Geek’s Comments (group member since Nov 07, 2013)

Geek’s comments from the GeekOutsider group.

So, if you started reading along with us yesterday, then you're smack dab in the middle of a whole lot of weird (ah, sci-fi!). Samuel Delany really knows how to kick things off, starting with neurologically-induced slavery and a big oaf of a protagonist.

There's so much here already! But this particular idea struck me:

--Intelligence levels justifying labor & humanness
While our lady rescuer seems to have mixed feelings about the whole slavery deal, she poses a question that might say something about how slavery has managed to proliferate on this particular planet:
"But if I could, I'd make you free--before I made you serve me! I really would. Only I can't. So the only thing left is for you to make me free...Or happy. Is it the same thing? Is happiness slavery?"

What caught your attention most in these first pages?

You may have seen on the site that we're kicking off a very geeky, very outsider-y reading marathon!! And we're kicking it off with the geekiest outsider of outsider geeks himself Mr. Samuel R. Delany.

This month, we'll be reading Stars In My Pocket Like Grains of Sand by Samuel Delany! It's a long, heady, paradigm-busting read so we figure it needs a whole month. We hope you'll join us on this mind-blowing 6,000-planet universe gender-bending journey! We start the epic journey Sunday!

Here's what some of the smarty pants publishing and critic-ing folk have to say about it:

"Sentence by sentence, phrase by phrase, Delany invites the reader to collaborate in the process of creation. The reader who accepts this invitation has an extraordinarily satisfying experience in store."--Gerald Jonas, The New York Times Book Review

"Stars in My Pocket has been one of my favorite books and, in particular, the book that, more decisively than any other, has defined for me just what science fiction is capable of and why it is worth bothering about."--Carl Freedman, The Foreword

"A densely textured, intricately worked out novelistic structure which delights and astonishes even as it forces a confrontation with a wide range of thought-provoking issues. Stars in My Pocket like Grains of Sand . . . confirms that [Delany] is American SF's most consistently brilliant and inventive writer."--Steve McCaffery, Fantasy Review

"If H. G. Wells was the Shakespeare of science fiction, Samuel R. Delany is its James Joyce. Marginalized by both fate and choice, he has inscribed those margins on the consciousness of readers of science fiction, fantasy, and literary theory." (David N. Samuelson, Professor of English, California State University, Longbeach)