Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia

by Samuel R. Delany, Kathy Acker (Contributor)

In a story as exciting as any science fiction adventure written, Samuel R. Delany's 1976 SF novel, originally published as Triton, takes us on a tour of a utopian society at war with . . . our own Earth! High wit in this future comedy of manners allows Delany to question gender roles and sexual expectations at a level that, 20 years after it was written, still make it a coruscating portrait of the happily reasonable man, Bron Helstrom -- an immigrant to the embattled world of Triton, whose troubles become more and more complex, till there is nothing left for him to do but become a woman. Against a background of high adventure, this minuet of a novel dances from the farthest limits of the solar system to Earth's own Outer Mongolia. Alternately funny and moving, it is a wide-ranging tale in which character after character turns out not to be what he -- or she -- seems.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Queer, LGBT, Science Fiction Fantasy, Gender

312 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 1976

About the author

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.

Reviews

[Jason · Rating 4 out of 5]

Everyone talks about how this is a political or cultural or social exploration novel, and that's all true, but what fascinates me about it is how incredibly PSYCHOLOGICAL it is. The cultural and social stuff is pretty simple - Samuel Delany has created here an honest-to-goodness utopia, a world in which everyone can essentially be anyone they want to be. You're a woman who wants to be a male homosexual? No problem. There's a community for you. You want to have scales and a tail? No problem. There's a community for you. You're white, and you want to be black, or orange? No problem. There's a community for you. There seems to be a complete acceptance of others in this world in regards to race, sex, gender, sexuality, profession....even theater artists are accepted!

But then what's the story? Ah, that's the masterstroke. The thing of it is, the novel is narrated by a man who hates the place. He is more or less a 20th-century guy. He could be any guy from today, perhaps on the slightly conservative side. And Delany places this very modern-seeming man into the far future and into a world where problems of personal identity have been more or less eliminated, and then tells the story of how that modern man of today just can't find his place in it. He doesn't fit in; he doesn't get it. It is the contrast between this utopia of malleable and universally accepted identities and this man's hatred of it that serves as the spine of this novel.

And I found it riveting. The guy's impossible, and yet...and yet - I sort of see where he's coming from. Because I, too, am a man of today, and perhaps I share some of the insecurities and prejudices of this asshole. Frightening! But that's why this book is so good. As a reader, I had to ask myself, would I have been happy in this utopia? Would I be okay with anyone being able and encouraged to be absolutely whatever they want to be? Isn't that a bit childish? This is particularly topical in today's world, isn't it, what with people all being encouraged to embrace their "true selves," whatever that may be. We applaud every person who comes out of whatever dark closet they had hidden their true identities. The only person today, evidently, who has any right to say just who and what you are is YOU. This is a very new phenomenon, and I know a lot of people have an instinctive and visceral reaction against it. So, could I enjoy a world just like that, a world without stability of identity, without structure and limitations and labels? Or would I also be a miserable curmudgeon, just like this guy? The novel invites self-introspection, and that is a rare feat.

And to anyone who fears they won't enjoy the novel because they won't sympathize with the narrator-protagonist, just know that you aren't meant to sympathize with him. He's an unreliable narrator, and if you were to sympathize with him, you would misunderstand the themes and purpose of the novel. Feel free to hate him. It's what Delany intended. Even as I saw where his discomforts came from, I hated him. He was a joy to hate. This novel is about how, even in a utopia, some people just couldn't be happy, and that's why I say the novel is so splendidly psychological. It's about how stuck we get in our own patterns, how resistant to change we are, how obtuse we can be about other people's feelings, about how we rationalize damaging other people. It doesn't deliver any pat answers - this isn't Dr. Phil. But it does present, to my mind, an extremely convincing portrait of the kind of human being who is all too common today, even perhaps in parts of ourselves, as social and cultural barriers to happiness start falling away one by one.

Read it as a psychological examination of the character's misery and attitudes and inability to adapt to a world without boundaries, and I believe you will get a great deal out of it. Strongly recommended.

[Erika · Rating 3 out of 5]

Trouble on Triton is supposed to inhabit a utopian (heterotopic) future when Earth is no longer the only hospitable planet, where personal expression has evolved through a widened acceptance of differing sexualities, and gender takes on radical new perspectives. I appreciated the gender exploration, but found it extremely hard to sympathize with the protagonist, Bron Helstrom. As a teenager, Bron was a (legal) male prostitute, but well into adulthood, he seems homophobic. This wasn’t the worse of his qualities. He’s also egotistical, self-centered, and unbelievably frustrating. Despite this, he manages to live in an all-male commune--the evolved living situation in Delany’s imagined future. Convinced no one save himself understands his situation, Bron chooses a radical future for himself that ultimately leaves him less satisfied than before.

The homages to a quaint, ancient Earth where manners and delicate social maneuvering like tipping and gentlemanliness, are satire at its best. Delany also challenges preconceived notions of gender and sexuality that, along with his humor, make Trouble on Triton worth the read. Bron, however, ruined most of the novel for me, but he also pushed me to think the most. I wonder if using such an unsympathetic, irritating protagonist so out of his element in a free, sexually liberating universe, to impose such an anomaly, is to present a creature wholly relatable to an extant homophobic readership upon publication.

Maybe the fact that Bron goes to such lengths to discover himself is really a plea or wishful thinking rather than the indictment of white male intellectual thinking Delany presents. I’m inclined this direction only because Bron doesn’t, in fact, discover anything past the stubborn limitations of his psyche, but he does seem to reach an honesty with himself at the end, if a disappointing one. Optimistically, he did try, albeit for the wrong reasons. Close-minded or not, Bron Helstrom represents the worst in all of us; our frustration with him is a frustration with the limited prejudices we recognize in our own society.

For example, men and women freely wander the pages of this book in little to no clothing without apparent embarrassment or fear. In a society where sexuality has become so evolved and the human body less of a sin than a recognizable joy, it’s no wonder and an odd restoration of peace among us, that women, as well as men can exercise that right. However, Bron frequently expresses extreme irritation when propositioned and even scorns the naked physicality of his male suitors, choosing instead disgust rather than flattery if, say, Lawrence were female, over his prospects despite not being gay.

If you don’t mind a book that so openly features the best and worst of human sexuality, gender (and mannerisms in regard to either), definitely pick up Trouble on Triton. The only questions I have are: does Delany ever get tired of a naked cast or do his characters ever get cold?

[Leo Robertson · Rating 2 out of 5]

NEW REVIEW:

Ugh, can it really have been eight years since I last read this?

It is relevant to something I'm writing, so I thought I'd revisit it.

