Trouble on Triton Quotes

“Everytime you read, you are walking among the dead, and, if you are listening, you just might hear prophecies.”
― Kathy Acker, Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia

“The fantasy/reality confusion...it's just marvelous in her work. I mean, there, it's practically like what we do, the fantasy working as a sort of metalogic, with which she can solve real, aesthetic problems in the most incredible ways -- I was actually in a few of her productions last year, a sort of ersatz member of the company. But finally I just had to get out. Because when that fantasy seeps into the reality, she just becomes an incredibly ugly person. She feels she can distort anything that occurs for whatever purpose she wants. Whatever she feels, that's what is, as far as she's concerned. But then, I suppose...' Bron laughed at the ground, then looked up: they'd just left the Plaza -- 'that's the right we just fought a war to defend. But Audri, when someone abuses that right, it can make it pretty awful for the rest of us.”
― Samuel R. Delany, Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia

“Everything in a science-fiction novel should be mentioned at least twice (in at least two different contexts).”
― Samuel R. Delany, Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia

“Heinlein, in Starship Troopers, by a description of a mirror reflection and the mention of an ancestor’s nationality, in the midst of a strophe on male makeup, generates the data that the first-person narrator, with whom we have been traveling now through two hundred and fifty-odd pages (of a three-hundred-and-fifty-page book), is black. Others have argued the surface inanities of this novel, decried its endless preachments on the glories of war, and its pitiful founderings on sublimated homosexual themes. But who, a year after reading the book, can remember the arguments for war—short of someone conscientiously collecting examples of human illogic? The arguments are inane; they do not relate to anything we know of war as a real interface of humanity with humanity: they do not stick in the mind. What remains with me, nearly ten years after my first reading of the book, is the knowledge that I have experienced a world in which the placement of the information about the narrator’s face is proof that in such a world the “race problem,” at least, has dissolved. The book as text—as object in the hand and under the eye—became, for a moment, the symbol of that world. In that moment, sign, symbol, image, and discourse collapse into one, nonverbal experience, catapulted from somewhere beyond the textus (via the text) at the peculiarly powerful trajectory only s-f can provide.”
― Samuel R. Delany, Trouble on Triton

“Naming is always a metonymic process,” Delany writes. That is, a name doesn’t tell you what something is so much as it connects the phenomenon/idea to something else. Certainly to culture. In this sense, language is the accumulation of connections where there were no such connections.”
― Samuel R. Delany, Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia

“Your problem, you see, is that essentially you are a logical pervert, looking for a woman with a mutually compatible logical perversion.”
― Samuel R. Delany, Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia