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Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand

Samuel R. Delany

3.87 · Rating details · 2,530 ratings · 260 reviews

The only survivor plucked from a world where life has been burned out from horizon to horizon, Rat Korga is a very unusual human. On his own world he was subjected to Radical Anxiety Termination-a synapse-jamming technique banned on many planets.

Now the officials of the Web must find a new world for him. Their first choice is the planet Velm: a world on which humans co-ex

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Kindle Edition, 448 pages

Published May 20th 2013 by Gateway (first published 1984)

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Nov 14, 2011 Richard Derus rated it it was ok · review of another edition

This was a favorite read of mine back in my twenties. I used it as proof that SF wasn't a literary wasteland, that innovative stuff was being done in the field and there were voices that the most exacting style-snob couldn't scruple to include in hifalutin' conversations.

Boy, was I wrong.

It's turgid, it's obfuscatory, and it's mutton dressed up as lamb.
"Cut through the galaxy's glitter; slice away all night. What thoughts did I dole out to that world (out of the six thousand, which, according t ...more

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Apr 02, 2010 Greg rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: sf-fantasy-and-other-dorky-shit

Two Stars? Are you kidding me? This is a book that has been re-issued by a University Press, that deals with complex issues like language, gender, sexuality....

I know, I know. But this book didn't do anything for me, if anything it just made me angry.

Well maybe that is because you are a white heterosexual male and you deserve to be made uncomfortable about the part you have played in the oppression of women and colonial peoples.

Yeah, I guess so. I guess I just don't see what the point of writing ...more

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Aug 24, 2010 Mike Puma rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: re-read, 2011, glbt-fic, 1991, 1985, scifi

Once upon a time (around 1986 or 1987?), I had an opportunity to meet Samuel R. Delany at an ALA or ABA [now BookExpo]. Taking advantage of my position as a buyer for a large book distributor, I monopolized some of his time in the Bantam booth while he waited to do a signing—something that is surely tedious for many authors, some of whom will seek diversion with anyone willing to talk with him or her. In our brief discussion, I remember him most for being surprised at his students’ reluctance to spend $80.00 for a two-volume edition of some work by Lacan. Not wanting to appear unknowledgeable (who the hell was this Lacan fellow?), I merely shook my head to acknowledge his frustration at the short-sightedness of some students who didn’t recognize the value of such a purchase (how quickly we forget the outrageous prices of some collegiate texts). Why does that matter? It doesn’t. What does matter, at least to me, is that Lacan has come to be one of the many languages I don’t speak but will occasionally recognize when I hear it. Delany speaks Lacan. Not just Lacan, he also is fluent in Marx, and Freud, and Jameson, and all the other languages that make his texts so dense, and wondrous, and intimidating. He’s also fluent in pornography, which admittedly, had something to do with my initial interest.

By the time I’d read SiMPLGoS (1985), Dhalgren was already atop my Favorite List; other Delanys had been dutifully accomplished or would be—the Neveryón series, The Tides of Lust, Hogg: A Novel and The Mad Man, et al. And so after my Delany period, I reapproached him with reluctance—my taste in reading has changed, and I wondered if his initial appeal would endure (I’ve restarted Dhalgren numerous times only to decide: Not yet).

When one of my groups decided to read this one, I thought I was ready. It begins with the story of Rat (the narrator’s big-O other or little-o other; I’m not fluent in Lacan, but dammit, it’s one of them) before moving on to the narrator’s seemingly endless account of his world, other worlds, terrains, suns and moons, planets and space travel. To be honest, I thought the middle section would go on forever—it was slow, I was slow, and then…finally, the narrator encounters Rat (now Rat Korga). The pace quickens towards an inevitable end. Inevitable but necessary. Necessary and sad. Themes of loss, memory, desire (that damn Lacan!), overwhelm the Real. The sublime yields to desire. Desire falls victim to Authority to loss and memory.

Someone once pointed out to me that there are two kinds of memory (I don’t mean short- and long-term, either): recognition memory and reconstruction memory. The second is what artiststs train and most of us live off the first—though even if we’re not artists we have enough of the second to get us through the normal run of imaginings. Well, your perfect erotic object remains only in recognition memory, and his absolute absence from reconstructive memory becomes the yearning that is, finally, desire.

I’m glad I reread this one, although I retain the five-star rating primarily because of the way the novel impressed me the first time I read it. Something that does strike me about it—especially when compared to other Delanys—there’s actually very little sex in this one, precious little should that be what you’re looking for.

...more

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Sep 27, 2007 Christy rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: science-fiction-and-fantasy, readinglist1, african-american-lit-and-history

This was a hard book to rate. It raises interesting ideas and plays with theoretical concepts that are intriguing and significant within the fields of gender studies, queer theory, postcolonial theory, sf/genre studies, postmodern literary theory, and theories of race and ethnicity. There is a lot to take in. For that, I like the book. However, there is so much going on in this book that it becomes difficult to follow and, worse, it becomes difficult to care about the characters and what happens This was a hard book to rate. It raises interesting ideas and plays with theoretical concepts that are intriguing and significant within the fields of gender studies, queer theory, postcolonial theory, sf/genre studies, postmodern literary theory, and theories of race and ethnicity. There is a lot to take in. For that, I like the book. However, there is so much going on in this book that it becomes difficult to follow and, worse, it becomes difficult to care about the characters and what happens to them. As an exploration of ideas in the form of fiction, it is a success; as a novel with a narrative and compelling characters, it is a failure.

There are two things Delany sets forth in this novel that I find particularly interesting. One, given my interest in feminist theory and gender studies, is his use of gendered pronouns. Instead of using gendered pronouns to acknowledge sex/physiology (where he = male and she= female), Delany presents a culture in which gendered pronouns reflect relationships of desire. In this culture, all beings (whether male or female, human or other) are referred to as women and called by the female pronoun. The exception to this is when one person is attracted to another person. In that situation, the person who is desired becomes "he." You can chart the shifting desires between individuals by paying attention to the pronouns used to refer to others. This is fascinating. It is a model of gender and sexuality that is not at all about bodies as types for it does not distinguish between sexes in common general speech nor between species and therefore it is rather liberating for a queer movement. There is no concept as homosexuality on many worlds (though the practices associated with the category certainly exist). There is a great deal of freedom on Velm (the world about which the reader is given the most information) to have sex with anyone you like of any sex, any species, any age, any height. Other worlds, it becomes clear, have different customs and prejudices (one world is okay with homosexuality, for instance, but frowns upon sexual relationships between individuals of very different heights). This is also potentially liberating for a feminist movement. Women are not differentiated in the language, are not set apart as outside the linguistic norm (having been commonly accepted as male). There is, in fact, a near reversal of this in the common assumption that all beings are women, daughters, sisters, mothers, regardless of their sex. There are potential problems with this, in that it does resemble a reversal of the current situation even as it reconfigures the system, but in practice, on Velm anyway, this functions less as a reversal of power relations and an empowering of women at the expense of men and functions more as an undoing of the concept of gender. It is not that women gain power, but that all people are the same, only distinguished by the workings of desire, whatever paths that desire may follow.

