Samuel R. Delaney is a living legend among writers of SF, but even legends begin their careers as unknowns. Delaney's first novel, The Jewels of Aptor, was written when the author was only 19 years old, and published in 1962.
The story concerns itself with Geo, a poet; Urson, his burly self-appointed guardian; Snake, a telepath and the victim of brutal treatment; and Iimmi, a dark-skinned sailor whose character is less well-formed than the others, which is strange considering Delaney's own racial background. (Perhaps he had to compromise for the readership of the time.) These four set sail on a quest, lead by a spooky priestess, to possess the jewels of Aptor, of great magical (or is it technological?) power.
Delaney's craft as a writer is widely known, yet the precociousness on display in this first effort still surprises. Consider the poetry of this paragraph from near the beginning of the novel:
Gangplanks, chained to wooden pullies, scraped into place on concrete blocks; and the crew, after the slow Captain and the tall Mate, loped raffishly along the boards which sagged with the pounding of bare feet. In bawling groups, pairs, or singly, they howled into the waterfront streets, by the yellow light from inn doors, the purple portals leading to rooms full of smoke and the stench of burnt poppies, laughter and the sheen on red lips, to the houses of women.
Note the idiosyncratic use of the verb "howled," and the alliteration and rhythm of "purple portals", and the near rhyming int that first phrase, which could be reset in verse:
Gangplanks, chained
To wooden pullies,
Scraped into place
On concrete blocks;
Such ambitious micromanaging of prose could go wrong; prose may turn as purple as the portals. Yet in the 154 pages of this novel, Delaney avoids overdoing it. Unsurprisingly, the poetic loftiness is not sustained, and the novel settles into a somewhat more mundane tone as it proceeds, but the impact of those opening paragraphs linger.
This is all good, but to quote a member of the Starship Sofa Forum: who reads science fiction for well-crafted prose? A few readers do, but still, point taken. SF implicitly promises other things, among them Big Hardware, Freaky Aliens, and Grand Narrative.
You can nominate your own favorite source of Big Hardware; mine happens to be Larry Niven's Ringworld*****, a piece of hardware so big, it's got a map of planet Earth as a small speck on its surface--that's a life-sized map of Earth. Aptor has nothing that grandiose, but it does provide a giant statue of a god, big enough that its navel acts as an entryway into the warren of tunnels and stairways that allows humans to climb to the top. So that's cool, especially when a fall from the navel could kill you (and almost does, in the case of one young woman).
Aptor also provides a few Freaky Aliens to attack our heroes; they are spooky and supposedly vicious--humanoid figures with wings and claws--but somehow they don't inspire the fear that they should. Much better are the amorphous blobs that inhabit the ruins of a bombed city. They seek and envelop skeletons which give them human form: very disturbing, but too soon left behind.
Delaney's mishandling of the not-so-menacing aliens is part of a greater problem with the book: too little is at stake. The jewels are supposed to be fabulously valuable--yet the characters trade them around rather freely. Characters die, or survive, and the reader shrugs. Characters turn evil, then redeem themselves--sort of.
Oh well. Delaney's later work gets better. Among his widely admired works is Empire Star, which also has a poet in it, one more interesting and definitely more melodramatic. Empire Star also resembles Aptor in that it includes a youth who neglects to wear much in the way of clothes--an annoying tendency. Indeed, Delaney begins with his protagonist completely unclothed, and never mentions him dressing, although his adventures take him across the galaxy, in the presence of a female companion. Does he ever dress himself? The question is left hanging, so to speak.
Aptor's Grand Narrative involves more aliens, this time of the wise yet aloof variety, and the theme of Technology Gone Wrong. Once again, an SF novel questions whether humans can handle the potent tools they have made for themselves. From our vantage point we know how the Cold War ends, but the author of Aptor was writing in the era of the Cuban Missile Crisis. No surprise he shared the nuclear fears of so many other SF authors.
-The Fredösphere