Delany is a professor of English & Creative Writing at Temple University in Philadelphia. He is as a professor in the department of English at the University at Buffalo, Buffalo, New York. He has received numerous awards including the Nebula Award for best novel for Babel-17 in 1966 and The Einstein Intersection in 1967, the Nebula Award for best short story for Aye, and Gomorrah and Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones, the Hugo Award for best short story for Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones in 1970 and for his non-fiction book, The Motion of Light in Water, and the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement in Gay Literature in 1993. He has written more than 20 novels and collections of short stories, memoirs, and critical essays. His first novel, The Jewels of Aptor, was published in 1962. He is a science fiction and short story writer. was born in Harlem, New York on April 1, 1942. I really can't think of another writer that I'd say is certainly better at that then he is.Samuel R. Instead of relying on a set of words that are artful in and of themselves, he relies on an expansive but relatively straightforward vocabulary, and the art is in the unusual and often challenging, but ultimately wonderfully expressive way he chooses and arranges specific words. He reminds me more of Thomas Pynchon (though without the daredevilry of his staggeringly long compound sentences) or Cormac McCarthy as far as that goes. His skill is picking just the right words and assembling them in just the right (and often relatively unusual) way to vividly communicate a nuanced idea, and that's a skill that just impresses the hell out of me. He has an expansive vocabulary, but it's not notably poetic - it's really mostly just functional and technically precise. Delany's prose impresses me just as much as theirs do, but it's a different sort of thing. Generally, really notable prose stylists tend to use relatively uncommon and somewhat baroque language - Gene Wolfe, China Mieville and Mervyn Peake are all good examples. To me, far and away the most notable trait of Delany isn't his views on society, but his considerable skill at the craft of wordsmithery, and particularly his astonishing ability to convey complex and nuanced ideas with a relative few very carefully chosen and arranged, and generally deceptively simple, terms. It's not simply that he made that commentary, but that there are times when it feels like he went out of his way to make it, or that he's harping on it - times when a lighter touch likely would've been better. The problem is that it all tends to get a bit tedious sometimes - there are too many instances, IMO, when he essentially wedged a bit of social commentary into a scene that likely would've read better without it. They were absolutely things that needed to be said, and he said them well. Let me make clear - it's NOT his views in and of themselves - they're not only perfectly fine and even admirable - they were very notable for the era in which he did most of his writing. Entirely unsurprisingly, since it's the NYT, it focuses primarily on his social commentary in the context of his homosexuality, which I've always considered to be the only thing approaching a flaw in his writing. I love Delany, but I'm sort of ambivalent about this article.
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