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.

Barbarian tribes live to the south: a people with pale skin, yellow hair, and light eyes.

But the barbarians were for many years the slaves of the dominant brown-skinned culture, especially for mining and agriculture (as we learn in both “The Tale of Gorgik” and Neveryóna) – and in many places still are.

But all take a greater or lesser part in recounting an overall story running through the whole series, the history of a man called Gorgik the Liberator.

The first appendix to the novel Neveryóna is an exchange of letters between a fictive character, S. L. Kermit (who also appears in "Plagues and Carnivals" and is the "author" of the appendix to the first volume, Tales of Nevèrÿon) and one Charles Hoequist, Jr., who, unlike the fictitious Steiner and Kermit, is an actual person—a graduate student in linguistics at Yale University during the early eighties when Delany was first writing the stories.

Science fiction and the fantasy subgenre "sword and sorcery" (the term was coined by science fiction writer Fritz Leiber, author of the sword-and-sorcery series, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser) both have a history of “series” stories—sets of tales with continuing characters and/or continuing locations.

In that Introduction he wrote: For sword and sorcery to be at its best, one needs a landscape that is ‘on the brink of civilization’ in an almost scientifically ideal way.

In the same interview he says that the story series is, in many ways, closer to the continuous modernist “longpoem,” such as Ezra Pound’s Cantos or Robert Duncan’s “Structure of Ryme” or “Passages,” Anne Waldman’s Jovis, or Rachel Blau Du Plessis’s Drafts.

Others important influences are the work of the French psychiatrist Jacques Lacan (discussed in parts of the appendix, "Closures and Openings", in the final volume, Return to Nevèrÿon), as well as critical theory in general.

Through the course of Return to Nevèrÿon, Delany connects it to a larger project, "Some Informal Remarks Toward the Modular Calculus".

Kermit's discussion even takes in a theory by an actual archaeologist who did her work in the early eighties, Denise Schmandt-Besserat, which proposes an earlier "token" writing using sculpted beads for words and ideas; according to Schmandt-Besserat, the earliest cuneiform writing that we have today is a matter of these "tokens" first pressed into clay to leave an imprint.

Starting with Trouble of Triton, the “Informal Remarks” are constituted by the sections in which the doubling (discussed earlier in this article) has most to do with writing.

In "Closures and Openings” (in Return to Nevèrÿon), section 15 discusses the Modular Calculus directly, for those who need a helping hand or who have not carefully pursued the notion for themselves through all the "Informal Remarks".