I was more or less on the money the first time around, haha! This book is drier than a coochie jettisoned into outer space!!

It really surprises me to read this after I heard the following anecdote which Delany relayed in an interview: He'd once lost some pages from Dhalgren when he was writing it and had to rewrite them. However, he was sure upon rewriting it that the words of those missing pages would have been in the exact same original order. Because that's how precise a writer he was.

Then why is it that, in this book (and likely Dhalgren though I will not be rereading it), the sentences are so unnecessarily lengthy and the payoff of each phrase is left (especially in the earlier passages of this book, where there are multiple examples of extremely long sentences that it does seem could have more easily been broken down, as I am demonstrating in this sentence) until you've forgotten what the beginning of it was? Painful!

Character relationships are not built convincingly. They went from one of Neptune's moons to Outer Mongolia and back and I barely noticed. In an early chapter there is a lengthy section of a guy playing some sort of board game which is not explained or relevant, but we get so many details of it anyway. Whenever something interesting is happening it gets interrupted by characters spouting the Wikipedia page, for whatever the topic is, at each other.

It's dated and bad. Avoid!

PREVIOUS REVIEW:

I suspect I'm not clever enough for it- but, you know, I hear Dhalgren is very clever, but similar to this (I remembered while reading it) I thought pockets of its description and arguments were interesting and highly original, but the rest was bland- and I'm always in a state of perpetual unease about who's going to sleep with whom and what I'm supposed to think of it, even although I'm not engaged in the lives of any of the characters... perhaps the underlying structure of either book is fascinating and rich and genius and masterful, but I don't care to dig deep in frozen soil.

And I don't know if this counts as narrow-mindedness, but I like men, not women, and I don't consider any kind of future where everyone's asking everyone to frick, then everyone fricking each other and then they both change gender and frick again, that sounds like an identity-seeking nightmare to me more than a utopia. It took thirteen year-old me so much effort to get to the point where he was able to identify as gay that, now twice the age, I'm fairly sure I don't have the energy to identify or even to try anything else (I'm married anyways- so fuck, Delany, call me traditional!). Even fictionally, it's exhausting to keep track of.

I'm seeing more and more that my perception of what is a novel and what isn't is much more limited than I expected- I think this is a response to reading the beautiful crafts that can come from writing like a tennis player with the net taut, rather than have it sagging and letting all kinds of balls get past- and long, oblique philosophical discussions- that only happen to take place on other planets or moons for reasons unclear- neither seems to me to be a novel, nor really sci-fi.

Still, Delany is capable of greatness, and when I'm feeling more adventurous, I'll return to his intellectuo-ethno-sexual ballpits again :)

[Rhys · Rating 4 out of 5]

Delany is one of my favourite writers, but it has taken me a long time to get round to reading this one. In fact, *Triton* has been on my bookshelves since 1993. I think I was intimidated by the appendix on metalogic. It looks like a 'difficult' novel, but that's really an illusion. It's a beautifully written, complex but totally accessible and engaging work.

The main character, Bron Helstrom, is simultaneously likeable and infuriating, perceptive and unaware, an authentic personality on the page. The background events of his life in an 'ambiguous heteropotia' include a devastating war between the inner worlds and the outer satellites that is presented slightly obliquely and very convincingly. And the society in which Bron has chosen to make his home is constructed with brilliant imagination and attention to detail. It's a sort of utopia-of-choice, not quite the perfect society but hugely preferrable to our own.

Delany is a thought-provoking writer but there is a lot of positive emotional energy in his work too. *Triton* is the best novel I have read all year. Without question.

[Craig · Rating 3 out of 5]

Triton is a very densely-written and challenging book that examines gender roles and politics and the mechanics of self vs. society and the philosophy of everything including philosophy. It's a good science fiction book in the strict speculative "What if?" sense. On the other hand, the main character doesn't seem to be very likable, and the story is hard to follow and secondary to the contemplations; it's certainly quite thought-provoking, but not really entertaining in the light and diverting sense. It took me a while to get through, but I was glad that I'd made the effort at the end.

[Kara Babcock · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s been almost five weeks since I did this, so let’s hope my skills haven’t atrophied too much! My student teaching practicum was awesome, but it left me little time for reading and no time for reviewing. Now I need to catch up. So please forgive me if the details in this review are sparser than ordinary; there is a very good reason why I write reviews as soon as possible after finishing a book!

Fortunately, Triton is a very memorable book, which one might have expected coming from Samuel R. Delany. I love the edition I have, another Bantam 1976 yellowing reprint, similar to my edition of Dhalgren, that I picked up at a used bookstore for $1.05. The cover alone makes me feel much more connected to the zeitgeist in which Delany was immersed when he wrote this, and that’s crucial to an understanding of this book. If you allow me to get reader-response on you for a moment, Triton is a book that will affect you differently depending on your generation. I know I say this a lot—you can call it a recurring theme of my reviews, if you like—but it’s true in this case. Politics runs through Triton like its lifeblood. Sexual politics, gender politics, even military politics all play a role. The characters themselves are more like puppets in an intricate stage play of the human psyche, in which they are battling for the one, best way to express themselves to the outside world. Hence the generational meanings—someone raised in the 1960s is going to interpret the politics and Delany’s themes differently than I do in 2011. However, that doesn’t depreciate the book’s relevance.

Triton is the story of Bron Helstrom’s struggle to redefine his identity in order to make his life less miserable. After running into a travelling actor known as the Spike and sparking up a brief affair, Bron’s own checkered and conflicted views on sexuality take front and centre. Bron was once a prostitute on Mars, where, unlike Earth, male prostitution is legal. He had sex with both men and women for business. Now he lives on Triton, where people live in communes or co-ops that are often divided by sex or sexuality. He has chosen to live in an all-male commune. His next-door neighbour is a homosexual man whom Bron views alternatively with respect and derision, for Lawrence refuses the rejuvenation treatments that keep most people healthy and youthful. Bron is much less comfortable with homosexuality, with unconventional gender performance in general, now that this is no longer his profession.

Bron is also selfish. He wants and wants and will often do things to get what he wants that he only perceives as harmful in hindsight—mildly sociopathic would be a good term, perhaps. This proves, ultimately, to be detrimental to his relationship with the Spike, a fact that becomes apparent when they run into each other while Bron is part of a political delegation to the antagonistic Earth. The Spike leaves Bron with a heartfelt, dictated letter that tells him in detail why she cannot like him, and this acts as the catalyst for the decision that offsets the last part of Triton from everything that comes before.

