“In the long country cut with rain, somehow there was nowhere to begin.”

So reflects the nameless character, known only as “the Kid,” as he wanders an apocalyptic America in Samuel R. Delany’s science-fiction novel “Dhalgren.” A description of the book’s physical setting as well as the Kid’s fugue state, this sentence exemplifies what Delany has described as the task of fiction: achieving “resonance between an idea and a landscape.” It also happens to describe the vertiginous task of writing about Delany.

For there is, indeed, nowhere to begin with Delany. Born in Harlem in 1942, Delany published his first novel at the age of 19, inaugurating a broad, genre-spanning career that now includes over 40 published works and several major literary awards. His writing combines space opera with neo-slave narrative, memoir, sword-and-sorcery fantasy and an elegy for the sexual freedoms of pre-Giuliani Times Square. Delany’s prismatic output is among the most significant, immense and innovative in American letters. And because there is no way to summarize his work, about Delany we can never be experts. We can only be enthusiasts. We cannot hope to describe his oeuvre, only our encounter with his oeuvre, and how this encounter has transformed us.

“It is not that I have no past. Rather, it fragments on the terrible and vivid ephemera of now.”

Maybe it was that the Kid’s experience of loss resonated with my own. In 1992, when I was 21, my relationship with my family had been shattered by my queerness, and I had absconded to San Francisco for a girlfriend who dumped me upon arrival. In the aftermath, I found a job waiting tables on the overnight shift at Sparky’s Diner on Church Street in the Castro, and I found Delany.

Around 4:30 a.m., with the neon SPARKYS sign casting a pool of foggy pink onto the sidewalk — when the ravers had finished their French fries and tumbled off into the wet blue pre-dawn — I would crouch in the kitchen, reading “Dhalgren,” and later, the book that made me a Delany enthusiast for life, “Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand.”