Samuel R. Delany is a writer of both fiction and science fiction. He has served as a Professor of English, Comparative Literature and Creative Writing at several American universities. Driftglass is a collection of his short stories.
The Star Pit is a rather meandering story about a starship mechanic and his grudging love for a young boy. The story posits the idea of "goldens," a race of hormonally adapted individuals who are capable of intergalactic travel. Sounds good, right? But the idea of these "goldens" is never tied into the overall narrative in any meaningful way, and for the most part it reads like a closeted gay man's plea for affection.
The next story, Dog in a Fisherman's Net, might be the best story in this collection. Definitely not science fiction however. This tale, centered around a death in the family and a submerged temple, works well up until the very end, when the protagonist makes a statement about himself that sounds both very forced and out of keeping with his character.
Corona has to do with telepathy. It's not a bad story, but there are many similar stories from the time period and this one doesn't add much to the genre.
Aye, and Gomorrah is about a race of sexless, genetically engineered people who make a living by fulfilling the rest of humanity's sexual desires. I like the idea, but the author doesn't take it anywhere meaningful.
Driftglass, the story for which this collection is named, dives into a world of merpeople busied with industrial pursuits. It's one of the strongest stories in this collection.
We, in Some Strange Power's Employ, Move On a Rigorous Line is dedicated to Robert Zelazny, author of Lord of Light, which has also been reviewed here. If you've read Lord of Light this story of "devils" and "angels" makes a certain kind of sense, but it's definitely one of the least accessible stories here.
The following tale, Cage of Brass, is somewhat weak. It reads like a more modern take on Crime and Punishment or maybe one of Edgar Allen Poe's stories, but the concept of post-homicidal guilt really didn't need the "prison" setting. I also felt that this setting could have been used to much greater effect by an author able to cut his or her stories down to their barest essentials.
High Weir is more like what I usually encounter in these late 60s/early 70s sci-fi anthologies. A team of researchers makes a startling discovery on Mars, and what they learn in the course of their investigations drives one of them insane. I think it's a worthy effort, even if I'm not sure whether or not the plot point involving the hologram makes any sense.
The next-to-last story, Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones is where I really struggled. The protagonist is thoroughly uninteresting, his predicament seems irrelevant, and for people that live in the future none of the characters in this story seem to be trading in any noteworthy technologies.
Night and the Loves of Joe Diconstanzo closes out the book. It's not terrible, but it seems like the sort of thing that Philip K. Dick did much better. Dick would have trimmed this narrative right down to its core, and he would have added an ending that made you question your reality. Samuel R. Delany, however, never accomplishes this task.
With all of the stories above considered, I can't recommend Samuel R. Delany. I get that he's won awards and enjoyed a certain standing in the science fiction community, but I didn't find anything in this collection that made me want to read other books by the same author.
To some extent he seems, like Ray Bradbury, to be a science fiction author who doesn't really want to be writing science fiction. I also get the feeling that the concepts introduced in his stories would be better handled by authors more able to cut to the heart of the stories they are telling.
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