I would probably have to provide a play-by-play summary of the entire book to describe in detail the episodes that cause Bron to make his final decision. Suffice it to say, Triton is an intricate book. Delany really does manage to create this amazing microcosm of a possible future society, one where advances in technology make it practical to alter one’s sexual orientation and sexual and gender identities on fundamental biological and genetic levels. Many science-fiction authors create such societies in order to explore the implications of those technologies—and there is nothing wrong with that—but Delany elevates this exploration to another level, creating the technologies to explore the issues they uncover. These issues are already present, simmering beneath the surface of society and occasionally bursting forth. The technology of Triton makes them more accessible for discussion—and the quality of that discussion is what makes Triton so memorable.

The subtitle of this book is An Ambiguous Heterotopia, alluding to The Dispossessed , by Ursula K. Le Guin. I can see the similarities, and this does make a good companion read. Both books present competing governments whose politics are in flux, with individuals undergoing moments of intense personal crisis against the backdrop of this larger conflict. I admit to preferring The Dispossessed though, and that might entirely be due to the portrayals of Bron versus Shevek. Bron is a jerk. There. I said it!

I am even more intrigued, however, by the connection to Foucault’s ideas of a heterotopia as a type of privileged “other” space. I suppose Delany sets up Triton itself as a heterotopia separate from the warring planets of Earth and Mars. Triton is physically distant from the other two planets, and the inhabitants of Triton consider people from “worlds” laughably different. Our view of life on Earth and Mars is heavily biased, of course, but it seems like the moons are refuges from more authoritarian regimes on the worlds. For all its advantages, however, life on Triton is not without its hardships and its disadvantages—hence the ambiguity. Bron confronts this at the same time that he confronts his dissatisfaction with his own life.

I confess I didn’t see the ending coming, and it altered my opinion of the entire book. It creates this very distinct division between what came before and what comes after. I suppose the question, which Delany of necessity leaves unanswered, is whether Bron’s decision will actually have the desired effect. Will this dramatic alteration to his life and lifestyle change him for the better? I think it was very drastic (hence why I found it unexpected), but it also makes a kind of odd sense.

Like Dhalgren, Triton is another difficult book. I didn’t find it nearly so difficult as Dhalgren to read, but it raises difficult issues and stretches the mould of the conventional plot-driven narrative. I’m coming to see this as “typical Delany”, and while not every writer can get away with that kind of intense devotion to themes, he can. Because Delany doesn’t back down, and the result are books that are still relevant thirty-five years later. He raises questions about sex and sexuality, gender identity and performance. And while Triton is without question a science-fiction novel, Delany makes that seem unimportant compared to the story he’s telling through his characters. He makes offhand references to technology and science we don’t have, and sometimes it doesn’t always seem plausible—but it’S always to a purpose. Triton is a well-constructed, thoughtful, thought-provoking piece of literature.

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

It took me a while to get hold of a copy of Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia, as I think it's been out of print for a while. I read a 1996 edition and found it an extraordinary analysis of gender and misogyny, although the latter word is never mentioned. The protagonist, Bron, moved to Triton after a stint on Mars and works as a metalogistician. Triton's society is utopian: money and marriage are illegal, everyone lives in communes and co-ops, and anything goes sexually. However Triton is at risk of being pulled into a war with Earth, for reasons that never become clear because Bron is too self-involved to be interested in them. The narrative is concerned with his troubled relationships and existential frustrations.

I found it difficult to get into at first, as Bron is a really insufferable protagonist. But his perspective is genuinely interesting and Delany explores it with delicacy and nuance. His interactions with friends, colleagues, and lover are strikingly observed. After he complains to his gay neighbour Lawrence that women "don't understand" him, this is the reply:

"Let me tell you a secret. There is a difference between men and women, a little, tiny one that, I'm afraid, has probably made most of your adult life miserable and will probably continue to make it so until you die. The difference is simply that women have only really been treated, by that bizarre Durkenheimian abstraction, 'society', as human beings for the last - oh, say sixty-five years; and then, really, only on the moons; whereas men have had the luxury of such treatment for the last four thousand. The result of this historical anomaly is simply that, on a statistical basis, women are just a little less willing to put up with certain kinds of shit than men - simply because the concept of a certain kind of shit-free Universe is, in that equally bizarre Jungian abstraction, the female 'collective unconscious', too new and too precious."

Bron, unsurprisingly, does not take this very well. Indeed, immediately after this conversation, he decides that the only way to find a woman who meets his requirements is to become one. On Triton, this takes a couple of conversations and a few hours to achieve. Spoilers, Bron then finds herself unsatisfied with life as a woman. The change in perspective is nonetheless really interesting. Delany examines gender and sexuality in a thoughtful and genuinely original manner that still feels amazingly contemporary 48 years after first publication.

As for what hasn't aged so well, it has to be the fashion. I appreciated Delany's descriptions of what everyone is wearing, while finding all the outfits terrible aesthetically and practically. Why wear a tiny cape that covers your shoulders but not your chest? It would get in the way without keeping your nipples warm. Similarly the braces with plastic letters attached would surely get caught on things. Nudity in public and the workplace is also normal on Triton. It's not so much that I'm prudish as that it sounds so uncomfortable! Triton's public spaces would all have to be very warm and lacking in sharp edges. Seemingly this is a future where humanity has moved on from the concept of jackets; perhaps in the seventies things seemed to be going that way.

The edition of Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia I read included two appendices with omitted and tangentially-related material. I really enjoyed Delany's reflections on sci-fi and how it uses language, which echo or develop points I've read elsewhere (e.g. in Jo Walton's What Makes This Book So Great: Re-Reading the Classics of Science Fiction & Fantasy) and reflected upon myself (e.g. when reviewing Deep Wheel Orcadia).

The hugely increased repertoire of sentences science fiction has to draw on (thanks to this relation between the 'science' and the 'fiction') leaves the structure of the fictional field of s-f notably different from the fictional field of those texts which, by eschewing technological discourse in general, sacrifice this increased range of nontechnological sentences - or at least sacrifice them in the particular, foreground mode. Because the added sentences in science fiction are primarily foreground sentences, the relationship between foreground and background in science fiction differs from that of mundane fiction. The deposition of weight between landscape and psychology shifts.

Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia is a singular sci-fi novel with little direct interest in science or technology, instead concerning itself with society, gender, and sexuality in a much more technologically advanced setting. It inverts genre expectations by ostensibly taking the literary fiction route. Rather than focusing upon a space war, it delves into one man's emotional problems. Yet in a futuristic context examination of these problems necessitates bringing in analysis of the wider society, just as Delany points out.