The second element of this novel that is particular interesting is in Delany's concern with cultural transmission. The book is just filled to the brim with details (some relevant, some irrevelant, and and some whose relevance is impossible to judge) about the cultures that Marq Dyeth, an interplanetary ambassador, comes into contact with. Because he travels to different worlds so often and must know so much about their different cultures and the ways in which they communicate with each other, this information is constantly intruding into his narrative. A character nods and we find ourselves inundated with information about what this means here, there, and everywhere. This makes the book difficult to read; it also illustrates the difficulties and dangers inherent in communication, especially when dealing with different cultures and different species. This is significant within the text of course because cultural/species differences sometimes inhibit and sometimes prevent communication (for instance, Delany shows how differences in bodily perception will affect communication [some creatures taste as a primary sense, some hear instead of see] and how their physical environment will affect understand and metaphor [what does morning mean, for instance, in a culture that has no sunrise/sunset?]), but it is also significant outside of the text. In the modern world, misunderstandings of other cultures and between cultures abound. One way of reading Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand is to see in it a warning about the necessity of greater sensitivity to cultural differences. As a part of the African American literary tradition, one could also read this element of Stars as a warning about the cultural differences between white Americans and black Americans, between black Americans and black Africans. This book's publication, following as it does, the black power movement and the flowering of interest in Africa among African Americans, serves as an oblique commentary on African Americans' attempts to fit into these various groups (whether white American or African). The cross-cultural connections within Stars serve as a hopeful vision of intercultural closeness (Marq's family, or stream, is composed of both humans and evelms) and as a warning of how easily those intercultural connections can be wounded.

Having said all that, I want to point out once again that, as a traditional sort of novel, this book is not the work of genius I was led to expect. But perhaps it is not fair to expect it to be a great traditional novel. Delany's focus here is experimental, after all, and the overwhelming and somewhat diffuse nature of the narrative reflects the broader issues he addresses. I cannot tell what the central narrative arc of the novel is, nor can I tell what details I should note as important or relevant as the story unfolds; but, upon reflection, that seems to be the point. Delany unsettles the reader by refusing to provide the expected focus and drive and in this unsettling provides a narrative that more truly reflects the diversity and randomness of reality, both in the novel's world and in ours.

Because this is a science fiction novel rather than a realist novel, there is even more room for these sorts of complications. Delany writes about the protocols of reading science fiction, in which the reader, rather than relying on a given world and its usual expectations, must create a new world in the process of reading. All science fiction requires this. It requires world-building in the reading process. Delany takes this concept further than most science fiction writers do, however, in his insistence on creating "the same order of richness and complexity" he sees about him in the real world by not just creating one world for the reader to marvel at but by placing that world in a larger context. His scope is not individual but cultural, and the overwhelming amount of detail in this book makes this cultural rather than individual approach unavoidable for the reader. The reader cannot simply care about Marq Dyeth's relationship with Rat Korga; the reader must also care about the human/evelm political relationship, the dangers of cultural fugue, the question of who and what the Xlv are, and the many, many small ways that all of these groups (and more) interact with each other. Delany writes, in the afterword to Stars, "I think that any time when there was such a notion of a centered subject, especially when related to the white, western, patriarchal nuclear family, not only was it an ideological mirage, it was a mirage that necessarily grew up to mask the psychological, economic, and material oppression of an 'other'.... " (384). He goes on to state that he sees a special connection between this position and the genre of science fiction. While I do not believe that science fiction has any sort of monopoly on this attitude among literary genres/types/styles, Delany's Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand certainly goes a long way toward creating a science fiction that is most definitely science fiction (it includes many traditional tropes of sf) and also stylistically and ideologically experimental as well as politically progressive. ...more

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Mar 21, 2014 Megan Baxter rated it liked it · review of another edition

This is not a great book. There were times when I wasn't even sure it was a good book. But it's trying so many interesting things, testing the boundaries of science fiction, and perhaps, the comfort of the reader, to get at some truly fascinating things. Some of these experiments may have failed, but I'd much rather read an interesting but failed experiment than an unambitious sufficiency.

Note: The rest of this review has been withdrawn due to the changes in Goodreads policy and enforcement. You ...more

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Apr 03, 2012 Wrey Fuentes rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Delany's prose takes some getting used to and I have even read reviews of his work that sang to the tune of, "Does he have to be so high and mighty in his verbiage?"

The answer is, yes! He does. Someone has to.

Get off your lackadaisical bum, you shoddy reader you, and expect something more from yourself and the writer. Stop kowtowing to the school of thought that indicates, "a simple word instead of an esoteric one." What the hell are all the rest of the words in the dictionary for? Why have com ...more

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Nov 21, 2014 Kara Babcock rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2014-read, science-fiction, own, space-opera

So … I don’t think I’d go as far as The New York Times Book Review does in praising this book. According to the blurb on the back of my edition, “it invites the reader to collaborate in the process of creation, in a way that few novels do”. Umm … yeah. Sure. Someone has been critiquing literature a little too long. But the blurb is right about one thing: Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand is both extraordinary and transcendent.

Samuel R. Delany is an interesting author for someone like me to ...more

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Sep 29, 2010 Ezra rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

if william gibson invented the term "cyberspace" (in "Neuromancer", 1984), then samuel delany (in "Stars In My Pocket...", same year!) is responsible for synthesizing the actual conceptual framework of the internet, and some of the consequences that might arise from an informationally-saturated society. gibson's book is like an impressionist painting, a piece of graphic design, an anime short; it's a style injection, with both ephemeral and lasting effects. "Stars In My Pocket..." is not like th ...more

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May 25, 2011 Fey rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: second-hand, reviewed, lgbt, on-my-bookshelf, science-fiction

The prologue of this book is a third person telling of Rat Korga's life. Beginning at age 19 when he arrives as an illiterate delinquent for "Radical Anxiety Treatment", basically a sort of lobotomy that turns him into a docile zombie, with full mental capacity, but only able to do exactly as he's told. Perfect for slave labour. Korga has a temporary escape from servitude when a woman buys him as a sex slave, but gives him technology enabling him to read books. He returns to slavery however and The prologue of this book is a third person telling of Rat Korga's life. Beginning at age 19 when he arrives as an illiterate delinquent for "Radical Anxiety Treatment", basically a sort of lobotomy that turns him into a docile zombie, with full mental capacity, but only able to do exactly as he's told. Perfect for slave labour. Korga has a temporary escape from servitude when a woman buys him as a sex slave, but gives him technology enabling him to read books. He returns to slavery however and not long after that, his planet (Rhyonon) is destroyed.

The rest of the novel is 1st person narrative from Marq Dyeth, who comes from an entirely different planet (Velm) and culture. Marq is an international diplomat, and lives a fairly priveledged life of space travel to exoctic cultures. And comes from a very liberal background, every generation of his family practice adoption rather than procreation, as such he has many sisters and many parents, of both human and evelmi (evelmi being a sentient, 6 limbed, multi-tongued, lizard-like race). The notable thing about Marq's world, (and apparently everyone elses world EXCEPT Korga's), is that although they make distinction between male and female (and neuter aswell for evelmi), everyone is termed 'woman' and refered to as 'she' regardless of sex. The exception being that the pronoun 'he' is used when the speaker has a sexual attraction to the referred person.

There is a tenuous connection to be seen between Marq and Korga, in the fact that many of the books Korga read were by, or relating to Marq's 7 times great grandmother Gylda Dyeth, or the Dictator she worked for - Vondramach Okk. But the greater connection between them isn't announced until at least a third of the way through the book, when one of Marq's aquaintence's happens to be working on the rescue mission for Rhyonon, contacts him to say that Korga has been calculated to be Marq's perfect erotic companion and that they are sending him to Velm.

I found the novel escpecially hard to get into. I began to be interested in the prologue after a while, Rat Korga's story was beginning to be very interesting, although I thought it was a little rushed. I suppose I would have preferred a novel that was entirely about him, the premise of rediscovering everything through technology, despite his altering brain surgery, was really fascinating. Would have certainly made a great story on it's own. But it was rushed through, and then the rest of the novel, I could never really enjoy.

