A father must come to terms with his son's death in the war. In Venice an architecture student commits a crime of passion. A white southern airport loader tries to do a favor for a black northern child. The ordinary stuff of ordinary fiction--but with a difference! These tales take place twenty-five, fifty, a hundred-fifty years from now, when men and women have been given gills to labor under the sea. Huge repair stations patrol the cables carrying power to the ends of the earth. Telepathic and precocious children so passionately yearn to visit distant galaxies that they'll kill to go. Brilliantly crafted, beautifully written, these are Samuel Delany's award-winning stories, like no others before or since.

'Delany's works have become essential to the history of science fiction' New Yorker Samuel Delany is one of the most radical and influential science fiction writers of our age, who reinvented the genre with his fearless explorations of race, class and gender. Driftglass is the definitive volume of his stories, featuring neutered space travellers, telepathy, Hells Angels and genetically modified amphibious workers. 'Delany's books interweave science fiction with histories of race, sexuality and control. In so doing, he gives readers fiction that reflects and explores the social truths of our world' The New York Times

Three novellas by a black writer. The novella, Atlantis: Model 1924, describes the sense of wonder experienced by a 17-year-old black youth from the South on his arrival in New York, while Citre et Trans is on a black man who is raped in Greece and the effect this has on his life. By the author of Return to Neveryon.

The story of a truly galactic civilization with over 6,000 inhabited worlds.

This Stonewall Book Award-winning novel traces the life and unrealized dreams of a homosexual African-American poet. Beautifully written in reverse chronological order, the story offers moving meditations on loneliness and sexual repression.

In Shorter Views, Hugo and Nebula award-winning author Samuel R. Delany brings his remarkable intellectual powers to bear on a wide range of topics. Whether he is exploring the deeply felt issues of identity, race, and sexuality, untangling the intricacies of literary theory, or the writing process itself, Delany is one of the most lucid and insightful writers of our time. These essays cluster around topics related to queer theory on the one hand, and on the other, questions concerning the paraliterary genres: science fiction, pornography, comics, and more. Readers new to Delany's work will find this collection of shorter pieces an especially good introduction, while those already familiar with his writing will appreciate having these essays between two covers for the first time.