The Einstein Intersection
by Samuel R. Delany
Summary
Humanity is gone. Something else has arrived, taken up residence in the abandoned bodies and abandoned stories, and is trying to live inside them. They farm, they herd, they have villages and rituals, and they are riddled with mutation, which they sort into functional and non functional and treat accordingly.
Lo Lobey is a herder with a machete shaped like a flute that he plays, and a gift for taking the pattern of another mind out of the music. Friza, whom he loved, is dead. So he goes to get her back, which means going to find Kid Death, who kills and resurrects at will and who wants Lobey specifically.
The journey is the myth of Orpheus being reenacted by beings who do not entirely understand it, alongside fragments of Jesus, Billy the Kid, Jean Harlow and Ringo Starr, because these are the stories the planet came with and the new inhabitants are trying them on to see what fits.
Delany was twenty four. The prose is dense, allusive, musical, and openly unfinished in places, and between chapters he inserts extracts from the notebook he kept while writing it in Greece and Turkey, so the book documents its own composition.
Around one hundred and fifty pages, which is remarkable given how much is in it.
The travelling section, in which Lobey joins a cattle drive across a ruined landscape with a herd of enormous mutated animals, is where the strangeness settles into something like a story.
Best for readers who want the New Wave at its most ambitious, and a book about what it costs to inherit somebody else's mythology. Readers who need a clear plot will struggle throughout.
Historical Context & Significance
The Einstein Intersection won the 1967 Nebula Award for Best Novel, the second of four Nebulas Samuel R. Delany won between 1966 and 1969, alongside Babel-17 and two for short fiction.
The title is not his. He wanted A Fabulous, Formless Darkness, and Ace Books changed it for commercial reasons. The published title refers to the intersection of Einstein's relativity with Godel's work on the limits of formal systems, which the novel takes as a statement about the boundaries of any inherited system of meaning.
Delany was in his early twenties and had already published several novels. He is Black and gay and wrote both into science fiction at a point when the field contained almost none of either, and he became one of its most important critics as well, alongside a long academic career.