I understand that the 'twist' of referring to all people as 'woman' and 'she' was probably supposed to be quite innovative and eye-opening, but really it just didn't have any impact on me. They clearly did still make distinctions between sexes, as people were termed male and female and neuter, and Marq has a clear expressed preference for males, so it wasn't about a real blurring of gender lines or anything like that. And it just made the language clumsy and awkward. So the society was also completely unbothered by peoples sexual tastes for males/females/aliens etc, but I found this not at all innovative either, it sounds like any other book I might usually read.. But it's more than likely that I simply came to this novel about 3 decades too late.

The only impact that the culture had on me, was probably in regards to their diet. And this isn't just because I'm vegetarian, because in Marq's culture they actually ate cloned human meat, which I found completely hideously wrong and repulsive, but I guess that was the intent? But what is the use of putting that into a novel, without injecting any commentary on it? And that's what the book really lacks, it lacks discussion, and feeling and depth. These strange things just happen, but Marq never really pays much attention to them, it's just things that happen in his every day life. It would have been much better to have Rat Korga's view on everything aswell, but we never do, because he's now in the third person, and doesn't have anything to say for himself.

One of the main difficulties in reading this book was that it dumped you righ in the middle of a foreign technologically advanced culture, and didn't bother to explain terms and concepts until much later. And it's very hard to keep reading when you don't know yet, what you're reading about. Very difficult, very awkward.

There was one grand speech from Marq at the end of the book about the mysteries of sexual attraction, about the unlikelyhood of meeting your perfect mate, and about how the concept of your world is not about the place that you live, but about the way you view things. I think this was the highlight of the entire novel. And yet it didn't have the impact it could have.. because I was never connected to the character.

On the whole, I found the novel mostly disappointing. I waited such a long time for this novel to go somewhere, and by the time I got to the end, I finally figured out this train was never leaving the station. Even if you'd never read a novel about these themes before, I wouldn't even recommend it, because there are better things out there now. ...more

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Aug 15, 2010 Bill rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Recommends it for: thinkers

Shelves: science-fiction, favorite-books-re-read

I am a fairly experienced reader, but I had difficulty reading this book. I found the use of names confusing. If ever I have truly needed a name glossary, it is with this book. I kept getting confused about whether a name referred to a person, a place, a planet or a star. I was uncertain about who was human, who not and the continual shift of pronouns made this even more difficult. In a sense this relates to cultural confusion in our 'real' world. In another sense this book needs to be read when I am a fairly experienced reader, but I had difficulty reading this book. I found the use of names confusing. If ever I have truly needed a name glossary, it is with this book. I kept getting confused about whether a name referred to a person, a place, a planet or a star. I was uncertain about who was human, who not and the continual shift of pronouns made this even more difficult. In a sense this relates to cultural confusion in our 'real' world. In another sense this book needs to be read when one is able to concentrate and focus. I was not.

Much has been written here about this novel on this page, much that perhaps I will comment on after future readings. The book is about many things, but a couple have invaded my quasi-consciouness.

The simplest of these concerns Delany's concept of the Web which was brilliantly prophetic at the time this was written relative to today's WWW.

Though we still are tethered to external devices, we can quickly find information we desire, still have to digest it ourselves, but find the information is controlled by another web of anonymous personages, powers and machines while maintaining the appearance of being free and open. And, all our activities on the Web are archived forever for those same entities to monitor. Delany's Web spans 6000 worlds and tens of thousands light years, but his ideas have much relevance to our current, if provincial Earthside WWW.

The other is more difficult to put into words, but I think it has to do with the nature of reality, communication and our own essential aloneness. How can you know me? How can I know you? All we know about each other is illusory and incomplete as is information and the science of information or the information of science, as is how we understand our culture and alien cultures. It is likely as difficult to understand each other as it would be meeting an alien being from another star system who has entirely different ways of sensing the external world. As it stands we can never grok another being.

But Delany provides a clue how we might do: (view spoiler) ...more

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Apr 10, 2012 Meghan Fidler rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: american-literature

The downfall of most science fiction is the difficulty of chronicling new bodies, worlds, and cultures for the reader. Many works dissolve into long flailing descriptions of aliens and drawn-out dialogs on cultural meanings. Authors who can surpass this albatross of introducing an 'other,' like Ursala K. Le Guin (training in anthropology helps, apparently! ^.^) and Octavia E. Butler, achieve an undeniable commentary on contemporary social life.
Samuel R. Delany joins this list. The main protag The downfall of most science fiction is the difficulty of chronicling new bodies, worlds, and cultures for the reader. Many works dissolve into long flailing descriptions of aliens and drawn-out dialogs on cultural meanings. Authors who can surpass this albatross of introducing an 'other,' like Ursala K. Le Guin (training in anthropology helps, apparently! ^.^) and Octavia E. Butler, achieve an undeniable commentary on contemporary social life.
Samuel R. Delany joins this list. The main protagonist, Marq Dyeth is an Industrial Diplomat, a position which requires him to engage new forms of life and culture across a large section of the Galaxy. He does so with the help of 'General Information,' or GI, an internal brain link to something very similar to today's web.
The commentary Delany provides on machine mediated interaction (i.e. today's internet) deserves a review of its own, and is one of the most notable aspects of this particular narrative. So I'll simply note that it is brilliant and continue.
Despite Marq's continual encounters with "Others," Delany never breaks stride--he never spends pages on physical descriptions, and the only time the readers receive long expositions on cultural meanings is when Marq himself needs to perform them as part of a family informal dinner.
This approach naturalizes the bodies and lives of these characters, giving the reader no time to shrug and become lost in confused imaginings of form. Instead, we are as Marq is: aware of difference, but not aggressively confronted by it.
This approach is brilliant, and if you'd like to see how excellence in science fiction becomes an impeccable social commentary, I've provided two excerpts below. One is from the aforementioned family gathering, and the second is a description of technology spurred on by the of Rat's prosthetic eyes:
(at the end of these I describe some turn of events in the novel, so if you like to read without prior knowledge of the plot, please stop after the following two paragraphs)

‘All right,’ I said once more. ‘But there’re so many ways that a stream differs from a family. I don’t know where to start. The father-mother-son that makes up the basic family unit, as the Family has described it for centuries now, represents a power structure, a structure of strong powers, mediating powers, and subordinate powers, as well as paths for power developments and power restrictions. It’s also a conceptual structure as well, a model through which to see many different situations. The Family has always been quite loose in applying that system to any given group of humans or nonhumans, breeding or just living together, so that you can have lots of fathers, lots of mothers, lots of sons: and any woman of any age or any gender can always fill any of the roles; I’m sure the right Family analysis could reinterpret our nurture stream or your reproductive commune as a classical ‘family’ without an eye blink, just by assigning one or more parts to one or more women. But if we agreed to the model, no doubt we’d begin to stabilize the power structure it controls. But there’re other power structures that can apply to nurturing groups. For instance, in the Family structure, the parents are seen to contain and enclose the children, to protect them from society. In the stream structure, the children are the connection between the parents and the society. To become a parent is to immediately have your child change your relation to society. Suddenly you have to deal with nurseries, nutrition co-ops, study-groups—-a whole raft of social institutions. Because most children don’t generate from within streams, the stream structure conceives of all children as gifts from society, as gifts to society.’

When culture first develops the technology to counterfeit a human function, the counterfeit is usually awkward and jarring. But when the culture reaches a technological stage beyond that, the prostheses are made to look as much like to original organ as possible. Now when a stage beyond that is reached, suddenly the prostheses are consciously constructed to call attention to themselves in aesthetically interesting ways.

