Return to Nevèrÿon collects three sword and sorcery

Sword and sorcery

Sword and sorcery is a sub-genre of fantasy and historical fantasy, generally characterized by sword-wielding heroes engaged in exciting and violent conflicts. An element of romance is often present, as is an element of magic and the supernatural...

 stories by Samuel R. Delany

Samuel R. Delany

Samuel Ray Delany, Jr., also known as "Chip" is an American author, professor and literary critic. His work includes a number of novels, many in the science fiction genre, as well as memoir, criticism, and essays on sexuality and society.His science fiction novels include Babel-17, The Einstein...

, along with an appendix: "The Game of Time and Pain," "The Tale of Rumor and Desire," and "The Tale of Gorgik," and "Appendix: Closures and Openings." It is the last of the four-volume Return to Nevèrÿon

Return to Nevèrÿon (series)

Return to Nevèrÿon is a series of eleven “sword and sorcery” stories by Samuel R. Delany, originally published in four volumes during the years 1979-1987...

 series. The collection was first published under the title The Bridge of Lost Desire.

This article discusses the three stories collected in the book. Discussions of overall plot, setting, characters, themes, structure, and style of the series are found in the main series article.

Contents

1987 edition as The Bridge of Lost Desire (Arbor House

Arbor House

Arbor House was an independent publishing house founded by Donald Fine in 1969. Specialising in hard cover publications, Arbor House published works by Hortense Calisher, Ken Follett, Cynthia Freeman, Elmore Leonard and Irwin Shaw before being acquired by the Hearst Corporation in 1979 to move into...

)

• "The Game of Time and Pain"
• "The Tale of Rumor and Desire"
• "The Tale of Gorgik"
• “Return...” A Preface by K. Leslie Steiner (Delany)

1988 edition as The Bridge of Lost Desire (St. Martin's Press

St. Martin's Press

St. Martin's Press is a book publisher headquartered in the Flatiron Building in New York City. Currently, St. Martin's Press is one of the United States' largest publishers, bringing to the public some 700 titles a year under eight imprints, which include St. Martin's Press , St...

)

The first paperback edition was identical in content to the 1988 edition, but with cover art by fantasy and comics artist Blas Gállego in the style of previous first editions of the series. The cover is notable as the first in the series to represent the main character as dark-skinned; previous covers in the series had substituted white characters for the people of color described in the books.

1989 edition as Return to Nevèrÿon (Grafton

Grafton (publisher)

Grafton was a British paperback imprint established circa 1981 by Granada Publishing Ltd, a subsidiary of media company Granada Group Ltd. It was named after the publishing company's then address, 8 Grafton Street, in central London...

)

• "The Game of Time and Pain"
• "The Tale of Rumor and Desire"
• "The Tale of Gorgik"
• "Closures and Openings"
• "Buffon’s Needle" by Robert Wentworth & Samuel R. Delany

1994 edition as Return to Nevèrÿon (Wesleyan University Press

Wesleyan University Press

Wesleyan University Press is a university press that is part of Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. The Press is currently directed by Suzanna Tamminen, a published poet and essayist...

)

Identical to the 1989 edition, but omits "Buffon's Needle".

The Game of Time and Pain

In the tenth and chronologically final tale in the series, “The Game of Time and Pain” (1985), we find out that Gorgik has been successful in his political campaign to end slavery officially throughout the land of Nevèrÿon. The political question becomes: How does the nation deal intelligently with this sudden population of freed slaves? This Gorgik narrates to one of his young sexual partners, a barbarian boy named Udrog, when the two find themselves together in an abandoned castle for the night, just before the passing of a funeral procession of one of Gorgik’s major political adversaries. Other than the first tale, this is the only one in which Gorgik is on stage for the majority of the action.

The Tale of Rumor and Desire

The last of the tales, “The Tale of Rumor and Desire” (1987) goes back in time to give us a full and emotionally rich portrait of a character called Clodon, whom we have seen before (in “The Tale of Fog and Granite”), but who has been fairly minor till now. During the outlaw days of Gorgik the Liberator, when his rebellion was at its most violent, while Gorgik was a hero to many, he was a villain to many others. In an age and a nation where there is no media, numerous people have taken to pretending they are Gorgik the Liberator, some for good and some for evil, for their own ends. In “Fog and Granite” we saw Clodon do exactly this. “Rumor and Desire” gives us a set of mosaic pieces from Clodon’s life before he decided to take on the Liberator’s identity in order to be a more effective highway bandit. As Delany writes in the voice of “K. Leslie Steiner,” in the introduction to the entire project (“Return . . . a preface,” in Tales of Nevèrÿon

Tales of Nevèrÿon

Tales of Nevèrÿon collects a preface and five sword and sorcery stories by Samuel R. Delany; and finally an appendix. The stories are "The Tale of Gorgik," "The Tale of Old Venn," "The Tale of Small Sarg," "The Tale of Potters and Dragons," and "The Tale of Dragons and Dreamers." It is the first...

), the eleventh and final written story, “The Tale of Rumor and Desire”:

The Tale of Gorgik

While the events of “Rumor and Desire” take place during, or just after, the events of Neveryóna (whose main character is a fifteen-year-old girl, Pryn, who runs away from her village to start traveling around Nevèrÿon, and who, for the first third of the novel, falls in with Gorgik’s revolutionary activities when its efforts are centered in Kolhari itself), it has always been published at the end, before a recapitulation of the very first story, “The Tale of Gorgik.” The movement back in time from the temporal end (“The Game of Time and Pain”) through “Rumor and Desire” to the beginning of the cycle (“The Tale of Gorgik”), is more satisfying: even in terms of plot, mysteries are clarified in the first story that many readers do not even notice on their initial read through it at the start of volume one and can only catch on a second reading after they have read the other tales. That first story mentions, in passing, for example, that Gorgik often hears a barbarian word, “nivu,” but never learns its meaning. When, in the repeated first tale, one comes to re-encounter this fact after having read the rest of the series, it takes on an entirely different significance.