Ace Books, a major purveyor of escapist science fiction during the Cold War year, targeted an audience of teenage boys with its simplistic good- versus-evil space operas, most of them priced at an affordable thirty-five cents. Few of these books remain in print nowadays, but a handful have become classics, some even gaining eventual recognition as serious works of literary fiction. Ace published works by Philip K. Dick, William Burroughs, Ursula K. Le Guin, Harlan Ellison, Roger Zelazny, Samuel R. Delany and others forward-looking authors—although gaudy and extravagant covers and cut-rate packaging (which often featured two novels bound together at 180 degree angles in a single volume in the popular 'twofer' style) were sometimes an embarrassing mismatch with the higher aspirations of the imprint’s most ambitious writers. "If the Holy Bible was printed as an Ace Double", Charles McGrath once quipped, "it would be cut down to two 20,000-word halves with the Old Testament retitled as 'Master of Chaos' and the New Testament as 'The Thing With Three Souls.'"
Ace was at the peak of its success in 1967 when it published Samuel Delany's The Einstein Intersection . But before the end of the year, Ace's founder A.A. Wyn would be dead, at age 69, and the publishing firm would cut back sharply on its release of new titles. The company had always been frugal in its dealing with authors—one writer famously encoded a message into an Ace book, with the initial letters of each chapter spelling out"A.A. Wyn is a tightwad" —but as the company’s finances faltered, writers could not even count on reliable advances and royalties. By the time Grosset & Dunlap took ownership of Ace in 1972, the imprint had lost much of its luster. Since then, ownership has changed hands two more times. Ace continues to publish sci-fi, but with little of the free-wheeling extravagance and prominence of its early years.
A book like Delany's The Einstein Intersection serves as a useful reminder of both Ace's daring and the experimental tendencies shaking up the sci-fi field during the 1960s. I wonder what the adolescents and teenagers who bought this book made of the peculiar add-ons to Delany's text. How did they respond to the novel's opening—a quote from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake? "It darkles, (tinct, tinct) all this our funanimal world." What did they think about the ensuing extracts from Jean Genet, Plotinus, Gregory Corso, Jean-Paul Sartre and the Marquis de Sade? How did they interpret the interpolation of entries from Delany's journal, which describe his European travels during the period he wrote The Einstein Intersection ?
These metanarrative distractions adorn a story that, at first glance, stays close to the conventions of pulp fiction. Our hero Lobey is mourning the death of his beloved Friza, and decides to leave his native village and journey to the big city. Along the way, he encounters adventures and obstacles, and eventually meets up with his adversary, Kid Death, who has the power to bring Friza back to life.
The Einstein Intersection is set in the distant future, when the planet suffers from a collapse in technology and widespread genetic mutancy. But much of the tone and attitude of the novel is reminiscent of stories of the Wild West. (Ace, it is worth noting, also published cowboy fiction during the 1950s and 1960s.) Lobey works herding dragons, but they might as well be cattle. His enemy Kid Death is at least partly based on the real life Western villain Billy the Kid. The final confrontation between the two combatants is in the tradition of the inevitable High Noon -esque showdowns and shoot- outs of the western genre.
These evocations are deliberate, expressions of Delany’s focus on folklore and myths—a fixation that constantly moves into the foreground of The Einstein Intersection . When Lobey sets off on his journey to bring back his dead love Friza, he is told by the village elder that his task recreates Orpheus's descent into the underworld to retrieve Eurydice. A subplot about a fellow dragon herder named Green- eye consciously echoes several stories from the New Testament…whoops, excuse me, from The Thing with Three Souls . Yet our author is equally interested in our modern equivalents of mythic figures, namely popular celebrities, and finds ways of incorporating Jean Harlow, Ringo Starr, Mario Montez and Spiderman in these pages. In case the reader might miss the connections, Delany calls attention to them in the passages from his writer’s journal that he inserts between the chapters. "The central subject of the book is myth," he asserts plain as day.
But others themes and subjects battles for control of The Einstein Intersection . A half-formed subplot about the ostracism of people who fail to meet social norms never really gains momentum, and another story line about duplicity and betrayal, with echoes of Christ and Judas, is equally left hanging. But this is part of the modus operandi of our novelist. Delany, in another journal entry, announces that "Endings to be useful must be inconclusive," and this is a dictum that he adheres to with some rigor, in a book that has little of rigor about it.
The novelty of these departures from science fiction norms ensured that The Einstein Intersection would gain some notoriety, and even a few awards. After all, not many pulp fiction writers start out their stories with Finnegans Wake , end up with Billy the Kid, and still find time along the way for dragons and mutants. I'm not surprised that a book of this sort would win the Nebula award for best novel of the year, and earned a nomination for a Hugo. Almost a half century after its debut, it still retains a certain cult status as an underground sci-fi classic.
But like so much of Delany's work, this book is frustrating and intriguing in almost equal doses. The experimental qualities in the prose come across as self-conscious and, often, distracting. The citation of fashionable authors does little to enhance the story, and eventually collapses into coy name- dropping. Yet I still admire the reach of this young author, who found himself working for a lowbrow pulp fiction mill and was determined to mess with his readers' minds. And given how pervasive escapist storytelling has become in the current day, and how predictable most of these narratives have become, I can't help wishing that the purveyors of our contemporary myths might imbibe a bit of Mr. Delany's renegade spirit.