If you're not already intrigued... I'm sorry, but you may be suffering from an acute lack of engagement with your own life. You might want to look into that.

I am officially a Delany Fan. My only hang up with the story comes from the description of Marq and Rat as 'perfect erotic objects' for one another 'out to about seven decimal places.' While I enjoy others erotically, I also find the difficulty Delany has in portraying 'love' interesting and a little disheartening. The main character, Marq, can't admit to loving Rat, rationalizing his later emotional discomfort away, avoiding the term and relying upon descriptions of a match between 'erotic objects.' Which leaves me hanging: is Delany providing a commentary on the impact of open sexuality on intimacy (personally, I don't think this is it), was Delany expressing his own relationships through Marq's difficulties, or did 'Stars in my Pocket' intentionally write love out of the Universe?
These questions, of course, could be nothing more than a reflection of my own inability to see such a strong intimate connection without seeing love... but I also trust myself, and as an Anthropologist the places that make me squirm are often the places where inquiry is needed.
Or at least acculturation.

Fantastic novel. Strongly recommended. ...more

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Aug 15, 2019 Radiantflux rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: audiobook, science-fiction

100th book for 2019.

A wonderful mediation on gender, family and desire.

4-stars.

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Feb 09, 2017 Daniel rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Hailed as a "masterpiece," I dove in not knowing what to expect. What I found was a book with enough inventiveness for dozens of novels and lacking sufficient plot for even one. I don't require the proverbial "page turner," but if whole sections could be removed without making a difference then this isn't a work of fiction, it's a literary exercise. It is highly regarded by many, but it was a long hard slog for me, and I won't be returning to his work any time soon, if ever. ...more

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Nov 04, 2011 John rated it it was ok · review of another edition

WTH?! I spent two months of lunchtimes on this?!

I have not slogged through a more difficult read since Gene Wolfe's lictor/new sun saga, and I didn't get the payoff from this that I did from them.

If this is the "masterpiece" that the cover blurb claims, I'm afraid it is one that passed right over the top of my li'l pumpkin head. As a character novel, it failed me: I never connected with narrator Marq Dyeth and was never supposed to grasp he cipher Rat Korga. As a plot novel, it failed me: it too ...more

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Mar 27, 2016 Julia rated it did not like it · review of another edition

It is a tragedy trees have been cut down for the sake of this absurdly overrated, plotless, pretentious garbage.

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Nov 24, 2020 Salamanderinspace rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: lgbtq

DNF at 40%

In the opening scenario of this book, a scientist is offering to give a man minor brain damage so that he will be happy. And a slave. He will be happy and unquestioning in his slave-tasks. It seems like a pretty obvious metaphor for psychiatric medicine. It instantly offers things to say that seem relevant and prescient to 2020. The man doesn't believe in other countries. Three times more women have this dumb-ifying procedure than men. The story follows the man after the procedure, and ...more

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Nov 28, 2020 Harris added it · review of another edition

Another excellent novel. Worth it alone for the 1990 afterword about Frederic Jameson and Kim Stanley Robinson where Delany situates his own writing in the "fragmentation of the self."

From the afterword:
"Moreover, I think that any time when there was such a notion of a centered subject, especially when related to the white, western, patriarchal nuclear family, not only was it an ideological mirage, it was a mirage that necessarily grew up to mask the psychological, economic, and material oppress ...more

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Apr 14, 2011 Geoffrey Fox rated it really liked it · review of another edition

I had long wanted to read this famous book — a space fantasy far from my usual choices of fiction reading; it's good to break routine once in a while, as industrial diplomat and star traveler Marq Hyeth (the narrator of most of this book) might say. And it was not at all what I expected. Which is good, I guess. I wanted surprises and got them.

As I did expect, it is fantastical and ironic. But it is not light comedy. It is a story contrived to reflect on complicated, unresolved philosophical ques I had long wanted to read this famous book — a space fantasy far from my usual choices of fiction reading; it's good to break routine once in a while, as industrial diplomat and star traveler Marq Hyeth (the narrator of most of this book) might say. And it was not at all what I expected. Which is good, I guess. I wanted surprises and got them.

As I did expect, it is fantastical and ironic. But it is not light comedy. It is a story contrived to reflect on complicated, unresolved philosophical questions, with dark hints about the answers: how the brain really works and how its processes can be disrupted; the construction of memories, creating myths; the varied ways of negotiating our sexual obsessions, and, finally (finally!) time, space and death.

The setting: Millennia from now, when humans and other intelligent beings from other planets (some of them with 6 legs, multiple tongues, wings and metallic claws) have achieved relative peace in their competition to colonize the 6,200 or more known worlds in the universe, a big (7'4") 19-year old social misfit, homosexual and long drug user in a world that discourages that sort of thing volunteers for Radical Anxiety Termination to turn him into a "rat", an anxiety-less and thus ambition- and curiosity-less human used as a slave by the more-or-less corrupt state industries. His partial recovery of his mental faculties and belated discovery of emotion, described mainly by the short, stocky interworld traveler and industrial diplomat (ID) Marq Hyeth, his perfect love object, is the central story around which we witness many other relationships, experiences and memories. And hovering over all of it are two massive, possibly related conflicts which may threaten them all: first, an internal rivalry among the federated worlds between a fundamentalist political-ideological movement called the Family (apparently the inventors of Radical Anxiety Termination) who want everyone and everything to be controlled and orderly and invent exquisite punishments for those who are not, and the more tolerant, laid-back, open-to-experimentation Sygn; and beyond them, outside any known federation, a mysterious and immensely powerful system of beings who offer no communication to the others, the Xlv, whose intentions are unknown but, if hostile, may be spell disaster.

The book is full of invention, with new worlds and new sorts of intelligent beings and new technologies with strange names appearing in every chapter, almost on every page. Which often makes it very difficult to figure just who is having sex with whom, and how they're doing it, or what's really going on in the dinner parties. (There's a lot of explicit, sloppy sex, but unless you're attracted to six-legged evelmi with shiny scales, or have an opportunity to stroll or float through a love-park on one of the Sygn controlled worlds, it will be beyond reach for you.)

My favorite parts include the long first section, before Marq Hyeth even appears, where we witness the brain-zapping in the Radical Anxiety Termination Institute and its consequences — which include the inability to take in new information from the General Information (GI) network which other humans and evelmi (those six-legged, winged- beings with all the tongues) use to learn new languages or access whatever data they want. This is because, as the high-ranking interworld official Japril explains,

"It's precisely those 'anxiety' channels which Radical Anxiety Termination blocks that GI uses both to process into the brain the supportive contextual information in the preconscious that allows you to make a conscious call for anything more complex than names, dates, verbatim texts, and multiplication tables; and it also uses them to erase an information program in such a way that you can still remember the parts of it you actually used consciously." (Pp. 161-162 in my edition.)

Wow! So all that we would give up if we lost all anxiety. That is a heavy thought. If I were a rat, i.e. if I had been subjected to blockage of my "anxiety" channels, I might be able to repeat that paragraph but I would never fathom its meaning. The novel is full of rather surprising, often profound, usually wittily stated observations.

Another delight is the dragon-hunting chapter. I won't tell you more. You just have to experience what happens in Dyethshome when you go on a dragon hunt. The final chapter comes as somewhat of a relief from all the interminable invention and learning of new creatures, habits, worldscapes. For here Marq Dyeth recalls his earlier life, which helps bring some coherence to the jarring, seemingly chaotic space travels we have just gone through. ...more

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Jul 11, 2013 John rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: lgbt, kindle

2 stars is a VERY generous rating for this book. No point, no focus, and a world that we're expected to already understand even though it's only ever "explained" through the characters' interactions with it. It's great that Delany "predicted the internet" in this book, but to try to parse that out of the obtuse writing was a chore, and certainly not a pleasure that I expect to get out of reading.

