The late Kathy Acker has discussed Orpheus at length, and Samuel R. Delany’s role as an Orphic prophet, in her introduction to the Wesleyan Press edition of Trouble on Triton. All that she said there is true, and I commend it to the reader. Delany is an Orphic bard, and The Einstein Intersection, as will become immediately apparent, is Orphic fiction.

In the oldest versions we have of the story of Orpheus it appears to have been simply a myth of the seasons: Orpheus went into the Underworld to find his Eurydice, and he brought her safely out into the light of the sun again. We lost the happy ending a long time ago. Delany’s Lobey, however, is not simply Orpheus.

The Einstein Intersection is a brilliant book, self-consciously suspicious of its own brilliance, framing its chapters with quotes from authors ranging from de Sade to Yeats (are these the owners of the house into which the squatters have moved?) and with extracts from the author’s own notebooks kept while writing the book and wandering the Greek Islands. It was written by a young author in the milieu he has described in The Motion of Light in Water and Heavenly Breakfast, his two autobiographical works, and here he is writing about music and love, growing up, and the value of stories as only a young man can.

One can see this book as a portrait of a generation that dreamed that new drugs and free sex would bring about a fresh dawn and the rise of Homo superior, wandering the world of the generation before them like magical children walking through an abandoned city—through the ruins of Rome, or Athens, or New York: that the book is inhabiting and reinterpreting the myths of the people who came to be known as the hippies. But if that were all the book was, it would be a poor sort of tale, with little resonance for now. Instead, it continues to resonate.

So, having established what The Einstein Intersection is not, what is it?

I see it as an examination of myths, and of why we need them, and why we tell them, and what they do to us, whether we understand them or not. Each generation replaces the one that came before. Each generation newly discovers the tales and truths that came before, threshes them, discovering for itself what is wheat and what is chaff, never knowing or caring or even understanding that the generation who will come after them will discover that some of their new timeless truths were little more than the vagaries of fashion.

The Einstein Intersection is a young man’s book, in every way: it is the book of a young author, and it is the story of a young man going into the big city, learning a few home truths about love, growing up and deciding to go home (somewhat in the manner of Fritz Leiber’s protagonist from “Gonna Roll the Bones,” who takes the long way home, around the world).