156 pages
Published 1962
Read from January 29 to January 30
Rating: 3 out of 5
My first attempt to read Delany was Dhalgren, which I purchased when I was 19. I held onto it for seventeen years before I gave it away. In that time, I never once made it past page two.
The allusive density of Delany’s mature prose never clicked with me, until I persevered through “The Tale of Dragons and Dreamers,” which I read last year in Masterpieces of Fantasy and Enchantment. By that time, my used paperback copies of Babel-17 and Tales of Neverÿon had gone the way of Dhalgren, given away unread. Bummer. Unlike the works of most of his contemporaries, Delany’s old pulps aren’t cheap on eBay, so it isn’t easy to get my hands on any replacements, either.
Why The Jewels of Aptor? It’s the sole Delany title available on Project Gutenberg!
It’s difficult to picture Aptor as it was originally published, as an Ace Double. For one thing, this book is actually pretty good. Delany’s prose doesn’t approach his later artistry, but it is crisp and it crackles with momentum, falling closer to something like Riddle-Master of Hed from the late ’70s than to, say, an Ace title like The Games of Neith from 1960. For another, Aptor is queer as fuck. Three of the main characters are: a poetic twink named Geo; a big bear of a man literally named Urson, who is Geo’s sworn “friend”; and the high priestess of the Goddess Argo, who is treated with immediate respect by the male characters and who never turns subservient. Urson playfully reaches around Geo’s waist for his coin purse. The priestess reminds Geo that he knows the spell for calming “the bear.” Later, the men get into a playful splashing match in a stream. I don’t think I’ve ever witnessed gay-coding this blatant in midcentury pulp.
The characters fit into what would become classic D&D templates: Geo is the knowledgeable bard, Urson is the muscle, a four-armed mutant boy named Snake is the rogue, and the priestess is the cleric-sorceress with inscrutable aims. (Another man, Iimmi, doesn’t fit as neatly into D&D classes, but maybe he could be an investigator.) There are three magic jewels caught up in a conflict between Leptar, where our heroes hail from, and the sinister land of Aptor. There are betrayals and red herrings. The same gods have multiple, conflicting factions and avatars. Geo isn’t sure who he can trust.
The setting is sword & sorcery with a post-apocalyptic sheen. Our heroes hunt in the jungle ruins of crumbled barracks buildings and crashed airplanes. A radio tower is agony to the psychic Snake. A living mass of goop clothes skeletons to pursue our heroes along an elevated highway. There’s even a gargantuan statue of a god that has a jewel in its head, waiting to be pilfered.
The plot does begin to sputter on its own fumes halfway through, but overall, the experience was a fun introduction to book-length Delany, at long last.
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