Rating: 
Summary: An interesting look at humanity.
Review: "Tales from Neveryon" examines many facets of human existence, from gender roles to marriage (the slight hint of S&M mentioned by a previous reviewer) to the way the devlopment of the concept of money has changed us. When you read this book you get a chance to step outside of human culture. For the first time you see, objectively, the forces at work within society and within us. You see the way the past shapes the present, and the way your preconceptions shape the way you perceive the world.This is an incredible book, well worth the time taken to read and understand its many complexities.
Rating:
Summary: An interesting look at humanity.
Review: "Tales from Neveryon" examines many facets of human existence, from gender roles to marriage (the slight hint of S&M mentioned by a previous reviewer) to the way the devlopment of the concept of money has changed us. When you read this book you get a chance to step outside of human culture. For the first time you see, objectively, the forces at work within society and within us. You see the way the past shapes the present, and the way your preconceptions shape the way you perceive the world. This is an incredible book, well worth the time taken to read and understand its many complexities.
Rating:
Summary: "A Child's Garden of Semiotics..."
Review: ...is what its author has called it, and that it is. The first novella in this book, Tale of Gurgik, I took as a quirky, Fantasy revision on coming-of-age stories like Dickens and Stendhal. Gurgik, an aristocrat, becomes a slave for six years and then stumbles back into bourgeois civilization. This story treats his acclimatization to the strange cultures of freedom and wealth. Tale of Old Venn is a sort of fantasy-novel introduction to literary criticism, played out in metaphors between an old woman and her disciple and friend. This story was my favorite; it introduces Delany's theories on the transition from currency to credit. The Tale of Small Sarg is an elegant and heartwarming portrayal of SM. (Sam Gamgee and Frodo will never look the same again!) I can't remember the names of the other stories and don't have the book on me at the moment (I've been lending it to everyone I know), so I'll defer to someone else for the rest. These synopses are to the actual stories roughly what velveeta is to gruyere, of course, a gross oversimplification. Delany's outlandish metaphors (those little rubber balls!) and surprisingly lucid forays into parts philosophic transform what could've been a preachy exercise in po-mo orthodoxies into an absolutely magical experience that must be read to be believed. The reader of this book will benefit from a bit of background in poststructuralism, but it's not necessary; in fact the story about Venn made more sense of Derrida than Derrida does himself. Delany would make a great addition to an introductory course on postcolonialism and semiotics. In fact, I wish I'd read this before I'd ever tried to tackle those people...
Rating:
Summary: Read the Series--Understand the Book
Review: Before anyone indulges in the luxury of on-line criticism, one should at least know (and respect) the correct spelling of the authors name. Samuel R. Delany (like the literal French for "of the New York", abbreviated), by his own admission, wrote Tales of Neveryon partly in repsonse to his own consumption of the Conan stories by Robert E. Howard, and Fritz Liebers (occasionally in collaboration with L. Sprague deCamp) Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser fantasy/fiction swords/sorcery stories. The French critics epigraphs which open the stories display SRDs depth of knowledge of literary criticism, although those critics and analysts of literature and society may no longer be popular. SRD also demonstrates his knowledge of archeology, ethnology, mathematics, physics, astronomy, and seamanship to a degree in all of the four (actually five, including Triton) books that are explicity about Neveryon, which itself is an intriguing "pun" or translation of a supposedly factual (it is, sadly, not) lost text or codex from repositories in Istanbul, Turkey (from which, only in 1906, the original proof by Archimedes for the volume and the area of the sphere were found in palimpsest form). SRD indulges in the use of arcane terminology, as well, not in a bombastic way, but in a manner that will make you curious to research the meaning of the word. The tales, overall, are delightful, fascinating, and relevant to modern times in more ways than any individual could express. One leads into the other in a logical fashion, except perhaps the last book, alternatively titled "The Bridge of Lost Desire" or "Return to Neveryon", and all four (excluding Triton, which I have not as yet read) make a cohesive and interlocked whole experience and pleasurable, thoughtful reading.
Rating: 
Summary: Poetic, if uneven
Review: Delaney is a stylist; I'll give him that. His prose often
sounds like poetry. It's especially noticeable in novels like _Nova._ Unfortunately, he has a tendency to be almost
incomprehensible (try _The Einstein Intersection._) Of course, some of _this_ book, which consists of five interlocked stories, in almost incomprehensible. Delaney makes the mistake of actually thinking some of the most irrelevant French philosophers make sense--he uses their quotes to open every story. The quality is very uneven. In one story he spends pages on his theory of money, and only shows he doesn't understand what is it. Right on the heels of that one he discusses his version of [phallic] envy. The last story in the book slightly indulges Delaney's...fantasies. The first story is a pretty good introduction to a decadent society, and the politics of court life. Overall, it's a very good book, not really sword-and-sorcery, or fantasy, or science fiction. Mostly, it's just Delaney. It won't appeal to everyone.
