One of Delaney's other devices is the idea of "plexity" (simplex, complex, multiplex) as a level of thought development, both for cultures and individuals. It's unclear if the Lll are ever freed, or just freed sometimes. I can't determine if this is a simple closed time loop or an iterative one, where each cycle develops a little differently. The same characters appear several times: They initially appear with different identities, but these identities are later mapped onto the same few characters. Events in the middle of the text are part of the backstory we see at the beginning. The most fundamental device is the cyclic nature of the story, where the events at the end of the text cause the events at the beginning to happen (in fact, there are several overlapping loops). However, as the story progresses, a number of Delaney's experimental storytelling devices come to the fore and squeeze out the Hero's Quest, which gets compressed into a few paragraphs towards the end. He just doesn't know what that message is yet. Delaney's short novel Empire Star initially develops like a garden-variety bildungsroman: Comet Jo abandons his simplex lifestyle to deliver a message that he's been tasked with. (Note: I was going to ask "Is Empire Star simplex, complex, or multiplex?"Īfter what must be the single most transportative hook in all of Science Fiction, Samuel R.
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