The Fall of the Towers [Mass Market Paperback]

Samuel Delany (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 1982

Come and enter Samuel Delany’s tomorow, in this trilogy of high adventure, with acrobats and urchins, criminals and courtiers, fishermen and factory-workers, madmen and mind-readers, dwarves and ducheses, giants and geniuses, merchants and mathematicians, soldiers and scholars, pirates and poets, and a gallery of aliens who fly, crawl, burrow, or swim.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Webs within webs, circles within circles, [Delany’s] imagination…creates a mirror of the oceanic density of our times, and leaves you asking for more.”— The Village Voice

“A grand job…these tales of Samuel Delany’s have a fine, rich strangeness…. Beautifully intricate and gloriously mystifying, all this intricate tapestry of advanced science and decayed society the author has portrayed marvelously well.” --P. Schuyler Miller, Analog Magazine

“A writer of consistently high ambition and achievement…Delany’s fiction demands—and rewards—the kind of close reading that one ungrudgingly brings to the serious novelists….Sentence, phrase by phrase, [he] invites the reader to collaborate in the process of creation. The reader who accepts this invitation has an extraordinarily satisfying experience in store for him/her.” --Gerald Jonas, The New York Times Book Review

“Delany has a fearsomely stocked intellect, and a wider range of experience than most writers can even imagine…. He is brilliant, driven, prolific.” --The Nation --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

From the Inside Flap

Come and enter Samuel Delany?s tomorow, in this trilogy of high adventure, with acrobats and urchins, criminals and courtiers, fishermen and factory-workers, madmen and mind-readers, dwarves and ducheses, giants and geniuses, merchants and mathematicians, soldiers and scholars, pirates and poets, and a gallery of aliens who fly, crawl, burrow, or swim. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 401 pages
• Publisher: Bantam Doubleday Dell; 2nd edition (October 1, 1982)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0553203096
• ISBN-13: 978-0553203097
• Product Dimensions: 6.7 x 4.2 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,152,939 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Drastically underrated by those who bring pre-conceptions, December 30, 2003

By 

Thomas J. Hair "Waldo the Wanderer" (Radcliff, KY United States [currently Baghdad, Iraq}) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Fall of the Towers (Hardcover)

If you want an intro to Delany, get "Babel-17". If you have read several of his works and enjoyed them, consider this one. If you don't care about reading Delany per se, but just want a darn good read, give it a try.

This book was my introduction to Delany. I read it first at the tender age of 14 in the Fall of 1974. Not his best work, but ten times better than most of the drivel masquerading as SF on the shelves today. It sparked my interest, and led me to read any and all books by Mr Delany.

This is a guy who generally evokes two kinds of response. One venerable reviewer stated, and I quote, that his books were well beloved by academics ever in search of "grist for the mills of exegesis." Interpretation: I don't think he likes him. Others are excited by his ideas about language, science, human sexuality, and how these are/were interweaving to create original novels that expand the human consciousness.

Me, I just thought he told a darn good story.

Why does all this stick in my mind?

My first college degree was in English Lit. To graduate I had to write a thesis paper on a contemporary writer. At the time, my favorite was Delany. [the title was "Science Fiction: the New Mythology". Hey, 25 years ago this was original stuff, okay?]

So, why read THIS book? Quite simply, it really IS is a darn good read. It has good guys, bad guys, interesting characters who undergo heroic trials, simpletons, Ubermensch, street performers, new looks at how technology changes human lives, insightful observations in to individual behaviors, and, long before "The Matrix" and "Neuromancer" were even dreamt of, a foggy Virtual Reality world in which a war is fought. [!??!]

So, get on board, give it a try, help yourself to some lemonade.

14 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing. Proves Oscar Wilde Wrong., March 8, 2004

By 

Andrea H. (New Jersey, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Fall of the Towers (Paperback)

Those who come to a Delany novel with preconceived notions inevitably will be disappointed, turning away in disgust and incomprehension, but those who approach his books with an open mind will invariably rewarded. In this brilliant early novel, composed in three parts, Delany examines a society on the verge of change and revolution through the eyes of a collection of laser-etched characters whose lives intersect in complicated and subtle ways. Delany's intelligence at 21 was fierce, and one of the beauties of this novel is the way it intertwines the intellectual and the everyday, how it is beautifully written and fiercely opinionated.

Though the action nominally concerns two gestalt beings from another universe, and their interactions with the empire of Toromon on Earth, Delany's true concern is human society in general, ours in particular, its cyclical fate and all-renewing possibility. It's not your typical science fiction. It's a thousand times better, science fiction idealized, then actualized.

I stayed up late to get to the end of the third volume, "City of a Thousand Suns," and closed the book with one word: "Amazing." Even more amazing, I truly meant it. Oscar Wilde famously said that anyone who seeks to write a novel in three parts knows nothing of Art and Life. Here, Delany gloriously proves him wrong.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars great read, October 22, 2004

By 

resident alien (Stillwater, OK USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Fall of the Towers (Paperback)

This is very different from Delany's later work (of which Triton is my favorite) being more accessible and lighter on hardcore philosophical theories. At the same time, the writing never falls short of brilliant, the storyline will keep you at the edge of your seat till the end, and the author's ideas about the social dynamics of race and sex in the future world are so far ahead if his time that it is hard to believe that the trilogy was finished in 1964.

But more than anything, it's a great story. Read it, and see for yourself.