No splendor, misery

I didn’t know.

Samuel R. Delany’s Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand is the first of his books I read, and it sent me on a frantic search for anything else of his I could get my hands on. It’s the first half of a diptych, the second to be titled The Splendor and Misery of Bodies, of Cities.

“To be titled.” Yes, I just learned that it hasn’t been written, which (since Stars was published in 1984) suggests pretty strongly that it never will be.

Which is a tragic loss, if something that never existed can be lost, or a tragic absence if it can’t.