The Einstein Intersection was published by Ace Books in 1967 and won the Nebula Award for Best Novel. Delany wrote it while traveling through Greece, Turkey, and Italy — and the mythological landscapes he moved through permeate the book: it is a novel saturated in myth, structured by myth, and ultimately about the tyranny of myth.
The premise: humanity has left Earth (or evolved beyond it, or simply vanished). The beings who now inhabit the planet are aliens who have taken on human forms and human cultural patterns without fully understanding them. They live out human myths — birth, death, love, violence — as if following scripts they cannot read. The protagonist, Lobey, is a musician in a fishing village who embarks on a quest to retrieve his dead lover, Lo, from the underworld — replaying the Orpheus myth without knowing he is doing so.
But the myths do not fit. Lobey is not Orpheus (or not only Orpheus — he is also Ringo Starr, Billy the Kid, Christ). The intersections between myths — the “Einstein Intersection” of the title, where parallel narrative structures cross and interfere — produce distortions, mutations, monsters. The novel’s villains are those who try to force experience into mythic patterns; its heroes are those who refuse the script.
Delany’s own journal entries appear as epigraphs to each chapter — notes on his travels, on Rimbaud, on music, on race (Delany was writing as a young Black man in the 1960s, and the novel’s concern with beings trapped in forms not their own resonates with racial as well as mythological meaning). The novel is short (barely 150 pages), dense, lyrical, and deliberately fractured — a palimpsest of overlapping narratives that never quite resolve.
Collecting The Einstein Intersection
First edition (Ace Books, New York, 1967): Mass-market paperback original (Ace F-427).
Market values:
- Ace first edition (fine condition): $20–$50
- First hardcover (Gollancz, London, 1968): $50–$150
- Signed copies: $75–$200
- Wesleyan University Press edition (corrected text): $12–$20
The Gollancz hardcover is the first hardcover appearance and commands premium prices. The Ace paperback is common but rarely found in fine condition.