Return to Nevèrÿon

In his four-volume series Return to Nevèrÿon, Hugo and Nebula award-winner Samuel R. Delany utilizes sword-and-sorcery fantasy to explore his characteristic themes of language, power, gender, and the nature of civilization. The eleven stories, novellas, and novels chronicle a long-ago land on civilization's brink, perhaps in Asia or Africa, or even on the Mediterranean. Taken slave in childhood, Gorgik gains his freedom, leads a slave revolt, and becomes a minister of state, finally abolishing slavery. Ironically, however, he is sexually aroused by the iron slave collars of servitude. Does this contaminate his mission—or intensify it? Presumably elaborated from an ancient text of unknown geographical origin, the stories are sunk in translators' and commentators' introductions and appendices, forming a richly comic frame.