Come and enter Samuel Delany’s tomorow, in this trilogy of high adventure, with acrobats and urchins, criminals and courtiers, fishermen and factory-workers, madmen and mind-readers, dwarves and ducheses, giants and geniuses, merchants and mathematicians, soldiers and scholars, pirates and poets, and a gallery of aliens who fly, crawl, burrow, or swim.

The war was over. The great computer which had arranged and directed the complex military operations of that future nation was to be dismantled. But the computer had become expert in the science of self-defence...and it resisted. The government buildings were blasted. Rockets rained on the great city, and the Empire of Toromon, the first great hope of humanity after the millennia of radiation wreckage, faced disaster at the hands of a super-scientific monster of its own creation. But, unknown even to Toromon's desperate leaders, was the fact that behind the berserk computer lurked the unearthly mind of a real enemy - a foe from the most distant realm of space, intent on making the Earth the first victim of galactic conquest.

Reverse colonization narratives are stories like H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds, in which technologically superior Martians invade and colonize England. They ask Western audiences to imagine what it’s like to be the colonized rather than the colonizers. David Higgins argues that although some reverse colonization stories are thoughtful and provocative, reverse colonization fantasy has also led to the prevalence of a very dangerous kind of science fictional thinking in our current political culture. It has become popular among groups such as anti-feminists, white supremacists, and far-right reactionaries to appropriate a sense of righteous, anti-imperial victimhood—the sense that white men, in particular, are somehow colonized victims fighting an insurgent resistance against an oppressive establishment. Nothing could be timelier, as an armed far-right mob stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, in an effort to stop the presidential election from being “stolen from them.” Higgins shows that this reverse colonization stance depends upon a science fictional logic that achieved dominance within imperial fantasy during the 1960s and has continued to gain momentum ever since. By identifying with fantastic forms of victimhood, subjects who already enjoy social hegemony are able to justify economic inequality, expansions of police and military power, climatological devastation, new articulations of racism, and countless other forms of violence—all purportedly in the name of security, self-defense, and self-protection.

This Hugo Award–winning memoir is “a very moving, intensely fascinating literary autobiography from an extraordinary writer” (William Gibson, Nebula and Hugo Award–winning author of Neuromancer). With the poet Marilyn Hacker, Delany moves into a tenement on a dead-end street that the landlord reserves for interracial couples. Between playing folk music in the evenings at the same Greenwich Village coffee shop as Bob Dylan and preparing shrimp curry for W. H. Auden and Chester Khalman, who have accepted an invitation that night for dinner, Delany takes a stab at writing science fiction. This young prodigy would complete and sell five novels before he turned twenty-two! (And then have a nervous breakdown . . .) This beautifully written memoir is a testament to a neighborhood where experimentation was a way of life. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Samuel R. Delany including rare images from his early career.