Empire Star
posted 27 February 06 by J.S. Vodalarius
I had to request this book from interlibrary loan and wait two weeks to get it – it came to me from Boston and I picked it up last night, a beautiful, solid little hardcover, the 1977 edition. The book, the object, was satisfying in and of itself. It’s bound in green, with a red stripe on the spine where the title and author are printed in gold letters. It is a pleasant weight, and the type is good. I started it last night, read most of it in about an hour and a half, and just finished it now, while listening to the Dresden Dolls and waiting for my hair to dry so I can starting dressing up fancy for dinner.
It’s called Empire Star. It’s by Samuel R. Delany.
And good gods, I think my brain is broken.
The whole thing…it’s all in beautiful circles, the whole story, like a Slinky or a cyclone or a series of interlocking spirals. Comet Jo, the main character, is engaging and sweet and kind and neat and adventurous, and there’s at least one remarkably peculiar and enjoyable extended literary reference. To Oscar Wilde, no less, which brings me extra joy separate from the book.
The story itself is both complicated and uncomplicated. On the one hand, it’s an exceptionally well-written SF adventure story, really good, really fun to read, and definitely accessible if you want to recommend it to your twelve-year-old cousin or someone. On the other hand, it’s full of extraordinarily cool, confusing, dizzying ideas, and I think people should write extended papers about it and publish them in scholarly journals. I sort of want to write a paper about it myself.
And story and cool ideas aside, the characters just rock my socks. I already said I liked Comet Jo, but then there’s also the Lump, and San Severina (whose entrance into the story is my favorite – “You are a very beautiful boy,” she says, and it’s great), and the glorious, the wonderful, the probably-very-overwhelming-in-person Ni Ty Lee, the poet, who rockets around the planet Tantamount in a ship made out of meteor, heading for the sun unless he finds something to distract him first. And he always gets distracted, because it takes very little to attract his attention. Can you tell that he was my favorite character? Well, good, because I loved him like crazy. He rocks not only the pair of socks I have on, but also every other pair of socks in my sock drawer, and all the socks I have at home.
I mean, besides, there’s a planet called Tantamount. How cool is that?
But anyway, I’m making headway on my quest to read everything of Delany’s that I can get my hands on. Out of all of them, though, I think that this one and Babel-17, the book it was meant to accompany, are my favorites. They can be read as a pair or separately, which is something I always enjoy. They both have poets in them, and wonderful little bite-size confusing bits, and Muels Aranlyde, the author, who I also like a lot even though you never really get to meet him. I have my own reasons for loving Muels Aranlyde.
This book is a little nugget of crazy awesome SF joy, and I love it for that, and for everything else that I already mentioned and even more things that I didn’t. So go for it. Find a copy, no matter how long it may take you. Read Empire Star. You really, really, really won’t regret it.