THE (ALMOST) UNDELETED

It has taken me a long time to get to this point in my appreciation of SF, but I have finally come around completely on Samuel Delany. I always enjoyed his books, but I considered him to be a little full of himself, and thought his books were horribly overwritten. But in the last five or six years I have gone back and re-read a few volumes that I had poo-pooed before, this one included, and for some reason I now have a much better appreciation for them. I think that I feel this way mainly because I am starting to get older and do not crave the flash-bang as I did when I was young. Delaney can deliver that when needed, but his stories generally are much more esoteric than that, and deal with more complex themes, such as mythology and linguistics. This book, called The Ballad of Beta-2, from the mid-point of his long career, deals precisely with those themes. Delany succeeded brilliantly in what he set out to do with this work, which was to reconstruct a lost culture by deconstructing one of the more meaningful and important ballads that its members....Please click here or on the cover above to be taken to the review..