Book - BookDetective

Name: Neveryona

Author: Samuel R. Delany
Year: 1983
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Genres/categories:
Fantasy, Fiction, Science fiction

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ISBNs:
9780553241778
055324177X

In his four-volume series Return to Neveryon, Hugo and Nebula award-winner Samuel R. Delany appropriated the conceits of sword-and-sorcery fantasy to explore his characteristic themes of language, power, gender, and the nature of civilization. Wesleyan University Press has reissued the long-unavailable Neveryon volumes in trade paperback.

The eleven stories, novellas, and novels in Return to Neveryon's four volumes chronicle a long-ago land on civilization's brink, perhaps in Asia or Africa, or even on the Mediterranean. Taken slave in childhood, Gorgik gains his freedom, leads a slave revolt, and becomes a minister of state, finally abolishing slavery. Ironically, however, he is sexually aroused by the iron slave collars of servitude. Does this contaminate his mission - or intensify it? Presumably elaborated from an ancient text of unknown geographical origin, the stories are sunk in translators' and commentators' introductions and appendices, forming a richly comic frame.