The Jewels of Aptor #1962club

The Jewels of Aptor, by Samuel R. Delany (1962). ~~Please note that I do not believe it is possible to “spoil” a book that is old enough to have a senior citizens’ bus pass, but the following makes details of the plot explicit.~~

Before we begin: I love this cover so much. It manages to be simultaneously pulpy and beautiful, which is precisely the vibe of early Delany, at least in my experience.

The Jewels of Aptor is the first published novel of Samuel R. Delany, a Black, openly queer pioneer of science fiction who is still producing work (albeit less sci fi now, more literary criticism and gay pornography). He is a living legend. If you’ve never heard of him, let me strongly recommend this recent New Yorker profile to give you a sense of the man and his writing. I’ve only read one novel by him previously, the slim but packed-full-of-ideas-and-I-really-must-reread-it linguistic space opera Babel-17. The Jewels of Aptor was published when he was still in his teens, but contains within it some extraordinarily beautiful passages of writing, and casually groundbreaking characterisation. That’s one of the fun things about Delany: how he does what he does without signposting it or grandstanding about it. As if it is the most natural thing in the world.

The plot, such as it is, revolves around the titular jewels, which—sort of like another famous fantasy accessory—grant their bearers immense powers of mind control and elemental destructiveness while also corrupting the soul. Poet Geo and his gigantic companion Urson are tasked by the human avatar of the White Goddess Argo to rescue her kidnapped sister from the menacing island-nation Aptor and to steal the final jewel from Aptor’s god, Argo’s opposing force, the Black God Hama. They are joined by a mute, four-armed teenager with telepathic powers, known as Snake, and a black sailor named Iimmi. As they journey across Aptor, they encounter strange creatures—werewolves, murderous bat-people, enigmatically helpful merfolk, and a giant sentient slime-mould—which, it becomes clear to the reader, are mutations created in consequence of nuclear fallout. In Geo and Urson’s home country, Leptar, there are also mutations, although everyone still looks humanoid; mutants are referred to as Strange Ones, and Snake’s four arms mark him as one of them.

So we’re dealing here with the medieval-feeling-fantasy-world-that-is-actually-post-apocalyptic, a setting that I enjoy enormously (for other instances, see Robert Harris’s The Second Sleep, N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season, Leigh Brackett’s The Long Tomorrow, and Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun, inter alia). Delany’s characters are aware of something they refer to as the Great Fire, a rain of ash and flame that killed most life, but there’s little in the way of culture shock when Geo, Urson and co. reach Aptor and see things like video screens, microphones, and the ruins of a nuclear research facility. They simply fit these phenomena into forms they can understand (uranium is fire metal, the video screens are large slabs of glass that contain moving images) and carry on. This feels like a key to Delany’s project here and as a whole: the astonishing simply absorbed, folded, into the everyday, and the everyday containing the astonishing. Does it not make sense, after all, that people who believe in gods and magic would actually have little difficulty accepting the existence of diodes, broadcast technology, and radiation?

Delany once said something about how plot doesn’t much matter, except as it arises from characters, and indeed the plot here is a bit thin. The characters, however, are quietly revelatory. Geo, for example, is exposed to high levels of radiation while in Aptor and has an arm amputated. His sudden disability is something he adapts to, for which other characters readily make accommodations (Urson helps him when they have to climb a mountain, reminding him that he doesn’t need to push himself to exhaustion; the others will match his pace). There’s a moment near the end where the idea of a “miracle cure” to replace his arm is treated more as an amusing fancy than a definite, desirable goal; Geo will probably have one arm forever, and that will be just fine. Iimmi, meanwhile, is repeatedly described as dark-skinned (as is the avatar of the god Hama, who turns out not to be a villain at all), and is a full member of the group—not a supporting character or a sidekick, but an active decision-maker, a participant, adventurer and game-changer who knows more about the mythology and history they’re dealing with than any of them. Four-armed, tongueless Snake is just as much a comrade: they fight to protect him, and he fights to protect them. When Urson dies, Snake conveys his final thoughts to Geo: they are of love, cementing the homoerotic hints about the nature of Urson’s and Geo’s relationship that have been scattered throughout the novel. Young Argo, the supposedly kidnapped sister, is actually studying electrical engineering in the monastery of Hama, and functionally rescues herself; the novel’s final scene shows her constructing a basic motor. I think a novel published in 2023 that built a team out of queer men, disabled people, people of colour, and young female scientists would be considered fairly progressive. Delany is doing it [checks math] sixty-one years ago, with the utmost casualness.

The Jewels of Aptor is a short, but thoroughly delightful, reading experience. Delany’s writing is simply beautiful, and some of his most poetic passages are scene-setting, though he never lets it go on too long—a paragraph, generally, at most. I’ll leave you with his description of what the group sees when they look down into the crater of a volcano:

Gold dribbled the internal slope. Tongues of red rock lapped the sides, and the swirling white basin belched brown blobs of smoke which rose up the far rocks and spilled over the brim a radion away. Light leapt in wavering pylons of blue flame, then sank back into the pit. Winding trails of light webbed the crater’s walls, and at places ebon cavities jeweled among the light.

The Jewels of Aptor, chapter IX

“Ebon cavities jeweled”. Just lovely.