[Jayaprakash Satyamurthy · Rating 4 out of 5]

In some ways, Triton is as much about science fiction as it is about social and political models.

The infodump or exposition is a vital part of the SF genre; it helps ground us in the imagined world of the story at hand and to contextualise those uniquely science-fictional sentences Delany is so fond of, formations like Heinlein's 'the door dilated' or a statement like 'her world exploded', which could have a much more literal meaning in a science fiction novel than in a mundane novel.

Infodumps give us the necessary context to understand things that do not gel with our everyday experience, they help understand social, political, cultural and technological elements of a story's background that are taken for granted when reading a book about our own times and our own people.

But an infodump is not necessarily informative in the strict sense; there are endless examples of SF infodumps that offer an explanation for things that we know cannot be explained because they have not happened; furthermore, the explanation probably does not have much practical value, because except in very rare cases no one has gone and done those things in the manner suggested therein (although the device or technique described may since have been developed in some different way). Instead, it is a sort of gesture, a string of words with enough familiar terms to reassure the average SF reader (defined by Delany as having the equivalent of a bright 13-year old's knowledge of science) that this is 'proper science' mixed in with enough plausible-sounding esoterica to convince that reader that something fairly authoritative has been said.

One of the first proper infodumps in this book happens when an attack has just been made on Triton, and a government official is trying to tell his companions in a men's cooperative housing building that the brief gravity failure that took place is nothing to worry about. He gives an explanation that starts by referring to things that seem to relate to 'real' science, and rapidly becomes esoteric. Them he is asked to tone it down so that a mentally-deficient person present can understand. He gives a simpler explanation that his person can understand - and even this version makes no sense on our terms if looked at closely. Just as the government agent does not really know quite what has happened, but is asserting his authority by seeming knowledgeable, Delany is giving his made-up explanation more authority by showing how even a mentally-deficient member of his future society can understand what flied over our own head. This is a very clever device, and a way to both demonstrate and practice one of the chief uses of the SF infodump.

But there are many other infodumps in this book. Some relate to a made-up discipline of metalogics - something which again has no relation to any real system of logic we might be able to conceive of, some are in the form of descriptions of dramatic pieces couched in the jargon of academic cultural studies, some relate to genetics and medicine. Others are more personal.

All the infodumps that relate to disciplines of this future world start in terms that seem to make sense, then move into more or less incomprehensible realms for a very long time - most of the mental context of these people is way, way ahead of our own, Delany seems to be implying.

And then there are the personal infodumps. These are much more comprehensible, even as they tell us things about society and politics on the different planets and sattelites of the solar system that are quite fantastic by today's standards. But on the human level, once we adjust a little, they are perfectly comprehensible.

Except that the main character of this novel, Bron Hellstrom, seems to see very different things in these personal revelations than we do. We begin by trying to empathise with what seems to be the main character and hence hero of this story. And yet, we slowly find that the people he resents are among the most integral, self-actualised and compassionate individuals he encounters, and the society he hates is a sort of libertarian utopia that in many ways seems to superior to any current earth society. This brings us to the more commonly discussed aspects of this novel - how it belongs to a dialogue on ambiguous utopias with novels like Ursula K. Le Guin's 'The Disposessed', how different societies offer different kinds of liberties and privileges, how much of this is governed by factors like resources and space and may not be possible or even desirable in other circumstances, and what means are justifiable to preserve a desirable way of life. There's also a commentary on gender relations and roles that is worth investigating.

Just as interestingly, Triton is a fascinating study of a completely dysfunctional individual, but one that is told almost entirely via a closely focused third person narrative that gives us this individual's thoughts and perspectives rather than anyone else's. It's easy to fall into subjectivity here, like the people who are seduced by the prose in Lolita and forget that the narrator is a deeply sick sexual predator. Delany's achievement is that Bron's anomie is made clear to us despite immersion in his viewpoint.

I haven't even begun to scratch the surface of what there is to enjoy and think about in this novel; there is a passage in one of the appendices where Delany offers a comparison of the difficulty of understanding SF versus its potential range of expression as compared to mundane fiction that evokes similar dichotomies between tonal and atonal music, representational and abstract art. This alone is a point that deserves being engaged with in detail; that odd second appendix opens up even more ideas. The whole narrative is a mine-field seeded with explosive ideas and concepts. This is a science fiction novel that does it all - engages in a dialogue with its genre, offers deep, thought-provoking world-building and gives us total character-immersion. It isn't so much that they don't write them like this anymore as that they hardly ever did.

[aPriL does feral sometimes · Rating 3 out of 5]

‘Trouble on Triton’ by Samuel R Delaney is a thought experiment of social ideas disguised as speculative science fiction about a society where sexual fluidity drives everyone’s social life.

A man, Bron Helstron, lives in the city Tethys on Neptune’s moon Triton. On Triton people can change their gender and sexual preferences in 6 hours by making appointments at neighborhood medical clinics. It is seemingly as socially acceptable as getting a new hairstyle.

Individuals can either go to work naked or dress as they please, but individuals do dress to declare what their jobs are or what neighborhood they live in. They have their cliques. Bron and his friends discuss about whether people must be “types”, since certain types appear to primarily make certain choices of jobs, lifestyles and dress/hygiene. People live in apartment communes with people who share their sexual and gender preferences.

It seems like an utopia of gender choices.

I have copied the book blurb:

”In a story as exciting as any science fiction adventure written, Samuel R. Delany's 1976 SF novel, originally published as Triton, takes us on a tour of a utopian society at war with . . . our own Earth!

High wit in this future comedy of manners allows Delany to question gender roles and sexual expectations at a level that, 20 years after it was written, still make it a coruscating portrait of the happily reasonable man, Bron Helstrom -- an immigrant to the embattled world of Triton, whose troubles become more and more complex, till there is nothing left for him to do but become a woman. Against a background of high adventure, this minuet of a novel dances from the farthest limits of the solar system to Earth's own Outer Mongolia. Alternately funny and moving, it is a wide-ranging tale in which character after character turns out not to be what he -- or she -- seems.

I don’t believe the book is at all exciting. It is wordily dense with philosophical conversations about community mores and personality types, with underlying themes about the intersection of political control and social mores, and certain scientific digressions, some of which are nonsense. Besides the obvious social commentary on gender and sexuality, imho the author is also making fun of the tendency of academics to study things that are basically subjective but injecting into the study mathematical proofs, and maybe also utilizing logic premises/conclusions, to reboot whatever the subjective experience into an objective scientific model for research. Like, possibly psychology? 😄

Or: ”Mathematical logic - Uses mathematical symbols to prove theoretical arguments.
-Google search.