1.5 stars at best. ...more

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Aug 17, 2020 Jessica rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: book-club, author-poc, genre-scifi, themes-queer

Easily the most fascinating book & the richest reading experience, I've had all year -- it's one that I know I could reread again and again, and would get entirely new things out of each time. Much of the time I had no idea what was going on or why it was relevant, or at least knew I was only getting a few layers of the context at most, but each sentence was, in turn: a bafflement, a delight, an oddity, a thrill, an obscurity, and this was more than enough to dazzle. Few sentences within seem li Easily the most fascinating book & the richest reading experience, I've had all year -- it's one that I know I could reread again and again, and would get entirely new things out of each time. Much of the time I had no idea what was going on or why it was relevant, or at least knew I was only getting a few layers of the context at most, but each sentence was, in turn: a bafflement, a delight, an oddity, a thrill, an obscurity, and this was more than enough to dazzle. Few sentences within seem like they could exist in any other book. It was, more than most anything I've read (or so it seems right now, in the afterglow), like reading a book written from an alternate universe (the one in which it is set? or another?). I now realize this was an intentional device to mimic the outsider's experience, to simulate the experience of total immersion into a whole new foreign world and all the cycles of frustration and amazement, confusion and brief flashes of insight, that entails.

Assorted ramblings for my own elucidation/indulgence, as I attempt to make sense of anything:

There's a moment I held onto like a lifeline where Korga (the most obvious outsider within the narrative) talks about how everyone asks him "what is it like to lose a world?" but how a more relevant question is "what is it like to be presented with a new one?" and how interconnected that is. Being immersed in an entirely new way of life, being given new knowledge that changes how you view the world, being introduced to conceptual frameworks that upends everything you've ever been taught -- this is losing your entire world as it was (beyond the literal planet/culture that Korga lost), by way of gaining a possible new one. There's another repeated line that I held onto -- "worlds are big, but the universe is small". There's infinite variation between people and their inner worlds, between groups of people across geographies & cultures, but there are the same basic struggles that play out across all humanity; namely the struggle between a willful desire to hold onto that known lost world & the rigid outdated order it places on everything (the Family), vs accepting a new world of different experiences, of other people, of new knowledge and how that changes what you've known (the Sygn). What actually causes the feared Cultural Fugue was unclear, but it might be a result of a downward spiral of willful ignorance within a society that leads to its own destruction.

There's a strong ethical thrust in the book towards a liberal, open-minded perspective -- "or is it likely that women are just more complex than can be made out by starlight alone?" -- and acceptance of diversity. What most fascinated me, however, was how even the semi-utopian world that Marq inhabits had its cultural blindspots, to the point of itself being threatened by Cultural Fugue upon Korga's presence (due to their very curiosity/open-mindedness, rather than willful ignorance?). Marq is supposed to be a capable diplomat, but I was continually disconcerted by his inability to ease Korga into his society, at the constant difficulty an outsider like Korga would face upon dealing with all the cultural expectations and subtextual decorum that foreign culture seemed to demand. There's also the matter of the Thants, and Marq's bewilderment at reading their signals and smoothing relations between them and his family. This was most exemplified at the formal dinner, of course, where Marq has a rare moment of putting himself in the struggling offworld guest's shoes and how alien the dinner's customs would be. Korga, by his peculiar history and nature, seemed to make out okay emotionally, but putting myself in his place no matter how fascinating and spectacular it all was (elaborate meals! alternate family structures! lack of gender signifiers! general equality!), I felt continually off-balance, overwhelmed. And of course, the Thants openly reacted in opposition to Marq's culture-- which leads me to wonder if it was Marq and his family's fault for not being better at bridging the cultural gaps between them, for all their supposed generations of diplomacy skill. Maybe this is just a human limitation, that diversity is so wide that no matter how open-minded a culture is, it's still hard to truly accept and understand otherness.

The dragon hunting scene, for example, was a rare moment of pure delight for Korga, but some of the implications nag at me. Through the hunt, they inhabit the dragon's bodies briefly (as the Old Hunter inhabit Korga/Marq), getting a full sensory taste of this different world... but I wonder about the limitations of that. It's a shallow taste, it's mere seconds/minutes as a recreational diversion -- you can taste other people's experiences / other cultures, but you can never fully inhabit or Know what it's like entirely. That must be better than blanket ignorance, but the possible shallowness also seemed reminiscent of the way people mistake cultural appropriation for multiculturalism.

Inhabiting another person's body and the rush/delight of the dragon hunting brings me to how there's also the whole layer of sexuality and desire throughout the book... how society oppresses and forms an individual's desire, what parts are central to who a person is inside vs what would change when your whole world changes -- the fact that Korga's sexuality is a constant regardless of the extreme situations he's confronted with for example. I'm not entirely sure of what to make of how Marq deals with everything in the Epilogue, which seems central to understanding this component... There's a lot to chew on -- perhaps if I manage to reread this someday. ...more

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Apr 09, 2011 Jeffrey rated it liked it · review of another edition

This was a ‘tasty’ piece of writing, post-modernist to the core, but like the universal flows of information that permeate its (and our) W(w)eb, it wasn’t always accessible. Reading about the shapes of bodies and the forms of cities that are so unfamiliar, yet so thoroughly connected to the signs and symbols that define our own bodies and our own cities reminded me of what it is like to try an exotic new delicacy and then eventually grow to enjoy it. Initial apprehension, even revulsion, slowly This was a ‘tasty’ piece of writing, post-modernist to the core, but like the universal flows of information that permeate its (and our) W(w)eb, it wasn’t always accessible. Reading about the shapes of bodies and the forms of cities that are so unfamiliar, yet so thoroughly connected to the signs and symbols that define our own bodies and our own cities reminded me of what it is like to try an exotic new delicacy and then eventually grow to enjoy it. Initial apprehension, even revulsion, slowly gives way to satisfaction, yet it’s all situated completely within the familiar processes of taste and digestion that we employ even with the most banal of comfort foods.

The book's protagonist, a human named Marq Dyeth, is a diplomat overseeing the import and export of knowledge from one planet to another. While the universe that ‘she’ inhabits is coated with information, knowledge is more tightly controlled. Dyeth’s privileged status—only 1 to 2 percent of the entire population travels among the worlds—leads to his being selected to host human Rat Korga, the lone ambassador from a planet that no longer exists. As it turns out, the two are perfect erotic companions.

Though Korga’s stay on Dyeth’s planet is short, it generates great interest among both of the world’s species (humans and evelmi). Dyeth’s diplomatic sensitivity to cultural norms makes ‘her’ an adept narrator of the fictional universe that Samuel Delany has created, from it’s sexual ‘runs’ to dragon hunting to socializing with an elite political family from a distant planet. And it’s this last tale that allows for the development of what is probably the book’s most interesting metaphorical subplot.

Two rival political factions compete for supremacy among the universe’s six thousand or more inhabited planets: the Sygn and the Family. The former resembles a version of today’s liberal cosmopolitanism, several magnitudes beyond the realm of the imaginable. Its adherents are imbued with a strong focus on urbanity as the locus of the social being, and promote non-biological units as the center of reproduction/socialization. In contrast, the Family capitalizes on political claims of eternal truth, a glorification of the nuclear family unit, and a reverence for community and tradition. The conceptual pleasantries of such a dichotomy are appealing in and of themselves, but it’s the clear reference to the politics of today that is the most enjoyable to contemplate.

