The Motion of Light in Water by Samuel R. Delany

Delany was the subject of a 2007 documentary, The Polymath, by Fred Barney Taylor, and he has written a popular creative writing textbook, About Writing. Other novels include Equinox, Hogg, and The Mad Man. His 2007 novel Dark Reflections won the Stonewall Book Award. Most recently, he has written the SF novel Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders. His four-volume series Return to Nevèrÿon is sword-and-sorcery. His novels include science fiction such as the Nebula-Award winning Babel-17 and The Einstein Intersection, as well as Nova and Dhalgren. His collection Atlantis: Three Tales and Phallos are experimental fiction. Delany’s science fiction and fantasy tales are available in Aye and Gomorrah and Other Stories. In 2013, he was named the 31st Damon Knight Memorial Foundation Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. He was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2002, by which time he'd also been chosen by the Lambda Literary Report as one of the 50 people who had done the most to change our view of gayness in the last half-century. Delany had won four Nebula Awards and a Hugo Award by the time he was 27. But the image stayed, unsettlingly, for a while.A novelist and critic who taught literature and creative writing at the University of Massachusetts and Temple University, Samuel R. I never saw him again, though I looked for him. I wanted to talk with him afterward, but he zipped up once we were finished and hurried away. But that's it.' And I realized that, either from medical procedure or something else, the first inch or so had been amputated. That's when he said, a little hoarsely, 'That's what there is. It ended in a kind of flat stump, like a sawed-off dowel, without the collar or taper of glans, making me think he was uncircumcised.

For its thickness and harness it was too short. Holding it, I realized something was wrong with it, but, for the moment, couldn't quite figure what. I stood a stall away from him, and we glanced at each other. There was only one guy at the urinal, a tall workman in greens and scuffed orange construction boots- which had, only in the last year or so, become standard wear for the nation's laborers. I pushed into the yellow-tiled space, with its dim, caged light-bulbs. I'd never gone into that one before, perhaps because I usually came there with Marilyn.

On my way up to the Bronx, when I got off at the 175th Street station, I decided to stop in and see what sort of sexual activity was going on in the subway john there. “17.2 One evening I was to meet Marilyn up at her mother's apartment for our ritual Friday night dinner.

The Motion of Light in Water by Samuel R. Delany