o Lobey is an alien living on an Earth long abandoned by humanity. He and his people exist among the remnants of human society: ruined cities, intriguing scraps of advanced technology and, most of all, myths about ancient heroes from Billy the Kid and Jean Harlow to Elvis and Ringo Starr.
Despite strict rules requiring adults to mingle their genes as widely as possible, Lobey's people must cope with a staggering rate of birth defects and genetic mutation. Some individuals vary so far from the "norm" that they are kept caged from birth until their—usually miserable—deaths. Others are considered functional enough to live among the population despite minor abnormalities like unusually large feet or an inability to speak. Still others possess psychic abilities like telekinesis and telepathy. Lobey, a gifted musician, is able to pull scraps of music from the minds of others. He plays these tunes on his prize possession, a flute whose body doubles as the blade of a sword.
For a time, Lobey is happy to spend his days herding goats with his best friends and collecting scraps of music. Then he meets Friza and falls in love. The couple's period of happiness is brief: Someone is killing psychics, and Friza is one of the murderer's early victims.
Grief-stricken and bent on revenge, Lobey leaves the village of his birth with one goal in mind: To retrieve Friza from the land of the dead by confronting her killer, a dangerous, shark-toothed entity known as Kid Death.
Short yet somehow epic
Winner of the 1967 Nebula Award for Best Novel, Samuel R. Delany's The Einstein Intersection is a bizarre musical meditation on the power of myth and the imprints a culture's stories and songs can leave
behind when its people are long gone. The narrative is broken with quotes by writers like James Joyce and the Marquis de Sade, with slogans from soda commercials and occasionally by passages from Delany's writing journal—notes on the author's travels to Greece and other locales as well as his plans for Lobey and Kid Death as they circle ever closer to their confrontation.
Delany's language is poetic and visceral at once: packed with beautiful turns of phrase and quicksilver flashes of hilarity. His images juxtapose the raw materials of dream and nightmare: Lobey's exquisite sword-flute, for example, with its pure harmonies and murderously sharp blade. The offbeat humanity of his otherworldly characters, as they constantly allow themselves to be drawn into playing out harrowing old Earth tales like the story of Jesus, never fails to
touch the heart.
With The Einstein Intersection, Delany dips into the subject of difference: His aliens are obsessed with reproducing themselves along as humanlike a template as possible. It is no accident that Friza's murderer targeted her because she is telekinetic. Lobey's society reacts in the usual way of peoples whose outcasts are being preyed upon—by speaking of the subject only in whispers, by scapegoating the victims, by venerating an acceptable few. Meanwhile they urge the unfortunate remainder of the "different" population to keep under the radar, to pretend to be normal.
Enchanting, tragic and always a bit mysterious, The Einstein Intersection is as alive and relevant today as it was 38 years ago—truly a book as ageless as the myths that form the bedrock of its storyline.
