Kevin's Watch

With hindsight it can be hypothesized that SRD has had different audiences at different points of his career: a very wide, traditional sf readership up to and including Dhalgren, which sold nearly a million copies in the USA alone; and a narrower, perhaps more intellectual, campus-based readership thereafter. There is no doubt that by the 1980s his fiction (and criticism) had become less accessible, and the real debate about his career must be whether or not he gained more than he lost with his adoption of a denser style towards the later 1970s. At this point his fiction also began to include more passages of obviously polemical intent, some of whose thrust, especially in their icons of abasement, did not carry conviction for all readers. But, though admirers of SRD's earlier work tend to be heavily polarized in their views of his later work, he by no means disappeared from public notice. The first two volumes of the Nevérÿon series sold around quarter of a million each. Lower sales on subsequent editions may have been partly due to resistance in the publishing and book-distribution worlds to his increasingly and explicitly controversial texts.