Thinking about this book from a bigger picture, I’m not sure I’d recommend it for someone venturing into science fiction for the first time, as I was. But if you want a book that will expand your political mind, and you’re not averse to the interplay of utopian and dystopian fantasy, then you’ll probably enjoy it. I’d also suggest, as a corollary, that you read Chapter 5 of Madhu Dubey’s book Signs and Cities: Black Literary Postmodernism.
(c) Jeffrey L. Otto August 8, 2009 ...more

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Jul 04, 2019 Alec Lyons rated it liked it · review of another edition

Truly this was a strange journey, and I don't know still how exactly to feel about it.... but overall I guess I can say that I was charmed and swept up by its strangeness. And it was strange. I did not know where exactly it was leading me, and truly, I don't believe it really lead me anywhere in the end.

In the end I feel as through the reader is opened up to layers and layers of information and lore, but that honestly goes nowhere? In the end the importance of all of that is left uncultivated.

I Truly this was a strange journey, and I don't know still how exactly to feel about it.... but overall I guess I can say that I was charmed and swept up by its strangeness. And it was strange. I did not know where exactly it was leading me, and truly, I don't believe it really lead me anywhere in the end.

In the end I feel as through the reader is opened up to layers and layers of information and lore, but that honestly goes nowhere? In the end the importance of all of that is left uncultivated.

It is very much in three very distinct parts, one being the opening with Rat Korga and our introduction to him and his early life, then the second following Marq and his illustrious position in the universe and through that interaction of Korga and Marq - we are introduced to a snippet of the universes greatly complex social and cultural constructs that are wonderfully alien.

I took great pleasure in listening to these constructs, notions of constructs and contradictions of these constructs. It never in the moment felt contrived and there were some beautiful reflections within the text. I enjoyed the exploration of agency, sexual desire, sexuality, what is home, gender, very very alien cultures interacting with one another. As well as the constant themes surrounding identity - being lost, relearning, having it stripped away, shaped, reshaped ...etc and I'm sure a bunch more things. Although, Marq is nothing short of egotistic, and despite his position; is terribly sheltered so I did enjoy his world being rocked and what that asked of him.

The third part was the afterword, an essay on Science Fiction itself, and feel that the fragmentation of the narrative is only then perceptible in reflection.

Anyway, a couple favourite quotes;

"Calling someone your perfect erotic object to his face seemed suddenly to express the perfect it stood for much too imperfectly."

"To leave a world at dawn, however, is to know how much you can want to remember, and to realise how much, because of the cultural and conceptual grid a world casts over our experience of it; we are victims of that truth against all will - once we tear loose from it in tonight."

"...it is a universe where what is built, what is written, what as been made; makes hands hold the beauty they do - and what is thought or felt or wondered over is marvellous because someone has clutched their hands or held them very still or merely moved them simply during the thinking or the feeling of it." ...more

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Aug 31, 2017 Anna rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, scifi, homoerotic

I definitely wasn’t in the right frame of mind for this book, as the whole time I was terribly worried about my Nana being ill in hospital. When preoccupied by worry, I either need fast-paced plot-driven fiction or dense non-fiction to act as a distraction. ‘Stars in My Pocket’ is a meandering sci-fi novel of ideas, with a great deal more world-building than plot. It has aged pretty well and remains interesting and original, with many striking details. I liked the drama of the dinner party scene ...more

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Feb 21, 2019 Dave rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Wow. This book was amazing. Delany has created a masterpiece here. The prose, the narration, the emotion, the imagery. This book is a work of art. This is a book about becoming human, and a book about being human. Some look for a deeper meaning, I don't think you should. That's all there needs to be.

The plot isn't the point. The setting isn't the point. The people are the point. Don't read this looking for an Earth shattering story. Or a truly unique setting. Or a prediction of humanity's futur ...more

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Nov 08, 2008 J. rated it really liked it · review of another edition

So amazing. The only slight problem I had with the text, and this is just my preference, is that the ending is indefinite. I see why he does it, though, and it makes sense. The idea that there could be such a thing as someone's "perfect erotic object" calculated mathmatically...that's a powerful reworking of Disney's "prince charming" myth, and I love how he Delany uses the embodied Queerness to examine it. ...more

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Sep 02, 2018 P rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

This is the first Delany I've read, and I haven't been this excited about a novel for a good while. Looking forward to reading more Delany. ...more

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Oct 23, 2014 Michael Battaglia rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

I will give Delany credit for throwing me a curveball. When I first read "Dhalgren" years ago I didn't think I would be in for the rather graphic sex scenes that the novel sometimes delved into (though given its length there was plenty of room for all kinds of stuff, my favorite kind of kitchen sink writing). When I read the description for this novel, I was expecting graphic sex scenes based on how the plot was going to go, and perhaps colored by prior experience. And that's not quite what I go I will give Delany credit for throwing me a curveball. When I first read "Dhalgren" years ago I didn't think I would be in for the rather graphic sex scenes that the novel sometimes delved into (though given its length there was plenty of room for all kinds of stuff, my favorite kind of kitchen sink writing). When I read the description for this novel, I was expecting graphic sex scenes based on how the plot was going to go, and perhaps colored by prior experience. And that's not quite what I got at all. Unfortunately, while "Dhalgren" didn't live or die depending on how explicitly a threesome was described (though, to be fair, it seemed like he had done his field research) this one might have needed a little something extra to liven it up a bit. Sex doesn't always sell, but it can break things up when the pace starts to slacken.

It starts promisingly enough. We're introduced to Rat Korga, who one day decides that giving up all of his willpower is a great idea and after he does so, he really doesn't have the initiative to reflect on how terrible an idea that really is. So we watch as he goes through being a slave, switching from master to master and having to be ordered around for even the smallest thing. Eventually it ends in him pulling a Kal-El and becoming the lone survivor of a world, mostly through sheer accidental luck. It's a whole novel's worth of experiences, which would be great except we're only fifty pages in and have three hundred more to go. Time to switch perspectives!

From there we go to hang out with Marq Dyeth, an Industrial Diplomat who travels from world to world and is quite chummy with lots of strange aliens, who he hangs out and chats with. Everyone seems to be worried about a thing called Cultural Fugue, which seems to be a version of everyone collectively deciding they just don't give a flying hoot anymore and blowing themselves up. Like an aggressive ennui. Also the galaxy is experiencing two warring philosophical factions who have different ideas of what exactly constitutes a family. In the midst of this Marq is told that his perfect erotic match ("to several decimal places" as the book helpfully points out) has been found and has just arrived, being the lone survivor of a recently dead world. Three guesses who it might be.

It's very difficult to accuse a man who has once written an eight hundred page hypertextual circularly structured novel of trying too hard but that seems to be the case here. You can almost feel the steam coming out of its ears as it contorts itself into trying to figure out exactly literary theory it is either proving or breaking new ground upon and in the afterword when Delany expounds on the various theories that went into it, and his vision of SF in general, you wonder if you need an advanced degree to figure out the real story going on here or if he just wrote this to mess with his graduate students. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy books that operate on multiple levels, even if I don't completely fathom the other levels. But there has to be a level that is accessible to me in some way and the novel comes close in parts but misses by that much.

