Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice-for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker.

Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Ultimately, a study in identity and illusion, Delany’s huge and difficult novel will interest admirers of Ballard, Pynchon, and the like, though one suspects there’s many an unread copy of the original mass market edition floating around.Īre we not men? We are-well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z (2006).Ī zombie apocalypse is one thing. Yet he admires the “sustained conceptual daring,” probably more suited to today’s audience, with its taste for transgressive ideas about sex, race, and gender. Fellow hypermodernist William Gibson provides an introduction (written for the 1996 edition) in which he admits he “never understood” the book, that it’s a riddle not meant to be solved. An anarchist community evolves, prominently featuring Delany’s protagonist, “the Kid,” a pansexual gang leader and poet. A futuristic, postapocalyptic narrative, Delany’s circular and heavily allusive fiction surveys the American “autumnal” city of Bellona, where some sort of disaster has taken place, altering not just the social structure but the nature of the space-time continuum. Through all these lives, it’s sold well-more than a million copies, supposedly-despite the demands it makes on readers, especially those expecting the more conventional SF that Delany published until Dhalgren’s appearance. The prolific Delany enjoys two audiences: the hard-core SF crowd and admirers of his more literary efforts, such as this humongous novel first published in 1975 as a mass market paperback, reprinted in cloth in 1977, then again by an academic press in 1996.