At the young age of 20, classic science fiction author Samuel R. Delany wrote his first novel. The Jewels of Aptor proved to be an auspicious beginning. Post-apocalypse fiction is nothing new and it probably started as a literary reaction to the Cold War in the years right after the nuclear bombing of Japan at the end of World War II. Fantasy fiction is nothing new either. Who knows when that genre actually began. Was it The Epic of Gilgamesh or the Egyptian Book Of the Dead? It was definitely something ancient. I imagine the fantasy genre as we know it today also took off in popularity during the Cold War as a means of escapism from the perceived threat of nuclear war. The ever-innovative Delany ties the two concepts together in this short debut.
The tone and framing of the story are set in the opening chapter when a female student and her teacher sit on a beach discussing religious concepts of good and evil, the Taoist symbol of yin and yang, and the art of Da Vinci depicting both the ugliness of Christ’s crucifixion and the beauty of the Mona Lisa. The identity of the girl and her teacher and the significance of the beach become more relevant towards the latter parts of the story. The theme of the co-existence and interdependence of good and evil, light and dark, is primed to be its meaning, at least theoretically.
The novel quickly shifts to the wharf of a seaside city named Leptor where we get introduced to the main characters. Geo, a poet and a student, is walking at night with his friend Urson, a large sized man, when a young boy tries to rob them. After that incident. They get hired for a mission on a ship called the Argo which is probably a reference to the Greek mythological poem The Voyage Of the Argos. The young thief, who has an extra set of arms and no tongue, gets hired as their companion after agreeing to work with them instead of against them. The thief, who cannot talk but can communicate with telepathy, is given the name Snake. The priestess who hires the group sends them on to retrieve her daughter, named Argo, supposedly being held captive on Aptor by Hama, a rival religious group. They are also assigned to steal a jewel from the temple where she is being held. The priestess of Argo is in possession of a jewel that comes from a set of three. Another one belongs to Geo, and the third is the one she is after. Possessing all three simultaneously will give her ultimate power. Sound familiar? I’m guessing that Tolkien’s The Lord Of the Rings is a major influence on this novel.
One major line that the story follows is that of solving the mystery of what exactly is going on. Who the priestess and Snake are, why Snake’s tongue was cut out, and why so few people ever return from Aptor alive are used as literary hooks to engage the reader. The other major line the novel follows is that of finding the temple where the daughter and the jewel are kept; from that angle the story is mostly just fantasy, action, and adventure, a lot like the exotic fantasy/sci-fi stories that appeared in pulp magazines during the Golden Age of science fiction. After sailors on the Argo start getting murdered, Geo, Urson, and Snake escape from the ship and land on Aptor where they meet a Black man named Iimmi on the beach. Aside from simply adding another member to the group, it isn’t obvious why Iimmi is included in the story. He doesn’t do anything that couldn’t be done by the others and he doesn’t detract from the story either. He simply just seems to be an extra character. The fact that he is Black doesn’t carry any obvious meaning either as the book isn’t really about racial relations. All I think is that Samuel R. Delany is African-American and wanted to include a Black character for that reason, even if Iimmi is just an arbitrary one. Anyhow, he gets along perfectly well with the other three so maybe that is the whole point.
What happens throughout the rest of the book is mostly action, pure and simple. The world of this novel is a post-apocalyptic one where civilization had been destroyed leaving only traces of things like crashed airplanes, burned out cities, and nuclear waste, all of which are present on Aptor. Nobody knows precisely what happened although it is suggested it was nuclear war, something that caused surviving people and animals to mutate in all kinds of fantastic directions. So as the band of men hack their way through the lush jungle, they encounter the ruins of that past civilization, fighting off all kinds of monsters and befriending some others.
When they enter a derelict city, they get contaminated by radiation then get rescued by a religious order made up entirely of blind women clothed in white. The females imprison them, but they plan to escape after learning the priestess intends to sacrifice them to their goddess. As interesting as this passage may be, I found a flaw that I couldn’t square with the rest of the story. The women in the temple heal the wounds the men receive after being exposed to radiation and I wonder why they do this considering their ultimate plan is to kill them. Furthermore, Geo and Iimmi are both scholars of the same religion so the temple women allowed them to read the manuscripts they keep in their library. Those two things don’t add up in light of what they intended to do with the men. Is this the yin circle inside the yang, or can it just be written off as short sightedness on the part of the author who was 20 at the time of writing? My guess is that it is the latter.
After escaping, the small band of scholar-adventurers wind up in another temple, this time inhabited entirely by men wearing black robes. Well, almost entirely since there is one female there. And guess who she is. Upon their return to the ship of Argo, all the mysteries are solved, all the questions are answered, and all the meanings are explained. That last aspect is a little weak since the meaning of the whole book is about a religious, mystical insight involving the island of Aptor, but that insight isn’t especially profound. Older, experienced readers won’t be impressed. This novel doesn’t offer anything as mind-blowing as the works of William Blake. If you want to approach that level, I would advise you to check out the later novels of Samuel R. Delany which do go pretty deep.
As juvenile as the whole story may be, this first novel does have a lot to offer. Delany’s ability to describe imaginary places and creatures so vividly is far beyond the ability of most writers of fiction, possibly even genius. Aside from top quality world building, the character development is of a high standard as well. Once the characters are introduced, it is impossible to forget them. But the story does start to drag about the time the group reaches the temple of Hama on Aptor, mostly because there is so much action paired with so little meaning in a novel that starts off promising loads of symbolism and mystical insight, but later becoming obvious that it is unable to deliver on those points. Also the plot hooks are introduced effectively, but lack originality; you can imagine this stylistic element being inspired by Delany reading detective novels while in high school. That’s not necessarily bad; it’s just that it marks the writing out as the work of a naive artist. It almost gives the impression you might get from the plot development of a Scooby Doo episode.
One interesting thing to note is the parallels between this early novel and Delany’s later magnum opus Dhalgren. The poet and group leader Geo easily corresponds to the poet and gang leader Kid in that novel. Urson also bears a strong resemblance to the character Nightmare. The ambiguous identity of Snake is a theme that crops up all over Dhalgren while the student and goddess incarnate Argo, being held in the temple of Hama bears a resemblance to the reanaissance woman Lanya. The three jewels that can be used as both weapons and lights are a little like the strings of jewels worn by some characters in Dhalgren. And the post-apocalyptic city on Aptor is a pre-configuration of Bellona.
Despite its flaws, The Jewels of Aptor is a fun novel to read and fans of Samuel R. Delany’s later works will find it interesting because a few of its elements show up in his later works. It doesn’t embody any profound or meaningful ideas, but the author obviously tried. For a 20 year old, this actually is a major accomplishment. I’ve taught college level writing courses myself and I don’t want to discourage anybody by saying this, but I have never had a student who showed as much promise as an author at that age than Delany did in this novel. He must have been born with a natural talent.
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