Whatever. The narrator, Bron, is a psychological mess. Readers can make up their own minds as to what his issues are, but this reader believes he is suffering from an inability to like himself much, primarily because he can’t settle on a personal form of being which pleases others and yet meets his own psychological requirements. He appears to be narcissistic and overly judgemental of people and their personal expressions of social mores. This isn’t good in a community designed to be all in in accepting libertarian values.

Incidentally, and as much as Bron pays any attention to it (not) a war between the Satellites and Earth and Mars is on the horizon. Because Bron is the narrator, we don’t get a lot of info on this except where it causes Bron discomfort, knocking him a little bit out of his self-involved mental state.

Bron is a person with superficial values. Throughout the novel, he keeps trying to connect with people. But since he despises or dislikes everyone, or he tries to force people to whom he is attracted to like him, plus, imho, he appears to confuse form for substance, he has many connecting difficulties.

“The emphasis in our culture, unfortunately, has increasingly become one of form over substance: too often image matters more than truth. People are so wrapped up in their solitary pursuits of personal interests and satisfaction that other people have merely become tools for achieving it.”

https://psychcentral.com/blog/blog/20...

Well. Doesn’t this ring true of today’s societies?

But idk, this is a difficult wordy intellectual novel of ideas to read. Perhaps you, gentler reader, will see something totally different, depending on the theme you primarily (and secondarily, and thirdly) see in the novel. I came to the conclusion the main theme is governments and societies should stay away from formalizing rules of behavior in gender/sexual relationships. Making any relationship a matter of rules, under the thumb of political laws or social mores or an authoritarian personality, will bend some people into pretzels, like round blocks trying to fit into square holes. The society on Tethys is collectively relieved they do not live under the moral rigidity of societies on Earth, with their strict rules of man/woman gender behaviors and no sexual diversity, but I think Bron would be much happier living on Earth. He can’t get past what he thinks his gender behavior should be, which is shown to be completely dependent on traditional Earth or Mars gender values in several situations, instead of simply being who he is. Imho, Bron needs to love himself, and accept the adult boundaries that have been set for his own personality by his childhood experiences. Trying to fit into the sexual fluidity of Tethys is, for him, a descent into personality disintegration. I think. In any case, he REALLY needs a psychiatric intervention.

[Emily M · Rating 4 out of 5]

The main character of this book, Bron Helstrom, is just the worst…and that is by design*. Mind you, when I say “the worst”, I don’t mean that he’s a Nazi or some such (remember when there used to be a consensus that Nazis = bad?). No, he’s just a familiar kind of awful-to-be-around person in an unfamiliar setting: The kind of guy who, placed in a society where everyone is free to follow their bliss so long as it isn’t hurting anyone, is miserable because he doesn’t actually know what he wants and thus has no one to blame for his unhappiness but himself. Or, rather, he does blame others constantly, because what he really wants is for them to cater to his wants instead of having their own priorities.

That might make this book sound like a painful experience, but it absolutely isn’t^. In fact, of the three Delany books I’ve read (which include Nova and Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand), this was by far the funniest, and schadenfreude at Bron’s misadventures is a big part of that.

Another probably unintentional source of enjoyment for me was the way that Delany seemed to struggle a tad with describing M-F attraction. We get an awful lot of description of male bodies, and Bron’s female love interest is described (positively) as being big-boned and having the sort of roughed-up “workman’s hands” that featured so prominently as an attractive feature in the very gay 'Stars in my pocket', and then it’s like: Oh, right, and her breasts were…there? IDK, man. While this could be seen as a flaw, because that difference of perspective is rare in SF of this age, it just tickled me.

Delany has described this book as being in dialogue with The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia - though it was mostly written before he’d read that book. In both, we have a man living in a moon colony with many elements that are better than our current society (at least from the perspective of an even moderately left-leaning person), but who has certain dissatisfactions with it, and who makes a visit to the “source” planet and then returns. But while Shevek is a sympathetic, intelligent man whose critiques are accurate, and who returns to his homeland ready to continue the revolution, Bron is…very much not that.

Unlike with ‘The Dispossessed’, we don’t get a super clear idea of what the political-economic situation is on Triton…which works, because Bron is a very politically disinterested character. But, as Delany says in the interview already mentioned, we see some of the effects (gender equity, not total economic equity but a lack of scarcity, a big focus on individual freedoms, high acceptance of queerness, etc.) and can make some inferences about the kind of societal rules that would produce them. Mind you, of the two rather collective, anarchistic-but-in-different-ways societies, I’d probably pick Annares. Triton seems like a bad place to be an introvert, or someone who likes the outdoors.

There’s some pretty fascinating stuff going on with gender and sexuality in this book. Some of it is a tad unsettling – like, it is hard for the existence of technology that allows for race and sexuality swaps NOT to feel ominous, even if here it is used purely for personal reasons (eg. to see what it would be like to be able to return the affections of your gay best friend). Gender reassignment technology is WAY advanced – you can get everything done down to the chromosome level in 6 hours – and we get to see a good bit of that because Bron decides to become a woman toward the end of the book. For REALLY stupid reasons, but, since it would presumably be just as easy to switch back, the doctors go with it even though they seem a bit confused by the situation . While some of the context is weird…gosh, I would wish every trans person a clinical experience like this! One of the docs even gives an explanation of what chromosomes and genes do or do not do that holds up very well considering this was published in 1974.

BTW, "heterotopia" is a word coined by Foucault to describe "certain cultural, institutional and discursive spaces that are somehow 'other': disturbing, intense, incompatible, contradictory or transforming" (according to Wikipedia). But Delany points out (again, in the same interview linked below) that the medical definition is that of a tissue occurring somewhere other than its original location, like a skin graft...or some of the results of a gender reassignment surgery.

All in all – highly recommend.

* Check out what Delany had to say about him – including how the book had its genesis in the brutal but totally accurate “I’m breaking up with you” letter Bron receives about 2/3 of the way through – in this interview: https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/interviews...
^ Unless you’re seeing too much of yourself in Bron, I would expect?

