I do read sci-fi, a lot, but I've never read his books. I'm gonna guess he's not hard sci-fi or military sci-fi, my two preferred fields.

This wouldn't change my mind on reading him, I long ago accepted that most people who entertain me don't think too much of me.
Say la vee.
I pay them for their entertainment, not their political, social or scientific beliefs.
I do prefer it when they shut up, but that's just my opinion. They want me to shut up too.

I will say I'm surprised you've never read Stranger in a Strange Land. It was sort of a big hippy deal in the 60s and 70s. I thought it was de rigeur to read it.

The 5th grade history teacher at my Catholic grade school was a friend of the family and he was a hippy. Tripped for the Beatles at Shea and I'm sure he was at Woodstock hippy. We lived near Woodstock, NY, about 60 miles from Bethel.

I wasn't in 5th grade yet when he gave me SiaSL, all the hippies wanted to be Valentine Michael Smith, (super) human raised on Mars who preached peace, love and brotherhood.
What he didn't plan on was that I would want to be Jubal Harshaw, cynical old man who knows people and has a very low opinion of same. Except for the few he chose to associate with, he wanted the world to leave him alone and was very big on personal responsibility and understanding your own motives and yourself.

My mother ran into the teacher a few years ago and told him I was a conservative. She said he was shocked and dismayed.

I'm glad I didn't see him. I respect him as much as I respect any human being and I would have had to tell him one of the main reasons I'm conservative is because I've been trying to be Jubal Harshaw my whole life.
In other words, thanks to him.
I also wouldn't like to have seen him as a Bush lied people died person.

There are many who seem to be rejecting science. IMO that is not what most of them are doing.

It is really a political stance. They are rejecting government as Totem, the only God.

Science is seen as endlessly advocating bigger government. And bigger government is seen a step to total government. An Orwellian world.

Are they right? Who knows? I sure don't.

They are rejecting what they see as living death. Life as a mindless zombie. And that only until the masters no longer need a mindless zombie.

The day when science will have perfected the means of controlling thought and government will use it.

In the 60s and 70s, I was reading Herman Wouk and James Michener. About 10 years ago I read several Heinlein books so I'd know what some people were talking about -- the same reason I finally read Atlas Shrugged.

Heinlein and Rand were horrible writers. It was painful reading. SiaSL was one of the worst. Starship Troopers was OK.

This is the first I've ever heard of Delany and it doesn't inspire me to want to know more.

Popular science has always been thought to be correct, however history has proven popular science of any past period to be totally wrong or deeply flawed.
Climate change is a given it always has been and always will be, to assume because of some so called scientific data that
carbon dioxide is now the cause is a stretch.
Unfortunately many people in authority are scamming millions of dollars from carbon trade and carbon capture schemes. They offer their full support to protect their personal interest.

Chip Delany has written some amazing work.

For a novella-size introduction to his writing, I would suggest: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Considered_as_a_Helix_of_Semi-Precious_Stones

Chip Delany is a brilliant writer, but he also has some very silly opinions. He is a self-described Marxist who has said all kinds of foolish things who traveled behind the iron curtain and never seemed to have anything bad to say about the communist regimes. He has asserted all sorts of things that aren't true, such as that European explorer' stories of cannibalism are just part of the racist Western view of non-white people? He just dismissed all the evidence of what the Aztecs and others did.
He has redefined words to suit his political agenda, so that, for instance, he can unashamedly say that he hates white people while denying that he is a racist.
In his comments on Heinlein's Starship Troopers, he threw the term "fascist" without justification and interpreted male bonding in the military through the lens of his own Tom-of-Finland predilections. (And I have never seen anything he wrote that withdrew those accusations.)
He cites as authorities on matters of history and sociology such liars and kooks as Foucault and Derrida and Nazi collaborationist Paul de Man, I think because their theories allow one to claim or prove anything one wants.
In one novel (Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand) he postulates a future in which massively powerful computer technology allows the socialist state to collect so much detailed information about everybody (down to each piece of garbage that you throw away--and it's a crime to make your garbage unanalyzable) that state central planners can successfully plan the entire economy better than free individuals in a capitalist economy can run their own lives.
Anyway, those are just a few examples off the top of my head of why I regard him as a brilliant but seriously flawed writer.

Oh--and one more point: Delany has written several fantasy novels, the first of which was Tales of Neveryon. I think his real complaint is that most fantasy is emphatically NOT Marxist.

As for his claim for such an astoundingly high number of sexual partners, I have no way to know if it is true. However, he has said many times that he liked to cruise for sex in places like gay bars, back rooms of porn bookstores and other seedy Times Square places and that he had been doing this since the sixties. A recent interview mentioned that he wrote a book (Times Square Red Times Square Blue?) about this side of his life and that he felt that casual sex with lots of strangers was a good and healthy thing.
He is supposed to have written a couple books of pornography which might give some insight into his personality.

Just because Delany takes himself very seriously is no reason why anyone else should.
This comes from an avid sf fan.