The Motion of Light in Water

Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village

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by Samuel R. Delany

University of Minnesota Press

Due/Published April 2004, 440 pages, paper

ISBN 0816645248

Born in New York City's black ghetto Harlem at the start of World War II, Samuel R. Delany married white poet Marilyn Hacker right out of high school. The interracial couple moved into the city's new bohemian quarter, the Lower East Side, in summer 1961. Through the decade's opening years, new art, new sexual practices, new music, and new political awareness burgeoned among the crowded streets and cheap railroad apartments. In this book, Delany calls up this era of exploration and adventure as he details his development as a black gay writer in an open marriage, with tertiary walk-ons by Bob Dylan, Stokely Carmichael, W. H. Auden, and James Baldwin, and a panoply of brilliantly drawn secondary characters.

 "A very moving, intensely fascinating literary biography from an extraordinary writer. Thoroughly admirable candor and luminous stylistic precision; the artist as a young man and a memorable picture of an age." -- William Gibson

"Absolutely central to any consideration of black manhood. . . . Delany's vision of the necessity for total social and political transformation is revolutionary." -- Hazel Carby