Part of the problem is that there feels like very little forward momentum. We spend a lot of time in the setup and then even more time filling in the details. And the details are fascinating. His depiction of alien species is bizarre yet oddly grounded and his vision of a galaxy where the female pronoun has replaced "he" as the default makes for some disconcerting conversations until you start to get used to it. His version of the Internet that looks not unlike an advanced version of the Internet we all know and shop for stuff on is fairly heady stuff, especially considering that the book was written in the early eighties when the best the Internet could do was maybe beep placidly to the hundred guys who had the capability of connecting to it. The cultural customs of both aliens and the future are thought-out, leading to some striking scenes especially toward the end, with a strange hunting tradition and an even stranger dinner arrangement. They feel like both extrapolations and breaks, a welcome vision of the future that too often in SF looks like today, but with flying cars and shinier suits.

But much like the curly haired Doctor in the episode where the weird space pirates were stealing planets, you have to ask, "What's it for?" There seems to be very little at stake and the big thing that we're supposed to get all worked up over, i.e. that Marq and Korga are perfect from each other from a desirability standpoint doesn't really seem like something we need to get all hot and bothered over, despite everyone in the book acting like something earth-shattering has happened. They don't even meet until about halfway through the book and while there is some lovemaking between the pages, it's oddly passed over and passionless. It's not that I go flipping through my SF books seeking explicit same-sex love scenes but given what Delany has been shown to be capable of in the past, you might as well not tease me with it and go all the way. If anything it would keep Korga from being a blank space where a person should be. Despite having a physically commanding presence and the coolest backstory of anyone there, he barely registers at all. The most interesting thing about him (his need to be told to do anything) is resolved via the magic of made-up science and with that gone, he basically exists as a walking erotic object. When late in the novel he makes a rather cutting comment about experiencing discrimination, it's shocking only because he hasn't evinced much of a personality thus far. I'll assume that Delany didn't want to go the easy route in dealing with the sexual consequences of your perfect fantasy having zero willpower but what we're left with is the plot and metaphors desperately seeking each other but never quite meeting in that sweet spot. I can see on some level what he's trying to do but it can't quite connect with me so what I'm left with is holding a book that I want to like but being told that I need to admire it.

Maybe if Delany ever gets around to publishing the sequel to it (don't hold your breath, by all reports), the structure will become more apparent and it'll resonate with me better. Maybe I'm just really shallow and out for cheap thrills. But when a novel presumably about the dissemination of information and its effect on people who come in contact with that information has difficultly conveying its underlying concepts, it might have needed one more pass to graft onto a plot, instead of a series of things happening, some of which involves people who are naked and pleased to be so. Which may be a future we don't mind living in, but it can make reading about it a not especially invigorating experience. ...more

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Jan 19, 2020 David Agranoff rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: political-science-fiction, afrofuturism, space-opera, old-school-sci-fi, far-future, poc-author

Oh boy, where to start here. Let me start by saying that I think this is a masterpiece but I am not entirely sure. This is the kinda science fiction novel that you just have to accept that you are not going to get every single aspect of it and just go along for the ride either way. On our best days that is what the women and men behind the genre should reach for. This experience was mind and universe expanding. Absolutely what you want in a Science Fiction epic.

Samuel "Chip" Delany is one of the ...more

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Apr 30, 2017 Mjhancock rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: queer, sci-fi, space-politics

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. Like many of Delany's novels, Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand feels ahead of its time, in the way it openly explores queer characters and queer desires. The book presents deeply personal perspectives within a dizzying melange of intergalactic cultures and civilizations—and yet, at times, that second half is sometimes to the book’s detriment, as it feels like it lacks a sense of unity, upon first reading. The first tenth or so of the book follows Rat Korga, a man born into poverty on the p Like many of Delany's novels, Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand feels ahead of its time, in the way it openly explores queer characters and queer desires. The book presents deeply personal perspectives within a dizzying melange of intergalactic cultures and civilizations—and yet, at times, that second half is sometimes to the book’s detriment, as it feels like it lacks a sense of unity, upon first reading. The first tenth or so of the book follows Rat Korga, a man born into poverty on the planet Rhyonon, who agrees to allow a procedure that changes his neurological composition so he’ll accept any verbal instruction he’s given, in exchange for room and board. The novel follows his life as a slave of corporations (in Rhyonon, it’s illegal and immoral for people to own slaves, but it’s okay for corporations), emphasizing the narrowness of his existence, and the moment where it becomes something more. The rest of the book is told from the first person perspective of Marq Dyeth, an industrial diplomat who puts the “cosmos” in cosmopolitan—Dyeth’s job makes sure he* spends a lot of time communicating between denizens of a multitude of planets. The crux of the story is essentially what happens when Marq learns that he and Korga are each other’s perfect erotic match.
Scifi scholar Darko Suvin coined the term “novum” to describe the logically possible element of a science fiction novel that separates it from the world as we know it. In Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (heretoafter referred to as “Sand” to save my wrists) it’s near impossible to identify a single novum beyond “humanity went to the stars.” The book presents several sci-fi concepts, some common, some less so. Dyeth comes from a family that’s a mix between humans and an alien race that kind of resembles lizards, and his culture is unusual for permitting not just such families, but erotic relations between the two groups—in the north, the two are still at war. Korga’s mental clamping is another major innovation, and it’s really fascinating to see how the culture of his planet makes very, very clear distinctions between “rats” and normal people, to justify the incredible degradations that the nonrats subject him to.
One of the most significant cultural “nova” is the reason I put the asterisk in describing Marq as he—Marq comes from a future where our gender/sex norms have been superceded; it’s complicated, but male has become a sort of subcategory of the general concept of woman, and thus you get sentences like “The foreign male pulled off her gloves.” In that way, it reminds me very strongly of Leckie’s Ancillary series, though it came much earlier. (I should also mention that when I refer to Dveth as he, I’m not trying to countermand Delaney’s work to destabilize our gender conceptions—rather, it’s highlight that the maleness of Dyeth and Korga is an important part, for both of them, of their erotic desires.) While there are various explanations. And there’s the cultural fugue, and the conflict between Family and Sygn, which, to my detriment, I was never quite sure I got to the bottom of. Perhaps the unwritten planned sequel novel may explain some of the finer details of this universe, but for the purpose of this book, the sheer variety of unexplained difference seems to be part of Delany’s point—that from a foreign culture on a different world to the rooms of your own home, you can never entirely understand everything around you, and you need to muddle through what’s important to you, as best you can.
I said the story doesn’t have a novum, and while that’s mostly true, it does definitely have a unifying theme, or subject. This is somewhat both facile and generalizing, but it’s essentially a story about the overwhelming attraction between two men. And honestly, that first moment of desire, leading up to their first face-to-face meeting, is one of the most charged scenes of the book, as is Dveth’s speech at the book’s end. Beneath the veneer of far flung futures and alien culture, there’s a very clear real world analog, as two men from very different backgrounds try to connect in the time that’s given to them. Korga comes from a world where his desires weren’t unheard of, but were considered perverse; Dyeth comes from a much more permissive background, and there’s a scene that seems very true to life where he realizes his “liberal” friends are much less tolerant of his life and family than he believed. It culminates in that final Dveth speech, where Delany tips his hand—this isn’t a love story, but a story of the bit before that, about what it means to exist in cultures, in times and places, where you aren’t granted the room to explore how desire can turn into love.
As I said in my opening, there’s a lot of other stuff going around too, and while there’s some context, it feels like an incomplete picture, and a lot is told to us through exposition. To a certain extent, that all works, because it reinforces the centrality of Marq and Korga, but it also means that the plot lacks direction in a lot of places. (And because I had to put it somewhere, my favorite minor character is definitely Small Maxa, Marq’s young sister with a phobia towards touch.) Still, it’s a powerful narrative, and worth reading.
...more

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Feb 01, 2015 Michael rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Recommends it for: Sci Fi Fans, Delany fans, anarchists

Recommended to Michael by: Tom Jennings

Shelves: literature, science-fiction

Most of this book was just in the “good, not great” category for me – at least when compared to Delany’s classics, like “Triton” and “Dhalgren.” It seems to be a return to more standard science fiction, in that it takes place in the context of a vast, Galactic society with faster-than-light travel and alliances with multiple alien species. There’s even an enigmatic “enemy” species, the xlv, about which little is known and much imagined.

