Every time I’ve written about Samuel Delany here I’ve ended by saying that I wish he’d write more SF. And now he has written more SF, and am I happy? Well, yes and no. Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders is as problematic as it brilliant. It’s an amazing science fiction novel that does that thing that science fiction so seldom does of starting off in the present (2007) and projecting forward for a whole lifetime into the future. It’s a wonderful book about aging and changing and experiencing a lifetime from one person’s perspective. Delany’s ability to imagine a fully three-dimensional future and casually slip details into the story remains unparallelled. This feels like a real future that could come from this real present, and like most futures it is unevenly distributed. We see it as it impinges on the lives of the characters, and the real story here is the love story of two men who meet in 2007, aged sixteen and eighteen, and the way they stay together until they die.
When my son was about fourteen, he took Stranger in a Strange Land out of the school library and undertook to write a book report about it. After he’d read it he was horrified, because it was of course full of sex, and he didn’t want to talk about that in a book report. Without lying at all he described the set up and talked about the book as if it was a fast paced Heinlein juvenile. Thinking uncomfortably about how to write about Valley of the Nest of Spiders I can’t help remembering this.
Valley of the Nest of Spiders is a very good book. I cried at the end, not just standing water in my eyes but real choking sobs. And it’s great science fictional speculation. But my goodness it’s a difficult book to read. It’s as if Delany tried as hard as he possibly could to make it hard for me to enjoy. For one thing, I had to keep putting it down. I couldn’t take it everywhere and read as I went about my day, because it’s not a book I could read on the bus or the train. It’s not just the graphic sex, though it is very graphic, very copious, and very descriptive. It’s not just the coprophagia and mutual snot-eating—though that’s what kept making me literally gag. It’s also the racial epithets that are our real modern day taboos, the “culturally charged language” as one of the characters calls it. I just can’t sit there next to some elderly Jamaican lady on her way home from church and risk her reading over my shoulder something that would distress her and which she’d only be able to interpret as racist porn. And there’s something like that on almost every page.
The book begins with huge doses of sex and racially charged words and no pay off yet to make it worth it—we’re still in 2007, so no worldbuilding, and it takes time to learn to care about the characters and the Georgia seacoast village where they live. They are great characters. It’s a fascinating choice of location. The pay offs are very much worth it when you get to them. I will read this book again. (And I’ll probably be a lot more coherent about it when I do.) But I don’t want to minimize how difficult this is to read. I’m all for “Your Kink Is OK”, but we have father/son homosexual incest starting very young, bestiality, urine drinking, and a sexualisation of dirt. We have all these things in Delany’s very visceral descriptions. There were things where I had to let my eyes go out of focus and start reading again a few lines later, and you know I never do that. Well, it turns out that I can do that if something makes my gorge rise enough. I have not read every word of this book.
Delany does have a purpose in doing all of this. It’s not pornographic. While some people may find some of it erotic rather than squicky, I think there’s probably (and intentionally) something here to squick absolutely everyone. Delany’s been saying since Triton that there’s no such thing as “normal”. What we have here is two very specific people and their specific lusts, which are part of them. They are not normal, but they are people, and both of these things are true of all of us. Sex, real thing. Stuff people do. No more or no less normal. You know, pretty much most of everything is written for my sensibilities. There’s not much I actually want to read that’s outside my comfort zone. Delany’s pushing us outside that zone, as he always has, because what he’s interested in writing about is out there.
I think he’s doing the same with the “culturally charged language”, race is also a real thing. Delany is making us think about what is taboo and why it is—for us now, talking about race and sex is something we have to do very carefully. By the end of the book, a boy called “Cum Stain” wearing transparent fronted pants, is at a party where it’s accepted that nice people don’t talk in public about science…
The more I kept reading, the more I enjoyed reading—as with Eric’s experience reading Spinoza. It’s not just that in the second half of the book we move beyond the present and so there’s more science fictional awesomeness, though that doesn’t hurt. I think it’s that I got used to what Delany was doing and the way he was doing it, and I came to care about the characters.
Eric Jeffers is a sixteen year old white gay boy from Atlanta who has been brought up mostly by his black stepfather. Eric wants to be a good person and to make the world better. As the book begins he goes for one last early morning cruise among the local homeless guys in the hope of sex before he goes to stay with his mother in Diamond Harbor. Just outside that town he gets his father to stop at Turpens, a truck stop where he has a lot of very graphic sex with some people who are going to be very very important to the story so you’d better keep paying attention. (I found the sex in Turpens to be the most difficult bit of the whole book.)
