Recently I was reading a profile in The New Yorker* of the science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany, a contemporary of other such SF authors as Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein, Robert Silverberg, Isaac Asimov, Ursula K. LeGuin, Roger Zelazny, and Octavia Butler (who was, briefly, a student of Delany’s). Despite the fact that back in my younger days I read many, many books by authors from that era, I somehow managed never to read any of Delany’s work, although I’m quite familiar with his name. I’m going to guess that this is because our local library didn’t stock many Delany titles, since in those pre-Internet days of dead-tree books that you had to get from a bookstore, most of my reading material was of the borrowed variety. But I digress. Here’s how that New Yorker article started off: