Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand

This is one of my favorite of Samuel R. Delany's mighty ouevre, but it's not for everyone. You have to like science fiction and dirty queer sex, and you have to want to read in extreme detail about the social organization of other worlds. ( )

I'm not going to say that I totally understood this book, but once I stopped trying to, I really enjoyed it a lot.

As far as I can tell: there is a guy who has this procedure that removes all his anxiety, but also his free will, so he becomes a slave on his planet.
Then the planet is totally destroyed as an effect of something called "Cultural Fugue", and he is the only survivor.

Then we switch to this other guy, who is what they call an Industrial Diplomat, and he lives on a planet where humans and these sort of lizard/dragon aliens coexist peacefully and have sex a lot. They have a lot of entertaining social occasions--there is this dinner party scene that is hilarious and bizarre.

Then these other people rescue the first guy from the cultural fugue holocaust, and somehow while they are fixing him up they find out that he and the industrial diplomat guy are each other's Perfect Erotic Object to within 3 decimal places, or something, so they figure hey, let's introduce them.

Then some other stuff happens, which I won't spoil for you, but the main reason to read this is really for the little details of the alien cultures rather than the plot.

OH, and I also forgot to mention that there's a whole thing where you call everyone "she" unless you're sexually attracted to them, in which case you say "he". So that can be confusing, plus also they use "women" as the default instead of "men". Subversive! (well, maybe for 1984) ( )

Weird, interesting. I did not understand much of this book but as it is a favorite of a good friend of mine, I kept reading. Delaney truly creates a unique world here--alien worlds within alien worlds-- and there were parts of this story I found really fascinating. I felt like I needed cliff notes for it! Still, I would venture that this is sci fi at it's most inventive. ( )

Delany writes at a different angle to everybody else, and I have greatly enjoyed some of his other works (Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones, in particular, is a strong candidate for my favourite short story). This book, though, despite an intriguing beginning, turned out to be one of the few books I can find no good reason to finish reading. Which is a pity, because underneath the linguistic wilfulness and meandering, self-obsessed narration, there are hints of genuinely interesting thought. ( )

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. ( )