[Tomislav · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have noticed, in my systematic read of classic and modern utopian novels over the past year, a tendency for these utopias to incorporate sexual freedom. Limits and channeling of sex are, of course, both a fundamental purpose of society and a powerful tool of social control. The breaking of sexual rules is often portrayed as both a metaphorical and literal challenge to authority. On my more pessimistic days, I notice that it also helps popularize the ideas and sell the books. However, Delany’s Trouble on Triton went beyond the popular images of sexual liberation of the 1970s into areas that probably did not help it commercially. I think that Delany’s use of gender identity and sexual orientation was breakthrough for its time. He envisioned a future society in the Solar System’s outer moons which allows individuals to inhabit co-ops and communes chartered in alignment with their particular identities and needs, where homosexuality and heterosexuality are equally accepted, and where sex change is a common step. Reading it now, almost 50 years later, I noticed that modern thinking of gender identity as a multi-dimensional spectrum has superseded the male/female binary alternatives of this novel.

The story is told by a young immigrant male from Mars named Bron Helstrom, a meta-logician at a social engineering institution known as the Hegemony, on Triton, the largest moon of Neptune. He meets and becomes obsessed with a well-known but elusive female conceptual artist named The Spike. While Helstrom pursues her, on Triton and through a war with Earth, Delany exposes more of his dubious utopia and free society. I found the performance of wealth and gender roles during Helstrom’s date with The Spike in Mongolia to be hilarious.

Helstrom considers himself an expert at meta-logic, defined in this writing as a way of thinking logically about things that goes beyond pure logical constructions and extends to real-world situations. However, in reality, his meta-logical thinking is just a way to justify what he wants to think in the first place. When rejected by the Spike for his self-absorption and low emotional intelligence, he concludes that those are male characteristics of his, and his solution is a physical and cognitive sex change. Afterward, and this is the brilliance of Delany’s characterization, Helstrom is still a self-absorbed and low emotional intelligence person – just now a female one, who ventures forth into her changed role at work, in dating, etc. Her transition pushes her to the internal experience of endemic sexism, which still exists in this utopia. Yet her failure to become a better person is also a statement in contrast to the literary portrayal of female moral superiority such as in the works of Russ and Tiptree.

I can’t figure out how I managed to miss reading this book when it came out. I was reading literary SF then, including works by Delany. In fact, he was a visiting lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee during the semester after I finished my bachelor’s degree there. Well, better late than never. I’m highly recommending it.

I read Chip Delany’s complex SF novel Trouble on Triton; An Ambiguous Heterotopia, because it is discussed in Lecture 17 of Great Utopian and Dystopian Works of Literature. It was originally published under the title Triton, in 1976, and was nominated for 1977 Nebula Award. The Wesleyan University Press edition I read includes some Appendix material – one item of which is an excellent examination by Delany of the term “science fiction” and how it functions in distinction from mundane literature.

[Nate D · Rating 4 out of 5]

An aptly extremely trans novel for June, if only incidentally, and unexpectedly. Out in the further reaches of the solar system, further from the old societies on Earth and Mars, society upholds the subjective reality of its people to the greatest degree, barring its causing harm to others. Standard John Stuart Mills stuff here, but Mills foresaw freedom of thought and religion, but probably not the fluidity of gender and race, here not only a right, but the responsibility of the government to change whenever a citizen should request it. (Incidentally, Delany would have been writing this around the time he blurbed his friend Joanna Russ' feminist sci-fi The Female Man, and deals with trans-ness far more elegantly than she does).

And yet, this is practically a background detail. This is partly a book about gender, but moreso about social codes, including those between men and women. In Delaney's future society, infinitely more variations in modes of living and relating exist, but his protagonist feels distinctly familiar to our own times in his jealousy, pettiness, and inability to really see others beyond himself. This makes him perhaps a relateable guide for 20th-century readers, but also completely insufferable. Is he more insufferable to a 21st-century reader? He was probably always meant to be like this, Delaney knows what he's doing and deliberately toys with our ability to relate. There are moments when the protagonist seems to be being completely insufferable when it turns out that he's completely in step with normal interactions and etiquette. But perhaps the central tensions, the central relationship that drives this (despite an entire war unfolding as a backdrop), would have read more subtly then.

Because this is a post-Dhalgren Delany novel, we also get various extra bits as appendices -- some playful academic discussion which may or may not connect with to his later Neveryon novels, and, tucked away in between, an essay on the utility of science fiction as a genre to a writer like him. Fundamentally, he says, sci-fi vastly increases the number of sentences that have narratively meaning (a realist drama does not allow for gravity to suddenly stop functioning, or for a character to duck into a clinic to have his sexual desires rewired on a whim), which, in turn, vastly increases the pool of conceptual and metaphorical meanings that can be attached to the expanded palette of narrative sentences. Among many other observations that could probably stand to be an entire book rather than hidden away in this one. Which perhaps increases the delight of finding it.

[Jo Walton · Rating 5 out of 5]

http://www.tor.com/blogs/2008/08/triton

[El · Rating 3 out of 5]

I feel like of all the books that made up Radical Utopias, this one took the longest for me to read. I don't know if that's realistic or not, but it was definitely the longest, and at times, driest. Which is hard to admit since I felt the first book in the anthology, Walk to the End of the World, was plenty dry.

I read Dhalgren a few years ago and it blew my mind. I have slowly been collecting Delany's novels, but went through the process realizing his other books might not touch me as deeply. Now that I've read Triton (later published as Trouble on Triton), I see that I was correct.

There are some connections to Dhalgren, primarily in that the protagonist here, Bron, used to leave in a Martian city, Bellona, which is where Dhalgren took place. It almost makes me want to re-read Dhalgren, but I'm so worried I won't like it upon a second reading that I probably will never do that. I understand there are some elements here connected to other Delany books, so I look forward to making my way through them all since I love shit like that (if done well).

The particular utopia indicated here takes place on Triton, or Neptune's moon. Bron came from Mars, and Triton is... different. And Bron spends a lot of his time kind of dealing with that and basically having really shitty relationships with other people because Bron has no social skills.

There are some interesting elements to this utopia, such as technology has provided that folks can change ones gender and sexual orientation at will. In that sense I was reminded of the second book in this anthology, The Female Man, though I felt Joanna Russ wrote a more compelling and influential story along those lines.

This is science fiction, and as I find with a lot of traditional science fiction (what I think real readers call "hard sci-fi") is that so much of it is boring to me. It's just not my preference, though I know many people who would be more into that than myself. I was there for the utopia, and it was fine. Bron is sort of a dick, which doesn't necessarily make the book itself bad, but makes me wonder what Delany's point was in writing Bron. There's discussion somewhere towards the end of the book about women, and perceptions of them, and it made me a little grumpy. I feel Delany is in a pretty good position to write about minorities as he is an African-American gay man, but at least in 1976 when Triton was first published, I'm not sure I felt confident that he viewed women very highly.

This could entirely be my faulty reading of the story, and I do agree that Delany's characterizations in this book were lacking across the board.