Rating:
Summary: Fantasy with a point
Review: If you're a big reader of fantasy, you might notice that sometimes the writers try to use their fantasy stories to make some sort of philosophical point, maybe try to comment on male/female relationships, or something equally weighty. More often than not, these come off as heavy-handed and clumsy, oversimplifying their point hideously to make sure everyone "gets it" and then hammering the same point home over the course of several books to the point of tediousness. Those type of books annoy the heck out of me. So it's nice to see someone actually doing it right with this book. Delany's fantasy world isn't strictly fantasy, per se (it has elements but is more like the world right when writing was first invented) but it's certainly not our world. So he creates this detailed world, shows it to us and then proceeds over the course of the stories in this book to make comments on our world and use the characters and situations to explore similar situations in the "real world". All of this is done without him standing up and screaming "Look! I'm being didactic!" and most of the time unless you're looking for the specific commentary, you won't even notice, that's how subtle it tends to be. Even better, Delany tends to just make his point and move, without laboring over the same idea in story after story. His ideas are different, too, than what you'd normally find in fantasy, it's not the usual "men and women don't understand each other" he looks into things like currency, the origins of feminism and the sexual nature of slavery. And even without the intellectual angle to these tales, they're entertaining in their own right, Delany's characters and settings are enormously exciting, and while there's not an overarching plot to the stories, characters do carry over from tale to tale and develop over time. And for all his examinations, Delany never forgets the most important thing about a story . . . keeping it interesting. His world is rendered with enough detail to fill several books and fortunately there were three other Neveryon books after this one. But those who think fantasy can't ever be smart should start here and see what else can be done with the genre. As fun as it is, it can't always boil down to "good versus evil."
Rating: 
Summary: Remarkable, if somewhat obtuse, look at civilization
Review: RETURN TO NEVERYON is the first collection of Samuel R. Delaney's Neveryon short stories, set in an unspecified land in the misty past which has just come into civilization. The first four tales in this volume are more or less independent, and the fifth ties them all together. Delaney uses the setting of a half-barbaric, half-civilized time to question and explore the institutions of modern man. Sexuality (often alternative), slavery, money (i.e. greed) and power are investigated with the result that civilization might not be the quantum leap away from barbarism that one would think. Delaney's characters, who are truly modern people, nonetheless are driven by the same primal urges that civilization is supposed to have supressed. Money is shown as a source of destruction of love between people, and matriarchy is unmasked as just as violent and cruel as pure patriarchy. Delaney's ideas are remarkable and original, and his characters and setting are truly captivating. The one fault, however, lies in his writing. Delaney tends to drone for pages on certain themes which make him sound dry and academic, and which occasionally draw away from his superb scenery. TALES OF NEVERYON is an okay read, and the concepts it presents are interesting, but the ho-hum writing style might destroy it for many readers.
Rating:
Summary: Enigmatic, lovely, and atypical
Review: Samuel Delany's Tales of Neveryon is a book which accomplishes something few ever have: it takes all of the basic elements of cliched sword & sorcery fantasy stories and weaves them into a suggestive, thought-provoking, allusive, and even haunting series of tales. None of these stories follows any sort of traditional plot structure -- some of them have only the barest hint of plot at all. And yet they are deeply compelling, for Delany has infused so many of the situations with intellectual substructures, simultaneously evoking a carefully-imagined fantasy world, well-developed characters, and profound philosophical speculations (and aggravations) touching on everything from economics to literary theory to political and social science. None of it is heavy-handed, though, and certainly not dogmatic -- if not for some slyly suggestive epigraphs at the beginning of each tale, the deeper implications of many of the stories would be easy to miss. The tales build on each other, and by the second half of the book, if you can juggle all of the echoes in your mind, the process of accumulation makes the experience of reading all the richer. By the end, the book feels a bit incomplete, because it has raised so many questions and introduced so many journeys that the reader is likely to hit the last page and think, "Where's the rest?" The rest is in the other books in the Neveryon series, and so though Tales of Neveryon is not complete in itself, there is a certain pleasure in knowing that the marvelous experience of reading this first book does not have to end.
Rating:
Summary: Enigmatic, lovely, and atypical
Review: Samuel Delany's Tales of Neveryon is a book which accomplishes something few ever have: it takes all of the basic elements of cliched sword & sorcery fantasy stories and weaves them into a suggestive, thought-provoking, allusive, and even haunting series of tales. None of these stories follows any sort of traditional plot structure -- some of them have only the barest hint of plot at all. And yet they are deeply compelling, for Delany has infused so many of the situations with intellectual substructures, simultaneously evoking a carefully-imagined fantasy world, well-developed characters, and profound philosophical speculations (and aggravations) touching on everything from economics to literary theory to political and social science. None of it is heavy-handed, though, and certainly not dogmatic -- if not for some slyly suggestive epigraphs at the beginning of each tale, the deeper implications of many of the stories would be easy to miss. The tales build on each other, and by the second half of the book, if you can juggle all of the echoes in your mind, the process of accumulation makes the experience of reading all the richer. By the end, the book feels a bit incomplete, because it has raised so many questions and introduced so many journeys that the reader is likely to hit the last page and think, "Where's the rest?" The rest is in the other books in the Neveryon series, and so though Tales of Neveryon is not complete in itself, there is a certain pleasure in knowing that the marvelous experience of reading this first book does not have to end.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent! Best of the Neveryon stories
Review: This is the first Delaney I've read, and so far, it is also the best. Great characters, great settings, great stories. If there is anything lacking, is that the other Neveryon books aren't up to the same level. (They are also very good, but not THIS good.) The other reveiwers have made some good points about why these stories are so good, but all I can say is read it yourself. It speaks for itself.
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