This is where Eric meets Shit Haskell. The novel is the story of how starting from there they love each other, how they negotiate loving each other, while having sex with lots of other people and animals, and precisely how the relationship works over their lifetimes as the world changes and continues to change. They are embedded in history and contexted by time. As time goes on their own past becomes mythologised by other people, and a constant struggle to correct them. Also time telescopes, so that in the end the world of the young people is as incomprehensible to them as the world where they grew up is to the young people—Eric meets the granddaughter of a man he had sex with on that first day in Turpens, she has been to Mars and is part of a political struggle for multi-person marriage rights. Delany himself is old enough now that he has very interesting angles on all of this.
The central question of the novel is “What does it mean, to lead a good life?” Delany gives us an answer in showing us Eric’s life, and it’s a powerfully provocative answer.
If you haven’t read any Delany and you want to know why he’s important to the field, I’d suggest that you pick up Nova or Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand. If you have read most of Delany and liked it, Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders is definitely worth the effort. It’s certainly not like anything else that’s likely to be published as a science fiction book this year.
Jo Walton is a science fiction and fantasy writer. She’s published two poetry collections and nine novels, most recently the Hugo nominated and Nebula winning Among Others. She reads a lot, and blogs about it here regularly. She comes from Wales but lives in Montreal where the food and books are more varied.
I’ve been following discussions of this book on the Delany yahoo group, and reading reviews that are linked there (as this was), and they are all trending the same way — this sounds like a fabulous book that I simply won’t be able to read. I love Delany, but this book sounds like it’s way, way past my squick factor. I get that there’s a political/aesthetic purpose to it, and I agree with that (insofar as I understand it) — I, too, am firmly in the “your kink is ok” — but part of my kink is not reading about !@@@@@#$% coprophagia (which I had to google, and even doing that made me gag). I don’t mean this morally, it’s just about personal sensibility. (I’m reminded of the political theorist who says that while liberals take into account only fairness & avoiding harm in moral judgments, conservatives also take into account loyalty, authority and purity. Well, I’m liberal, and for more purity is not a moral category. But it is a don’t tell me about it please category.) Some people can’t watch violence on film; I don’t think I can read about coprophagia.
I had a similar reaction to The Mad Man — I found the sex simply too squicky to read, and I skimmed large parts of it. And yes, to answer the question you asked in the linked piece on skimming, I worried about missing stuff. But it was that or not read it, and in the end I decided I was getting something out of skimming.
I must admit it makes me sad that Delany is writing books I can’t read now. Because everything everyone’s been saying about this book makes the non-sex parts sound fabulous, especially the second half.
Honestly, I wish someone would write “a prude’s guide to the Valley of the Nest of Spiders”: page numbers about which pages to skip, with summaries of what was missed in the way of plot/character/theme in them. Then I could go read the rest of it. I gather from your review that this would be difficult, that a lot of the characterization is done through/in the sex scenes, but I can’t tell if it’s impossible — if what would be left would be worth reading (granting that much would be missed). Do you have a sense of that? Does anyone else?
And does anyone want to write up a “skip-these-parts” guide to TVNS? I’d settle for avoiding coprophagia & allied things.
In books like The Mad Man, I didn’t mind the porn—the foreskin dick cheese, the urine, the ass-eating. But in this one, the snot is definitely getting to me. Like you, Jo, I physically gagged when reading about the snot-eating, which makes reading on the commuter train a challenge. I had to take a break for a bit and read two other novels, just to get back to Spiders. The mucophilia does seem to die down a bit around page 250. Thanks to reviews like this, I will continue to solider on.
Stephen — I don’t think this is a book that could have a “good parts version”. It is what it is, and all the gross stuff is part of that. My own preference for Delany writing about sex is the way he wrote about it in Triton and Stars in my Pocket, but it’s not like he doesn’t have something real and interesting to say. He’s not just trying to make us feel ill. Though it does make me feel ill. Difficult.
Nick: I find myself strangely relieved that I am not the only one who had this problem, because I was wondering if I was just excessively squeamish. I’ve been thinking I may have another go at Mad Man, a book I have stopped reading twice half way through because of my gag reflex.
Interesting responses. Part of me laughs at some of the things others are squeamish reading about, because hey, they didn’t bother me. But then I think about the aspects of the story that made me squirm, and I agree that there is something in this book to move pretty much everyone out of their comfort zone.
