At Long Last, Tales of Nevèrÿon
Approaching Samuel Delany’s Conan/Semiotics Slash Fiction
Have you ever wished Conan the Barbarian were the kind of guy to read critical theory? No? Too bad, because today we’re discussing the first volume of Samuel Delany’s Nevèrÿon stories. Nevèrÿon is a sword-and-sorcery-and-semiotics series heroically compiled by Wesleyan University Press into four paperback volumes. I spent the last several years hunting for a Nevèrÿon access point because my religion doesn’t accommodate just ordering things I want online, and in September I finally acquired Tales of Nevèrÿon, the first story collection, at Pittsburgh’s tiny but delicious City of Asylum bookstore. City of Asylum is the only bookstore I’ve ever visited which is more rigorously curated than the Seminary Co-op of Chicago so in hindsight OF COURSE they had Nevèrÿon.
In Tales of Nevèrÿon we get five stories tenderly sandwiched between two only semi-penetrable scholarly discourses written by imagined academics. Each of the five stories opens with a profoundly abstract quote from Jacques Lacan or Julia Kristeva or similar, before getting into the hacking, the slashing, and the Socratic discourse of guys in leather loinclothes. At this point, I anticipate either you’re positively vibrating with interest or, if you’re lucky, you didn’t go to the University of Chicago.
These five stories, while each capable of standing on their own, together tell of the intertwined lives of Gorgik the slave, his twink Small Sarg, the female explorer Norema, and the exceedingly girly-pop warrior Raven. The four of them live in and around the empire of Nevèrÿon, which is an ancient Bronze-agey kingdom operating under a sort of racial/phenotypical hierarchy which favors the dark-skinned people of Nevèrÿon over the lighter-skinned barbarians who live at the empire’s fringe and are often made slaves by it.
Gorgik is one of the native people of Nevèrÿon, yet in the course of political upheaval he too is made a slave, and only escapes this terrible fate by becoming a powerful noblewoman’s personal attendant. In the course of his adventures, he encounters Small Sarg, one of the pale barbarians, rescuing him from slavery. The two of them begin a fascinating switch-ful BDSM relationship which helps them come to consciousness about the moral abomination of slavery. By the end of Tales Gorgik and Sarg are running two-man ninja-style raids against Nevèrÿon’s castles and freeing all the slaves within, which is SICK.
Norema is from a island fishing society outside Nevèrÿon. Trained in her youth by the local wise woman to question everything and apply a sharp anthropological lens to every new society she encounters, she comes to Nevèrÿon’s capital after a tragic loss and becomes a merchant’s secretary. She also picks up Raven, who is an incredible girlboss badass from a hidden mountain matriarchy. As outsiders, Norema and Raven cut through some of the self-aggrandizing imperial baloney put forth by Nevèrÿon and see how this society marginalizes women, in ways both familiar and weird to us real worlders.
BTW nobody in Tales wears a shirt ever. I mean nobody. It’s important that I mention this in the expectation-setting portion of this review because I don’t want you to forget the Conan-adjacent aspect.
At the same time, I don’t want to underrate how much of these stories are talking-based. Significant portions—indeed, portions more significant than the battles or hook-ups—are discussions between various characters about their views on the world, the clashing perspectives, beliefs, and subject positions which inform their experiences. As high-stakes as the sword fights are the debates and contests over the meanings of symbols, states, and tools. Delany displays an admirable facility with voice and dialogue in these Tales, managing to produce a genuinely useful plain language explanation of the dialectic during “The Tale of Old Venn”, the story which introduces us to Norema. We should have been allowed to read “The Tale of Old Venn” in our intro classes. Not only does it actually tell you what’s up with dialectics, but it also contains the most raw drive-by takedown of Freud I’ve ever read.
Honestly, Delany’s flexing in every direction with these stories. He responds to an array of classic philosophers and theorists through his fantastical fun sword-and-sorcery frame. He elegantly explores the power dynamics of fraught categories like race and gender without ever falling into eyerollingly trite 1-to-1 analogues. He builds up layer upon layer of detail and character, setting up an intricate series of dominoes you don’t even know are dominoes ‘til they’re falling. Throughout it all, he maintains a constant sense of wondrous surprise and mystery as he guides us through his lush constructed world.
I’d already read the final story in Tales, “The Tale of Dragons and Dreamers”, before picking up the collection. Upon that first isolated read, I was struck by the story’s depth and complexity and, of course, its semiotics mindset. But returning to it at the end of the actual Tales collection produced a return so much richer because I’d acquired the context of the preceding four stories. Contextualized as the conclusion to a five-part arc, “The Tale of Dragons and Dreamers” hit crazy-style. I was genuinely moved when Gorgik and Small Sarg described how the dynamics of their relationship allow them to defy and redefine the violent logics of slavery, a system which has deeply harmed them. Signs aren’t only evil, even if that’s the most engaging part to theory craft about. The right sign at the right time can hold us together through the unthinkable.
I waited a long time to start the Nevèrÿon series, but the wait paid off. I highly recommend Tales of Nevèrÿon, but only if you’re someone who’s always dreamed of being in a blunt rotation with Fafhrd, the Grey Mouser, and Jacques Derrida.
