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. Those volumes are:

The eleven tales are discussed in the articles devoted to the individual volumes mentioned above. The rest of this article is dedicated to the series as a whole.

The eleven tales that make up Return to Nevèrÿon are set before the dawn of history. Nevèrÿon (pronounced "Ne-VER-y-on" according to the preface to "Tales of Nevèrÿon") is the land the stories are set in, a name derived from the aristocratic neighborhood of Neveryóna (pronounced "Ne-ver-y-O-na") in the capital city Kolhari. The modern-day geographical location of Nevèrÿon is never made clear. The men and women of the reigning civilization have brown to black skin. Barbarian tribes live to the south: a people with pale skin, yellow hair, and light eyes. By the time the stories start, clearly some amount of racial mixing has occurred. 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.

Many of the stories have different protagonists and, indeed, different sets of foreground characters. 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.

Currently the eleven stories are collected in four volumes, put out by Wesleyan University Press. At the end of the fourth book, Return to Nevèrÿon (1996), the first tale is reprinted, to emphasize the cyclic nature of the series. The tales themselves are discussed in the articles devoted to each individual volume.

A number of the Nevèrÿon stories are novella (or short-novel) length, including the seventh tale, "The Tale of Fog and Granite" (1984), the ninth tale and the first novel-length treatment of AIDS from a major U.S. publisher, “The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals” (1984), the tenth tale, "The Game of Time and Pain" (1985), and the eleventh, "The Tale of Rumor and Desire" (1987). The sixth story, Neveryóna, or: The Tale of Signs and Cities (1981), is a full-length 380 page novel. As well, a set of appendices and an over-all introduction are fixed to the project, all of which have elements that make them part of the fiction. The introduction to the first volume of stories, Tales of Nevèrÿon, is presumably written by a young black woman academic, "K. Leslie Steiner", for example, who turns out to be a character in the ninth tale, "The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals". 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.

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