Okay, I’m a kinky gay man: Just spent the weekend at a kink event where I made out with one guy who happily shoved his tongue up my nose and drank the urine of another. So a lot of the acts done with other adults in the book, I’ve done; the others didn’t squick me out. And the “well, that’s just what he likes to do” acceptance in The Dump is one of the best depictions around of the sort of community I’ve found at leather runs, where physical safety is paramount (the front porch scene between Black Bull and Whiteboy is brilliant in this regard), people are encouraged to try things as long as no one is being forced to do things they object to, people sometimes use kinks to work out deep issues (again Whiteboy), and it’s not uncommon to hear things like “Well, it doesn’t really do much for me, but I love the way it turns him on, and he’s always willing to do [x] for me, so yeah, I guess it makes me happy.” (And the artificially funded Utopia that is The Dump in some ways makes it even more like those temporary leather run communities–a world that is not self-sustaining.)
But the racially coded language–man, that kept me uncomfortable. Delany makes us think about how we think and talk about race–and avoid talking about race–even as race is always part of our sexual economy. But reading Eric and Morgan toss those “culturally-invested” nicknames back and forth never got comfortable. And I think that was part of the point. I think it’s the reason I need to read this book again–to understand more clearly how these (current) cultural taboos shape how I move through the world in ways I am culturally discouraged from articulating, even to myself.
One chapter is devoted to Dynamite having doubts about how he raised Morgan. Neither he nor the narrative comes to any conclusion about whether he was a good father. To me, it seems that engaging the novel on its own terms requires coming to rest on that point of uncertainty with him–neither jumping to condemn him nor praise him (or praise him despite…).
It delights me that the book is full of the things often elided in novels. We learn repeatedly not just about how and how often they have sex, but about what and how they eat, and what clothing they wear and how–things that typically, if they are brought up in novels, are brought up once to establish the class and income level of characters and then subsequently ignored.
No, there could never be a prude’s guide to the book–not just because the sex is pervasive (as it is in life), but because the discomfort is part of the point, because it makes you look at forms of pleasure that sexually and/or culturally squick you out and simultaneously see the deep humanity, essential goodness, and love between these characters.
I’m hoping desperately that the “your kink is OK” comments do not include pedophilia…that’s truly one of the most heinous acts possible and an abhominable, inexcusable way to treat the young and helpless.
I really enjoyed early Delany.
Nova, Jewels of Aptor, etc, were all quite fun and interesting.
But then I don’t know what happened. After Triton I just found reading his material a bore, and I won’t be picking this up.
Odd sexual fetishes are fine and dandy, but it’s not really what I read books for. I’ve never read a book where sex was an integral part of the story that I though ‘this was amazing’. I do like sex in books though, I just don’t think it’s that interesting if they form a central part of the narrative. Everyone’s different…
I am fascinated by Delany’s experiments in genre– his last few novels have been focused around the idea that pornography is a genre like any other, and so has its tropes, its masterworks, its genre-blends, and so on; so this one is apparently a porn/SF cross, while, say, Hogg was as far as I could tell an attempt at doing pornography as an artistic end in itself. I heard Delany read from the first few pages of this one while it was in draft, at Readercon a few years ago, and the thing that amazed me was that I could tell it was going to be porn from sentence one, despite the fact that when he came into the room he sat down, said the title, said it was an SF novel, and began to read. Because apparently the tropes of pornography are so recognizable that the genre was detectable several pages before any sexual content at all. Now that was interesting. Because I don’t actually read commercial pornography, so those tropes are that detectable through, as far as I can tell, zeitgeist.
That said, the problem I have had trying to read this book is that while I don’t have a squick response to things that are Not My Kink, I do find it very boring to read about sex that is not remotely erotic– like having every physical motion of a modern dance concert described to me without knowing what the music is or how the moves relate to it. I’m very glad you reviewed this, as it lets me know that I should push through the boring content and there will be stuff I find interesting later, which is not something I had been able to definitively determine from other reviews.
Frodo Stark: There is no unconsensual sex, no coercion at all, and the text takes the position that people under eighteen (Eric starts off a week before his seventeenth birthday) have to clearly ask for and initiate sex.
Well, I was going to order this for the store, but you lost me at, y’know, coprophagia. And booger-eating.
Sounds like a great book I’ll never read.
Odd that people are resistant to reading about characters who engage in sex practices they would not themselves indulge in and perhaps even find discomfitting, when they would not balk at reading a book with a character who murders or violently destroys whole planets. Is this something “immately human” or an element of the very sort of cultural taboos whose outlines Delany is trying to get readers to wrestle with in this book (in the way he did with sex and gender in “Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand”)?