrive at a pre-selected destination after tens of generations have lived entire lives on board.

While they were travelling, though, humanity invented hyperspace and hyper speed travel, so these slow slow slow boats reappeared in colonisable space hundreds of years AFTER humanity had arrived and colonised it, with technology and culture all stuck in the past.

The Star People were treated as embarrassing throwback bumpkins, with some minor interest paid to them by the rest of humanity, but not much. A collection of the poetry and songs of the Star People had been collated and it is one of these that is the eponymous ballad. The student is tasked to perform a deep analysis of this text, and travels to the Star People’s ships in order to investigate at source.

The Star People arrived into known space at the end of their journey with two of their ships missing, one of their ships filled only with corpses and half of its walls burst open, and one of them completely empty of any signs of life.

The people who remained in the others seemed disinterested in reconnecting with the rest of humanity, many of them warped and changed by the centuries of high level radiation exposure in the heart of the galaxy.

Onboard one of the empty ships, though, the student finds a living presence, who will help to explain what happened to the humans as they travelled slowly there from Earth…

I won’t parrot the plot, but The Ballad of Beta-2 is – from what I’ve read – the first real hint of Delany’s power. It is structurally and narratively interesting, with questions about time and legacy and reputation baked into a plot that is exciting, imaginative and fully realised.

None of the frustrations created by his earlier works are present here, though I would cite both The Jewels of Aptor and The Fall of the Towers suffer solely due to their extremely ambitious intentions. If the books were trying less hard, it wouldn’t be clear that resolutions and narrative alignments fail. Both of those texts (i.e. those four novels) have too much going on. The Ballad of Beta-2 strips that back and leaves us, yes, with a story that remains big and complicated and interesting, but this time all of it is able to be contained within itself.

Empire Star, yes, isn’t quite as good, but it’s also very much not attempting to do more than is possible, and is far from unsatisfying. It’s just that The Ballad of Beta-2 is excellent, is wonderful, is great.

If my comments on the earlier Delany’s put you off (I presume if you’re reading these you’ve at least fucked with Driftglass), then this is the place to start if you want more but also earlier Delany.

A lot of fun, very satisfying indeed. Yes please yes!!!