“If you can write down a woman’s or man’s name, you can write down all…”

I'm currently behind on reviews, so don't be surprised if the recent reviews are a bit sparse.

If you can write down a woman’s or man’s name, you can write down all sorts of things next to that name, about the amount of work they do, the time it takes for them to do it, about their methods, their attitudes, and you can compare all this very carefully with what you have written about others. If you do this, you can maneuver your own dealings with them in ways that will soon control them; and very soon you will have the control over your fellows that is slavery.

Tales of Nevèrÿon

by Samuel R. Delany · published 1979 · read 2023-01-25

★★★★★

What a grand adventure. The tale of Gorgik, starting out free, becoming enslaved, working his way out of slavery through court and the military. The tale of Small Sarg, his friend, partner, slave, master, and them defeating slave-owners. Norema, learning from an old wise woman. The warrior-woman Raven. All of them get full, fleshed out cultures. Each culture has different gender roles, mythologies, opionions on child rearing, sex, contraception, love: all explored in these 300 pages. Also, once more, Delany takes on slavery, this time in Fantasy. And economics. And gender. And how money changes entire societies just by existing. It's deep and good and it puts down all the Fantasy and sci-fi economists (Pratchett, Stross, you name them) a notch and takes first place. And he doesn't stop there – his description of how money changes society and flattens value is continued into how language flattens meaning, too! Delany, man. Dense, brilliant, beloved. And all that with an equally brilliant epilogue, pretending that the whole story is just a reconstruction of the Culhar' text, a narrative fragment written around 5000 BC, of which different versions have been found in all the ancient languages, at all the ancient excavation sites. Leslie Steiner, a black Cuban (her mother from the US, her father an Austrian Jew) finally puts them all together to end up with a translation of the original Linear-B fragment. (And the translation excerpts tie in with the story so cleverly.) It's beautiful. I love it. See also: An excellent blog post by Jo Walton