Fun fact: At the end of the novel are a couple appendices that seem sort of a strange inclusion. But apparently they come up later as well which come up later in his Nevèrÿon series, so I look forward to seeing that as well as any other connections.

I really want to like Delany, but so far Dhalgren is the best I've read. I'll be curious to see how his other books work for me.

[fonz · Rating 3 out of 5]

La novela en sí me ha parecido muy interesante en el concepto, pero parcialmente fallida en la ejecución, a veces fascinante, a veces un poco pesada, a veces incluso irritante. Aún así, debido a que sufro de una parafilia literaria de carácter masoquista, me lo he pasado estupendamente dándole vueltas, leyendo entrevistas, conferencias, reseñas, etc, para acabar de desentrañar sus recovecos hasta donde ha llegado mi limitado entendimiento.

El concepto de la historia descansa en dos ideas. La primera es el concepto de utopía, que tanto repelús provoca en los escritores de ciencia ficción norteamericana. Tras redactar el primer borrador de "Tritón", Delany se leyó "Los desposeídos", dándose cuenta de que su novela dialogaba de algún modo con la de LeGuin. La cuestión es que no le gustó mucho, por un lado por la falta de diversidad sexual y por otro porque para Delany el concepto de utopía, como ya he leído en algún que otro autor norteamericano, equivale indefectiblemente a totalitarismo, ya que en "Los desposeídos" es el hostil entorno de Anarres el que funciona como policía política. La idea de Delany es que la utopía no puede funcionar en un entorno de abundancia, el concepto de novela utópica es inválido porque si existiese una utopía en el mundo "real" seguro que viene un hijoputa y te la jode, en fin, the good old hobbesianismo de toda la vida. No voy a entrar en complejidades sobre el pensamiento utópico o la aspiración de construir una sociedad más igualitaria tanto en lo económico como en lo social, que tanto pavor parece que produce entre los amantes de la Libertad, pero ya va siendo hora de reconocer que si la cf digamos "clásica" norteamericana (previa a los años noventa) nunca ha logrado imaginar un futuro diferente al capitalismo, el anarcocapitalismo o el libertarianismo, es porque siempre ha sido extremadamente conservadora hasta en sus elementos a priori más progresistas.

A partir del concepto "si existiese una utopía en el mundo "real" seguro que viene un hijoputa y te la jode", Delany construye "Tritón". Pero ojo, Delany no construye una utopía, sino una heterotopía. ¿Qué es una heterotopía? Si lees la definición del concepto en el florido verbo de Foucault o Delany, no se entiende nada, con esa manera que tienen los postmodernos de expresar un concepto sencillísimo de forma muy enrevesada porque es lo que se espera de un intelectual, pero en el fondo es muy fácil, una heterotopía es "casi una utopía". De este modo Delany plantea el escenario; la humanidad se ha extendido por todo el sistema solar, en una de las lunas de Neptuno, Tritón, se ha establecido una colonia humana donde se ha desarrollado una heterotopía que podríamos calificar de libertaria. ¿En qué consiste esta heterotopía? Básicamente en el concepto extremadamente individualista de la "inviolabilidad subjetiva", en Tritón puedes ser quien quieras ser, puedes cambiar fácilmente de género, de sexo, de aspecto, de apetencias sexuales, de religión y nadie va a criticarte, oprimirte o marginarte por ello, ni el gobierno va a interferir. Además, no existen los impuestos, se pagan los servicios cuando se utilizan, se ha eliminado la ignorancia, todo el mundo está educado en cierto consenso científico y se ha establecido una "renta básica" que proporciona alojamiento y alimentación cuando te quedas sin trabajo. Por otro lado, existe una jerarquía social y económica muy definida, el gobierno espía a sus habitantes aunque es transparente respecto a ello y las colonias están a punto de entrar en guerra con los planetas interiores, Marte y Tierra en un principio por motivos económicos. Aunque Delany tampoco se calienta demasiado la cabeza respecto a su Sistema Solar, leyendo la novela todo este universo me resultaba una translación de los Estados Unidos de la época, Tritón y el resto de colonias en los satélites de los grandes planetas gaseosos no son más que la parte "progresista" de Estados Unidos, un San Francisco o un Nueva York idealizados, y Marte y la Tierra son esa América profunda y conservadora que se ha deslizado hacia el totalitarismo, que odia estos Estados Unidos "liberales" (en un momento de la novela se visita la Tierra y, salvo unos transportes subterráneos, no es demasiado diferente a la Tierra circa 1976). A Delany no le interesa detallar mínimamente ni la relación económica ni social ni histórica ni cultural entre los distintos planetas y lunas del Sistema Solar, este universo es simplemente un teatrillo, un decorado, un escenario para el drama de su protagonista.

Bueno, pues si la heterotopía se basa en la "inviolabilidad subjetiva", ¿qué pasa cuando un individuo es un neurótico? ¿Y si esa neurosis entra en conflicto con el orden social imperante? Aquí entramos en el otro concepto que sostiene la novela, el retrato psicológico del hijoputa que te jode la utopía, el protagonista, Bron Helmstron. Originario de Marte, Bron es la encarnación y casi parodia de la masculinidad heterosexual más tópica y normativa; rubio, alto, guapo, de origen escandinavo, que ya sea por el escaso afecto que recibió de sus padres, ya sea por sus años pasados como trabajador sexual en una colonia marciana, carece de autoestima, lo cual le convierte en un tipo sumamente egoísta, incapaz de entenderse, ni entender a los demás, y, por tanto, incapaz de amar. Tremendamente tradicionalista y posesivo, su ideal de familia es el de la publicidad de los años 50 norteamericanos y llega un hilarante momento en que piensa completamente como un incel. Aún teniendo a su alcance la posibilidad de ser quien quisiera ser, Bron elige comportarse como un gilipollas en todas sus relaciones, tanto amorosas como de amistad, y acaba deslizándose poco a poco hacia la psicosis y la más absoluta soledad. Bron se convierte en "el hijoputa que te jode la utopía", puesto la heterotopía de Tritón ha fracasado con Bron y con otros como Bron (con consecuencias imprevisibles), quien, muy posiblemente acabará completamente loco al desmoronarse el constructo que sostiene su psique, formado a base de años de autoengaño, tal y como fracasaría la utopía de Le Guin enfrentada al egoísmo de sus habitantes más individualistas, que deberían ser reprimidos y reeducados al modo estalinista para salvar la utopía.

