This book review is another in our New Look At an Old Book series, where reviewers take on genre classics.
I knew the title long before I knew it was a book. It sounded to me like an old song lyric, or a well-worn quote from a poem or bit of literature that I’d somehow missed. My introduction to Delany was through Dhalgren
I never finished Dhalgren. I was blown away by it. It put me to sleep. I was thrilled to find its like in the annals of science fiction. I memorized whole passages of its gorgeous, exacting prose and both condemned it and recommended it to others. But everywhere I read about Delany, Stars in My Pocket stood out as the work to remember, even with oldguard authors like Harlan Ellison calling it trash. In fact the more I heard about it, the more I recognized a loose pattern—those more aligned with the genre’s roots didn’t like it, and those more aligned with the genre’s future found it fascinating.
It is a hard book to be reductive about. “Literary queer hard sci-fi from the mid-80s” neither rolls off the tongue nor gives a real sense of what it’s like. Even the blurbs from its various editions don’t agree on what it’s about, and these differ further still from how individual readers have described it. In a pan-galactic civilization, culture is polarizing between two factions—the Family and the Sygn—roughly analogous to today’s conservatives and liberals. One of the civilization’s six thousand worlds is destroyed in a mysterious conflagration (a phenomenon the book refers to generally as Cultural Fugue), which may be the result of alien action and which leaves Rat Korga, an oafish lobotomized labor slave, as its lone survivor. Korga, as agents of the secretive Web discover, is the “perfect erotic object” of one Marq Dyeth, an Industrial Diplomat who is also a member of a significant family on a prominent Sygn world. The Web conspires to bring the two men together for its own ends, and thus begins one of the strangest and most poignant love stories in all of science fiction.
The trouble with this summary and others is they give the impression that the novel is thoroughly genre—which it is. But it is also thoroughly literary, by the most contemporary understanding of the term, and Delany, as a literary critic and professor of creative writing, engages experiments in structure and prose style at every turn. The language of the book is precise and exquisite, evoking thoughts and images in ways very few other authors of genre have ever managed. He also writes against the sexual mores of his time (provoking controversy as literature, but not pure genre, often does) and builds subtext into the story that threatens to overwhelm the plot—with absolute intentionality. A result of this perhaps is that the book hasn’t aged as science fiction does. Nothing about it seems kitschy or quaint, even a quarter century after its first publication. Neuromancer
This is not to suggest Delany is a general fiction author treading into genre waters with no idea how to swim. As a piece of hard sci-fi, Stars in My Pocket is a juggernaut. It packs more seminal ideas into brief descriptions than are found in some entire novels. Diverse planetary environments and species are carefully realized — ecologically, historically, linguistically, and culturally. Details of even the most mundane bits of technology seem both exotic and actual. Delany understood and wrote in his time networked information technology with far more perceptiveness than Gibson, coiner of the term “cyberspace” or no. He writes future physics with as much imagination as he writes a future where advanced synaptic mapping and six thousand worlds’ worth of sexual diversity has allowed for the quantifying of even erotic desire—down to units with significant digits of seven or more decimal places.
Not all the experiments work, however, and in some places clarity falls before style. He also makes some mistakes that seasoned “storytellers” (as opposed to “writers”) rarely make, such as the array of poorly defined characters that are either introduced only to serve a scene-specific function, or as narrative spice in periods where the plot drags.
And it does drag—frequently. Both action and exposition, throughout the book, are carried too often by dialogue that differs little from the prose (except in places where Delany choses to insert an alien idiosyncrasy), so that conversations that strain credibility with their awkwardness often span several chapters, reveal virtually nothing about the speakers, and advance the plot by mere minutes. The prologue takes up almost a fifth of Stars in My Pocket, and the action that any synopsis of it describes doesn’t actually begin until halfway through it. Delany carefully expounds the story’s context and themes from page one, but the story’s immediate subject, the relationship between Marq Dyeth and Rat Korga, he doesn’t address until well into the book.
Once he gets there, though, the story shines (in particular the unforgettable dragon hunt chapter). Loss, lust versus love, sexual identity, and the power of social forces all come through with emotional and intellectual resonance. Culture and society are the heart of the book’s futurism, and the ideas it addresses both grandly and in minor details (as with changes to grammatical gender, where “she” is neutral, and “he” is reserved for objects of sexual attraction) are no less relevant today than they were twenty-five years ago. It should also come as a welcome relief for those still looking for a complex portrayal of a homosexual relationship in genre that doesn’t read like fan fiction.
A Delany publishing renaissance is already underway. Vintage has released a design-conscious series that includes Dhalgren and other major pieces in 2000, and the latest edition of Stars in My Pocket was published in 2004. Fantasy and science fiction are catching up to Delany. The tiresome boundary between genre and literature that he ignored is eroding, and today’s readers will have more to appreciate in his work than any audience he’s ever had, which, as the work makes clear, he richly deserves.
To buy a copy of Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, click here