Proximal Eye – Page 2 – Mark W Tiedemann

How The West Was Shot: Dhalgren Part Three

July 12, 2025 1 Comment

Throughout Dhalgren Delany plays with resonances and echoes that sometimes slip past without conscious impact. One of the repeated devices is the insertion of an authorial voice from time to time, where in the midst of things there is a stopping to comment on—not the plot, at least not usually—the subtext. They can read like Kidd (and in the next hundred pages, he loses a d and becomes “the Kid” or just “Kid”) having an internal dialogue, but gradually we hear a different voice. And then, in the midst of one of the more energetically violent scenes, wherein Kid joins the pack of Scorpions in their raid of an abandoned department store, Kid glimpses someone in a mirror and gives a description that is clearly not Kid. Anyone who had met or knew Delany at that time would have recognized the description. The author comments on his work but here is actually seen by one of his characters. Twenty or

The Next Landscape: Dhalgren Part Two

July 4, 2025 1 Comment

A hundred or so pages on we begin to see how Dhalgren is science fiction as opposed to a form of magic realism (sans magic). The extraordinary advent of two moons in the briefly cleared sky above Bellona. And not just two moons, but the puzzle of how one can be near full and the other a crescent. Delany says nothing about their relative size other than the fact that both are obviously globes. (This is important because it shatters the easy surmise that this is somehow Mars—Phobos and Deimos would not be so large, nor would their relative positions lend explanation to the difference in phases. Of course, the idea that this might be Mars has already been precluded by no one, ever, observing that gravity is different in Bellona than on Earth.) What this does is signal that on crossing the bridge into Bellona, Kidd left “our” world—the world he catalogued in the first page by the list

On Reading Dhalgren, Part One

June 28, 2025 2 Comments

Possibly in a moment of insanity, my reading group chose to do Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren this year. This is one of those touchstones in one’s reading life that challenges, daunts, requires. I possess a first edition…I think. A Bantam paperback original, a Frederik Pohl Selection from 1975. 879 pages. I’m currently reading it for the second time. Like other novels of such storied complexity, it’s an achievement to get through once. Other such novels include James Joyce’s Ulysses and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravitys Rainbow. I might throw in William Gaddis’s The Recognitions and possibly Don DeLillo’s Underworld. It’s not just that they’re long—I’ve read a number of James Michener bricks and none of them posed the same sort of challenge, as well as other famously long novels, like Forever Amber and Gone With The Wind and From Here To Eternity—but that they are dense. Meaning that there are layers of subtext, metafictional excursions, discursive passages that actively demand more from

The Language Of Dragons

April 23, 2025 5 Comments

In decades of reading, it can be surprising on looking back just what one has left unread. The question about what may be the minimum of varied texts are required to be considered Well Read or just A Fan of a given genre is a good launch point for a discussion about the pleasures of words. It is often assumed that for anyone to be regarded as a serious fan, certain stories are a must. So when it turns out that such lists include titles you never read, the impulse may be to remedy that. One does so at one’s peril, though. There are books I did read in my teens and twenties that I enjoyed immensely that now, upon rereading, do not hold up very well. For a variety of reasons. Stung often enough, one may avoid even first readings of books from that period. Time is a factor; there are new books to read, when exactly am I supposed to

On Reading Joanna Russ As A Teenaged Male

March 22, 2025 No Comments

Growing up, science fiction became a refuge for me. I was (probably still am, though I’ve learned some tricks) one of those kids who simply did not grok the world around me. My peers were alien to me, culture was a mystery, the adults around me cryptic to point of useless, and for whatever reason I felt it was my fault. I had always read SF and many of the movies I thought were great were, but until Star Trek it was not an exclusive, obsessional interest. Right around age 12, my consciousness became flooded with science fiction. There are many reasons for this, but at the time I would have said the chief one was aesthetic. In retrospect… Point being, SF pretty much provided me a foundation for navigating the world. I think it fair to say a great deal of who and what I am today was initially informed by all that crazy kid stuff. I could not

Time and War

March 2, 2025 No Comments

It is said that few things “date” faster than science fiction. The closer to the present the story is set, the sillier something can look later, especially after the putative date in the story. Many stories written in the Fifties and Sixties and set in the Nineties look quaint now, if not outright bonkers. But predicting the future is not what science fiction is about. To paraphrase Samuel R. Delany, all science fiction is about the present, using the future as a special lens through which to examine it. Given that, certain works can become completely different books when read later. I first read Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War a few years after its publication. At that time, I experienced it as a solid example of military SF in dialogue with Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers and the pleasure of the story (if pleasure is the right word) was in the details of an interstellar conflict fought in a non-FTL

Relocation and Recognition: Kaliane Bradley’s Novel of Displacement and Recovery

February 26, 2025 No Comments

Time travel has been a mainstay of fiction for a long time. As a controlled process, H.G. Wells introduced it in his groundbreaking novel, The Time Machine, but the notion appeared before, usually as a peculiarity, a manifestation of a fickle universe or the inverted logic of dreams. Rip Van Winkle is one example. Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court is another. Both of these works are concerned with the fish-out-water aspect of displacement and this is one of the main strengths of the idea, that someone is taken completely out of their milieu and dropped into a situation so beyond what might be considered “normal” (i.e. traveling to another country, being kidnapped, or getting caught up in a shift of class, etc) that perspective is forced into precincts requiring almost complete reassessments. The physics notwithstanding, it irresistible for purposes of cultural reassessment. If that sounds a bit dry, let me assure you, handled well it is

The Caste of Our Insecurities

January 17, 2025 No Comments

Hard truths are best absorbed in small packets, at least when possible. Depending on the immediacy of their message, that luxury may be unwise or impossible. But confronting such truths and the facts supporting them may be the primary duty decency demands. Hence, the purpose of books like Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: the Origins of Our Discontents. The thesis of the book is simply stated, that we here in America, the United States, whether we wish to see it or not, live in a caste structure that allocates hierarchies and exiles certain groups of people to inferior status for no reason other than the preservation of those hierarchies. She makes comparisons with India’s much older and in some ways more entrenched caste structure, and examines the history and modes of its instantiation here. She gives examples, some horrific in their violence, many baffling in their intractability. She makes the case. And then she examines how it functions as a stealth program, unconsciously

Mark W. Tiedemann

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