The Jewels of Aptor

The Jewels of Aptor
	First edition
Author	Samuel R. Delany
Cover artist	Jack Gaughan
Language	English
Genre	Science Fantasy
Publisher	Ace Books
Publication date	1962
Publication place	United States
Media type	Print (Paperback)
Pages	156 pp
OCLC	1625608

The Jewels of Aptor is a 1962 science fantasy novel by Samuel R. Delany, his first published novel. It first appeared in shortened form as an Ace Double F-173 together with Second Ending by James White.

From the 1968 edition onwards, Delany's original text has been restored, as the first edition was shortened by about fifteen pages for publication in the Ace Double format.^[1]^[2]^[3]^[4]

Plot introduction

In a post-atomic future, when civilization has regressed to something near the Middle Ages or even before, a young student and poet, Geo, takes a job as a sailor on a boat. He travels with a strange passenger, a priestess of the goddess Argo, who is heading toward a mysterious land of mutants and high radiation, called Aptor. The journey is presumably made to recapture a young priestess of Argo: her daughter (her little sister in the Ace Double version), who has been kidnapped by the forces of the dark god Hama.

References

^ "Afterword", A, B, C: Three Short Novels, Delany, 2015, section III. Although the later editions are often described as "revised", Delany did only routine copyediting to his original text. "My personal sense is that this was no sort of rewrite. There was no revising of incident, characters, setting, or structure."
^ Barbour 1979, p. 163.
^ Pringle 1990, p. 171.
^ Clute and Nicholls 1995, p. 315.

Sources

Barbour, Douglas (1979). Worlds Out Of Worlds: The SF Novels of Samuel R. Delany. Frome, Somerset, UK: Bran's Head Books Ltd. ISBN 0-905220-13-7.
Clute, John; Nicholls, Peter (1995). The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (2 ed.). New York: St. Martin's Griffin. ISBN 0-312-13486-X.
Pringle, David (1990). The Ultimate Guide to Science Fiction. London: Grafton Books. ISBN 0-246-13635-9.
Tuck, Donald H. (1974). The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy. Chicago: Advent. p. 137. ISBN 0-911682-20-1.

External links

The Jewels of Aptor at Standard Ebooks
The Jewels of Aptor at Project Gutenberg (original Ace Double text)
The Jewels of Aptor public domain audiobook at LibriVox
The Jewels of Aptor title listing at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database

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[ABC-1] "Afterword", A, B, C: Three Short Novels, Delany, 2015, section III. Although the later editions are often described as "revised", Delany did only routine copyediting to his original text. "My personal sense is that this was no sort of rewrite. There was no revising of incident, characters, setting, or structure."

[2] Barbour 1979, p. 163.

[3] Pringle 1990, p. 171.

[4] Clute and Nicholls 1995, p. 315.

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