Dhalgren was published by Bantam Books in January 1975. At 879 pages, it is one of the longest science fiction novels ever published — and one of the most controversial: simultaneously a million-copy bestseller (it went through sixteen printings by 1977) and a book despised by much of the SF establishment. Frederick Pohl called it unpublishable. Harlan Ellison said Delany was wasting his talent. Philip K. Dick, characteristically, called it a masterpiece.
The novel is set in Bellona, a fictional city somewhere in the American Midwest that has been struck by an undefined catastrophe: much of the population has fled; communications with the outside world have ceased; time has become unreliable (two moons sometimes appear in the sky; days may last hours or weeks); the remaining inhabitants have organized themselves into loose communes, work crews, and roving gangs called “scorpions.” Into this landscape arrives the Kid — an amnesiac, bisexual, half-Native American drifter who may or may not be a poet and who may or may not be insane.
The novel follows Kid through months (or years — time is unstable) in Bellona: his sexual relationships with both men and women; his involvement with the scorpions; his writing of a book of poems that may be the book the reader is reading; his encounter with the city’s few remaining bourgeois families. The structure is deliberately circular: the novel’s last sentence feeds into its first, creating an infinite loop. The final section becomes increasingly typographically experimental — columns overlap, margins shift, text interrupts itself.
Delany — who was twenty-eight when he wrote it, Black, gay, dyslexic, and already the author of ten novels — intended Dhalgren as a deliberate break with the genre conventions that had made him famous. It is a novel about the collapse of narrative itself: about what happens to storytelling when the structures that support it (linear time, stable identity, social order) dissolve. Its influence on subsequent experimental SF (Mark Z. Danielewski, Jeff VanderMeer, China Miéville) has been enormous.
Collecting Dhalgren
First edition (Bantam Books, New York, 1975): Mass-market paperback original — no hardcover first edition exists.
Market values:
- Bantam first printing (1975, paperback): $20–$60
- First hardcover (Gregg Press, 1977): $50–$150
- Signed copies: $100–$300
- Wesleyan University Press edition (2001, corrected text): $15–$30
The absence of a true hardcover first edition makes Dhalgren unusual among major SF collectibles. The Bantam paperback in fine condition (difficult — they were printed on cheap paper and read to destruction) is the primary target.