Flight from Nevèrÿon
Cover from the first edition
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| Author | Samuel R. Delany |
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| Cover artist | Rowena Morrill |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Series | Return to Nevèrÿon |
| Genre | Sword and Sorcery |
| Publisher | Bantam Books |
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Publication date
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1985 |
| Media type | Print (paperback) |
| Pages | 385 pp |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 12043382 |
| Preceded by | Neveryóna |
| Followed by | Return to Nevèrÿon |
Flight from Nevèrÿon is a collection of sword and sorcery stories by Samuel R. Delany. It is the third of the four-volume Return to Nevèrÿon series. This article discusses the three stories collected in the book. Discussions of overall plot, setting, characters, themes, structure, and style of the series are found in the main series article.
The following table of contents is from the most recent Wesleyan University Press edition:
In earlier editions, the novel The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals was listed as an appendix; the "Postscript", which brings the story of "Joey" (presumably based on a real person), one of the characters in Plagues and Carnivals, up to date, was not yet included; nor was the discussion with a reader, Robert Wentworth, of "Buffon's Needle," a mathematical reference to something that occurs in tale number six, the full-length novel Neveryóna.
The first story in the book (and the seventh overall tale in the Return to Nevèrÿon series), “The Tale of Fog and Granite,” is a short novel that basically tells of the many people trying to counterfeit Gorgik the Liberator throughout Nevèrÿon and to use a semblance of his project for their own ends. It dramatizes the problems this makes for a nameless young smuggler who has become fascinated by Gorgik and, though he has never met or seen him, is actively trying to find out anything and everything he can about him — rather like a fan pursuing all information available about a favorite rock singer.
In this same story, we learn how much Gorgik is trying to utilize the confusion these counterfeits cause. (The story contains an extraordinarily sympathetic critique of S&M practices, and how their meaning differs when they occur across different social power boundaries.)
When, indeed, after some harrowing adventures brought about by the pursuit of his obsession with Gorgik, the young smuggler (rescued by Raven) finally gets to meet his hero almost by chance, he cannot even be sure that he has met the true Gorgik — so that he and, moreover, the reader must begin to wonder if there can even be, in such a political hall of mirrors, any such “truth” — or at least a truly effective force for liberation. Is political success perhaps, as Gorgik himself seems to feel, a matter of learning how to organize the mirrors around the hall?
The next story (the eighth), “The Mummer’s Tale,” abandons Gorgik almost entirely, to tell of the young smuggler’s youth as an adolescent hustler on the Bridge of Lost Desire in Kolhari — and his relationship, over a twenty-year period that takes him from sixteen to thirty-six, with an actor in a traveling mummer’s troupe. Here the doubling that works through all the tales is with a silent auditor to the mummer’s story, a man whom we learn is a teacher, a philosopher, a lover and supporter of the arts (a democratic minded prince, who has given up his title to pursue his intellectual work), and who has known the narrator over the same period, and has been his friend over the same twenty years — but has never met with or known till now the mummer’s petty criminal friend.
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