'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman
Hugo and Nebula winner, and one of the most reprinted SF stories ever written — the genre's definitive fable of civil disobedience.
Book Entry · Science Fiction
What is Dhalgren about?
Bellona, a Midwestern city severed from the world by an unexplained catastrophe: two moons some nights, a swollen sun others, smoke that rearranges streets, and no two clocks or newspapers agreeing. Into it walks a nameless young drifter — the Kid — who acquires a notebook, a gang, lovers of several configurations and a poetry career, while the text loops back into itself, ending mid-sentence on the clause that begins it. Delany's million-copy experimental epic is SF's Finnegans Wake: adored, abandoned, annotated. Harlan Ellison hurled it across a room; William Gibson called it a riddle never meant to be solved.
Why it matters
The genre's most famous avant-garde novel and an enduring proof that SF readers will follow real difficulty if the sentences earn it. A touchstone for literary SF ever since.
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