Delany was twenty-nine when this collection arrived, and already writing like someone who'd been exiled from three different futures. *Driftglass* is not a book of predictions. It's a book of positions — bodies in space, bodies in water, bodies in glycerine coffins, bodies altered past the point of easy return. Rereading it in 2026, what strikes hardest is not the speculative furniture but the social architecture: a world where the people who do the most dangerous work of expansion — the spacers, the amphimen, the cable-layers — are the ones most marked, most surveilled, most disposable. The spacers in "Aye, and Gomorrah" are sterilized and fetishized simultaneously, reduced to "frelks" by the people who need what they provide. This is not prophecy. This is pattern recognition. We have our own amphimen now — gig workers with algorithmically altered schedules, veterans with bodies reshaped by deployments no one wants to discuss at dinner, content moderators who absorb the internet's psychic runoff so the rest of us can scroll in peace. Delany saw that the cost of infrastructure is always borne by someone specific, and that society's gratitude curdles quickly into disgust.

What the collection anticipated with uncomfortable precision is the biopolitics of modification. The amphimen are surgically altered to work underwater; the spacers are changed at a cellular level for interstellar travel. In both cases, the alterations are mandatory, irreversible, and socially stigmatizing. In 2026, we haven't yet reached surgical gills, but the discourse around body modification — from gender-affirming care to neural implants to the pharmaceutical optimization demanded by certain employers — carries exactly the charge Delany mapped. The bodies that serve the economy must be legible to the economy, and any body that has been *changed* to serve becomes, paradoxically, suspect. "Corona" gives us Lee, a nine-year-old telepath in a hospital, her extraordinary capacity treated as pathology. We now medicate children whose neurological profiles don't fit the classroom. The story didn't need to get the technology right. It got the power dynamic right.

Where the collection shows its age — and this is not a failing so much as a watermark — is in its faith that the physical frontier remains the primary site of human meaning. Space, ocean, Mars. The stories assume that the next crisis of identity will be forged at the boundary between the human body and an inhospitable environment. They could not have anticipated that the more destabilizing frontier would be informational: that identity would fracture not because we were surgically altered for Jupiter but because we were algorithmically sorted for engagement. There is no internet in *Driftglass*, no social graph, no feed. The prisoners in "Cage of Brass" communicate through drainage pipes, which is almost poignant — a physical network, bound by architecture, requiring proximity. Delany's futures are intensely embodied. The disembodiment that defines so much of contemporary alienation is absent. This makes the stories feel, strangely, more urgent now. They remind you that flesh is still where the bill comes due.