All is not as it seems, as one might expect from Delany, ho Most of this book was just in the “good, not great” category for me – at least when compared to Delany’s classics, like “Triton” and “Dhalgren.” It seems to be a return to more standard science fiction, in that it takes place in the context of a vast, Galactic society with faster-than-light travel and alliances with multiple alien species. There’s even an enigmatic “enemy” species, the xlv, about which little is known and much imagined.

All is not as it seems, as one might expect from Delany, however. He emphasizes the fact that space travel is not at all common, that most people live out their lives in the context of their own birth-worlds (“a world is a large place” is a common slogan, and he makes a point of demonstrating that one world is not a monoculture). The aliens we meet are mostly conquered subject-races, who live either in assimilated harmony or outright warfare with the human colonists. The society is divided between two factions, the Family (who appear to be conservative and Earth-centric) and the Sygn (who are less clear, but seem to be more semantic in their focus). Worlds move back and forth between these factions, teetering on the edge of Cultural Fugue and self-destruction. The Galaxy appears to be not ruled so much as manipulated by a meritocracy known as the Web. The world on which we spend the most time apparently functions as a “bureaucratic anarchy,” which sounds like the worst of all worlds but actually seems to be fairly pleasant most of the time.

The real story, however, is a Romance, in the grandest of all senses. One man has his world destroyed (either by the xlv or Cultural Fugue, we are never certain which), while the other is an Industrial Diplomat, traveling from world to world solving problems as a kind of troubleshooter of the stars. Oh yes, I did say “the other man,” although in their tongue both would be described as “women,” since Delany is trying one of his linguistic-reversal experiments and has largely eliminated gender distinction from language, except in intimate situations. But, again, this is first and foremost a gay romance novel. And it was here that the narrative did occasionally move into “great” territory in my reading. Particularly in the final four or five pages, in which he lets his poetic soul loose to discuss the power sexuality has over perception, the energy it gives us when we are allowed to acknowledge it and experience it, and the way it is a motivator for greatness in all human beings, regardless of how acceptable or unacceptable their predispositions may be. This is heady stuff, coming from the 80s.

On top of that, Delany manages some interestingly prescient technological speculation. Although the Web refers to a political structure, one of its primary tools is “GI,” referring to Galactic Information, a kind of mentally-implanted Google-Wikiedia equivalent important for diplomatic work (since no one can memorize the protocols of every planet they will visit). There’s even a kind of discussion of the Digital Divide, since some worlds have full access, some partial, and some none at all. The love-object in our story comes from such a world, and has also had his own inquisitiveness surgically removed, so that he remains a kind of archetypal Innocent. But, the thing that I really remembered from this book was that the technology existed to transform him from an idiot to a genius, just by putting on a glove or some rings, because his stupidity, like nearly all stupidity, was not inherent but a result of being trained how not to think through painful punishment.

So, although I still won’t add this to the very topmost of my pantheon of Delany novels, it was well worth a read and far above most sci fi of its period or any other. ...more

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About Samuel R. Delany

Samuel R. Delany

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Samuel Ray Delany, also known as "Chip," is an award-winning American science fiction author. He was born to a prominent black family on April 1, 1942, and raised in Harlem. His mother, Margaret Carey Boyd Delany, was a library clerk in the New York Public Library system. His father, Samuel Ray Delany, Senior, ran a successful Harlem undertaking establishment, Levy & Delany Funeral Home, on 7th Av Samuel Ray Delany, also known as "Chip," is an award-winning American science fiction author. He was born to a prominent black family on April 1, 1942, and raised in Harlem. His mother, Margaret Carey Boyd Delany, was a library clerk in the New York Public Library system. His father, Samuel Ray Delany, Senior, ran a successful Harlem undertaking establishment, Levy & Delany Funeral Home, on 7th Avenue, between 1938 and his death in 1960. The family lived in the top two floors of the three-story private house between five- and six-story Harlem apartment buildings. Delany's aunts were Sadie and Bessie Delany; Delany used some of their adventures as the basis for the adventures of his characters Elsie and Corry in the opening novella Atlantis: Model 1924 in his book of largely autobiographical stories Atlantis: Three Tales.

Delany attended the Dalton School and the Bronx High School of Science, during which he was selected to attend Camp Rising Sun, the Louis August Jonas Foundation's international summer scholarship program. Delany and poet Marilyn Hacker met in high school, and were married in 1961. Their marriage lasted nineteen years. They had a daughter, Iva Hacker-Delany (b. 1974), who spent a decade working in theater in New York City.

Delany was a published science fiction author by the age of 20. He published nine well-regarded science fiction novels between 1962 and 1968, as well as several prize-winning short stories (collected in Driftglass [1971] and more recently in Aye, and Gomorrah, and other stories [2002]). His eleventh and most popular novel, Dhalgren, was published in 1975. His main literary project through the late 1970s and 1980s was the Return to Nevèrÿon series, the overall title of the four volumes and also the title of the fourth and final book.

Delany has published several autobiographical/semi-autobiographical accounts of his life as a black, gay, and highly dyslexic writer, including his Hugo award winning autobiography, The Motion of Light in Water.

Since 1988, Delany has been a professor at several universities. This includes eleven years as a professor of comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, a year and a half as an English professor at the University at Buffalo. He then moved to the English Department of Temple University in 2001, where he has been teaching since. He has had several visiting guest professorships before and during these same years. He has also published several books of criticism, interviews, and essays. In one of his non-fiction books, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999), he draws on personal experience to examine the relationship between the effort to redevelop Times Square and the public sex lives of working-class men, gay and straight, in New York City.

In 2007, Delany was the subject of a documentary film, The Polymath, or, The Life and Opinions of Samuel R. Delany, Gentleman. The film debuted on April 25 at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival. ...more

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“You've blotted the rich form of desire from my life and left me only some vaguely eccentric behaviors that have grown up to integrate so much pleasure into the mundane world around me. What text could I write now? It's as though I cannot even remember what I once desired. All I can look for now, when I have the energy, is lost desire itself-- and I look for it by clearly inadequate means. At best such an account as I might write would read like the life of anyone else, with, now and again, a bizarre and interruptive incident, largely mysterious and completely demystified-- at least that's what it has become without the day-to-day, moment-to-moment web of wanting that you have unstrung from about my universe. Without it, all falls apart. In a single gesture you've turned me into the most ordinary of human creatures and at once left me an obsessive, pleasureless eccentric, trapped in a set of habits which no longer have reason because they no longer lead to reward. And if I had enough self-confidence, in the midst of this bland continual chaos into which you've shunted me, for hate, I should hate you. But I don't have it.” — 14 likes

“We're plotting to steal time itself from you.... We're going to spike it to the floor as it slips by. And just as you come over to see why it's so still, we'll pull it out from under you--and send you spinning off around the galaxy's edge. We're planning to pluck all the best stars out of the sky and stuff them in our pockets... so that when we meet you once again and thrust our hands deep inside to hide our embarrassment, our fingertips will smart on them, as if they were desert grains, caught down in the seams, and we'll smile at you on your way to a glory that, for all our stellar thefts, we shall never be able to duplicate.” — 10 likes

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