Genre: Erotica, Literary Fiction
LGBTQ+ Category: Gay
Reviewer: Jim
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About The Book
An uproarious and scandalous Southern picaresque by the master Samuel R. Delany.
A chance encounter with two older fellows at the movie theater has the young vagabond Ligie on his way to Lot-8, a trailer park down the road with an unconventional local reputation. There, Ligie meets Big Joe and his extended Lot-8-family: a loose-knit community of freaks all sectioned together by the landlord at the outskirts of town. Weaving together colorful characters and outright carnal debauchery, Big Joe is a radical pastoral of community, desire, and the strangeness of knowing one another.
The Review
As a winner of multiple awards and a long-lasting (sixty years and counting) member of the science fiction community, Samuel “Chip” Delany should need no introduction. But the general dominance of film and television SF, from which Delany is largely absent, means that some fans haven’t heard of him. So, who is this man, the author of “Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones”, “Aye, and Gomorrah”, Babel-17, and The Einstein Intersection (his Hugo and Nebula winners)?
Briefly, Delany is a pioneer in three ways. One, he was the first out gay man to publish SF. Second, apart from early fantasists such as George Schuyler and Pauline Hopkins, he was the first person of color to publish science fiction and fantasy. Third, his profound scholarship in literary theory has resulted in numerous non-fiction works studying the field of SF and other paraliteratures. He remains active as of 2026, though in his eighties, often working with scholar Bill Wood.
His work, like Robert Heinlein’s, is easily divisible into periods, with an early period of fantasy and space opera, a backbreaking magnum opus (Dhalgren) in 1975, a fantasy series (“Neveryon”), memoirs in several volumes, and a series of unusual sexual works (“anti-pornography”, in his terms) since that time. While some readers prefer one period or novel, this review addresses the most recent novel-length work from Delany, Big Joe.
The plot resembles that of other later Delany works such as Shoat Rumblin and Through The Valley of the Nest of Spiders. A youth, named Ligie, encounters two gay men in a pornographic movie theater. He has sex with them and then accompanies them back to their home, “Lot-8”, a community of sorts which includes the titular Joe. Gay sex is more or less the norm in the community.
The novel includes lengthy scenes of sex, farting, and urination. There is no plot which I could discern, but an episodic (episodomitic?) series of scenes of eroticism, food preparation, and excretion. Unlike Shoat Rumblin, this book contains no shit-eating. The story ends with Ligie accepting this community as a new group of friends. The novel has nice illustrations, often of naked men. A large number of Delany’s works include good illustrations. There is mention of AIDS and of PreP, but the air of the book is timeless.
What are we to make of this? I am not sure that this is the ideal introduction to Delany’s work. In fact, some readers will be disgusted at the sleazy tale and liken it to the aging Robert Heinlein’s fixation on incest and sex with multiple partners (To Sail Beyond the Sunset). Some will compare to Delany’s earlier The Mad Man and Hogg, and label it as “anti-pornography”. Big Joe has little of Hogg’s philosophy or Dhalgren’s textual complexity. If it is meant to be anti-pornographic, “anti” has more or less left the building.
I genuinely hope that Delany publishes more science fiction. But it has been many years since he has done so. I liked the homely descriptions of meal preparation, and the characters’ liking for each other, but it never crossed over into love. “Realistic”? I have not had similar experiences, and so I cannot comment.
I am not sure to whom I can recommend this book.
The Reviewer
Jim is a sci-fi author and reviewer who lives in Sacramento, California.
