literature/delaney/the sandman

["Brian J. Dillard" <dillardb@pilot.msu.edu>]

Anyone ever notice all the weird overlappings between Neil Gaiman's
Sandman comic and Kate's work? Actually there are overlappings with
Tori's stuff, too, since Neil and Tori are best buds and the character
Delirium often kind of looks (and talks) like her. But considering that
the comic is about Morpheus the Dream King (see Space Dog and Tear in
Your Hand by Tori), who lives in a sometimes scary, sometimes chaotic,
sometimes
kind-of-hard-to-appreciate-at-first-but-it-grows-and-grows-on-you place
called The Dreaming - it's hard not to see some parallels. One of the
later issues, which depicts the funeral of a god as viewed by mortals,
makes explicit reference to The Big Sky - the concept but also possibly
the song. As with Kate's work, especially TKI, mythology plays a heavy
part in Sandman, which fits all sorts of disparate cosmologies under a
sort of ur-cosmology. I bet an enterprising undergraduate could do a
great thesis on the use of myth and folklore in contemporary pop culture
using Kate's and Neil's bodies of work as a big part.....

Anyway....

Karen Newcombe wrote:

----
For those seeking the more intellectual
approach, I highly recommend Samuel R. Delaney whose work is brilliant
--
his subjects are power, language, meaning, transmission of ideas,
identity.
 The Neveryon trilogy was recently reprinted in a fancy edition by one
of
the big university presses.
----
I second the recommendation. Utterly pretentious, utterly engrossing
sword and sorcery with a poststructuralist bent. whenever i read about
the character raven, a sort of amazon warrior, i picture kate in the
babooshka video - the look happy rhodes aped for the cover of Building
the Colossus, all chainmail and attitude.

Actually I am halfway through the Neveryon series and there are four
books, published, as Karen said, by the Weslyan University Press through
the University Press of New England.

In general Delany is excellent, but whatever you do, avoid _the madman_,
his latest novel - it invariable gets described as ambitious, and that's
about all you can say. He is guest teaching this fall at my alma mater,
the Honors College at Michigan State University, where he has often
helped out with the annual Clarion Science Fiction Writers' Workshop.
For those of you in the area who are interested, I have no doubt he'll
do some sort of public lecture.