Este retrato psicológico de Bron es la parte de la novela que me ha resultado más interesante, no es muy común este tipo de naturalismo en la ciencia ficción, seguir la vida normal de un tipo "corriente" en una luna de Neptuno, en una sociedad ajena a la nuestra, no es algo que se haya explorado demasiado en el género. En lo formal, Delany quizá es demasiado denso, y se complica la vida explicando de forma enrevesadisima lo sencillo, abundan las aclaraciones entre guiones y paréntesis (incluso hay paréntesis dentro de paréntesis), en una charla durante los ochenta el propio Delany reconoce que quizá se pasara un pelín. También juega en su contra su amor desmedido por la cf, hay tres infodumps que te sacan completamente de la lectura, insertados además en tres diálogos, es decir, te comes un infodump de varias páginas en un diálogo que parece una conferencia sobre conceptos seudocientíficos típicos de la cf que entorpecen muchísimo la lectura, convirtiéndola en una especie de árido y complejísimo ejercicio metaensayístico sobre la importancia del infodump en la ciencia ficción que, fuera de estudiosos y teóricos del género nivel Darko Suvin, no sé a quien más podría interesar. Además me irrita que entre en exhaustivo detalle sobre el mecanismo que hace funcionar el escudo que protege Tritón o las minucias del cambio de sexo y gustos sexuales y luego no se moleste en levantar un Sistema Solar algo más elaborado que esta translación de los Estados Unidos al futuro, donde todavía se emplea la palabra "faggot" o "nigger". Pero lo más triste es que este amor desmedido que Delani manifiesta por la cf luego no fuese correspondido, porque a Delany, que a diferencia de Dick, por ejemplo, ni se le pasaba por la cabeza abandonar la ciencia ficción, finalmente fuese el mundo editorial de la ciencia ficción el que le abandonó a él.

[Kate · Rating 3 out of 5]

i'm not sure how i feel about this at all!! the main character is absolutely UNBEARABLE, but he is supposed to be, it's the book's whole point--but he really is so utterly unlikeable and horrifying that reading this book was a slog the entire way through. he gets his comeuppance several times throughout the story (but he never learns anything--another point of the book, i think) which is almost satisfying? i don't know if i simply read this book at the wrong time in my life, or in the wrong context, or if there was something i was just missing, or if i didn't get it, or if maybe there actually wasn't that much there TO get and it was all just a lot of set-dressing and cobbled-together sf sociological ideas/experiments flung one after the other at the reader and never examined, never interrogated, except through the context of knowing who this author is, and what his other works are like, and that therefore his presentation of such ideas SHOULD have been thoughtful and interesting. so perhaps it is just not the place to start with delany. and perhaps there is a reason that the dispossessed by le guin is still spoken about so often, and this book--a self-designated 'response' to le guin's book--is not? i don't know! i am utterly baffled.

i feel frustrated because i WANTED to get this book. but reading this felt like reading certain books in high school--books with points and meanings you knew were there, and could sort of recognize, but they were just utterly meaningless to you and your life, or you thought that they were insufficiently analyzed, or that they showed a poor or distasteful understanding of life and the meaning of being a person, and so you just didn't care to 'get' them, and you just read the book and took the test and moved on because there just really was not much there in the text for you at all despite the fact that it is a literary quote unquote classic.

also i feel like the way this book addresses gender and gender confirmation surgery--though that is not what it is in the book, not really, which is part of the problem--is just unbelievably irresponsible and crude. lmao. coming from a gay author i expected more; but then again delany is not trans, and that is a whole other issue, the way cis gay people feel entitled to telling/understanding trans stories or ideas when cis gay people often really do not understand those things at all! and really the point of this book has nothing to do with transness, nothing at all, but the unfortunate implications ARE there by nature of the book's content. and i just did not care for it. there is a great deal of depth to gender and transness that can be explored in a book, in thought, in life. this book attempted to plumb that depth, and seemed to think that it had done quite an interesting and valuable job, but really it was excruciatingly superficial and flippant and boring.

the writing style and syntax were worth reading, though, which is why i will continue with other works by delany. also because i am fairly certain that this book is an outlier among delany's work and the issues i have with it are specific to this book in particular, and i really shouldn't have started here after all, because i do find delany in general to seem like he should be a thoughtful and interesting person and writer whose ideas and writing i am still interested in experiencing more of, BECAUSE he is known in sf literature for being different, thoughtful, incisive, wordy, conceptually novel. think i'll finally read dhalgren next. but not until this summer, maybe.

[Erik Graff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although I may have read Delany unknowingly as a kid, it was Jim Gottreich, my favorite high school teacher with whom I and several of his former students maintained relations after graduation, who brought him to consciousness. Jim had tried reading his 'Dahlgren', a long novel, and had told us of it on several occasions, conveying an ambivalence in his representations of it. On the one hand, he was impressed with the writing. On the other hand, he found it dense and difficult. I have no idea if he ever finished the thing. I never dared starting it.

I did, however, dare 'Triton' and several of Delany's other, shorter novels. All of them were stylistically dense and very well written, the author's style often distracting me from the plot. The plots themselves, like this one, are often deeply psychological, gender roles and affectional modalities being of particular concern to Delany.

[Megan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I taught this novel for a course in Queer and Trans Lit this semester -- it's a thick novel as all of Delany's are, thick with social observations and insights, and was challenging for some students, esp those who haven't read much sf; nonetheless it spurred terrific convos, especially in relation to Giovanni's Room (both novels interrogate toxic white masculinity) and Orlando (ie. thinking about the possibilities sff affords for thinking through power and oppression, esp i/r/t gender and sexuality), two other novels we've read this semester. The representation of trans experience is somewhat limited, as Bron's gender transition is mainly a tool for exploring gender binaries and Bron's own residual, embarrassing misogyny in the queer feminist world of Triton; still extraordinarily complex and sympathetic: to women and feminism, and to gender and sexual pluralism.

[Sasha Eden · Rating 1 out of 5]

It felt like that book was far longer than it actually was.

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Triton is one of those books that lingers in the penumbra at the edges of my understanding like a jungle cat stalking prey, carefully choosing the perfect moment to pounce. And yet (and yet) I couldn't put it down. Delany's prose is irresistible and his ideas are tantalizing (even if I'm not entirely sure I walked away with a clear understanding). Triton is also an example of a particular type of sci-fi that skips past the distraction of identity politics such as race, gender, and sexuality to get at larger issues, which is not to say these things aren't discussed. Quite the contrary. In fact, the main thing that's widely known, relatively speaking, about this book is how the protagonist switches gender and sexuality. Rather, what I mean is that these categories that are so often divisive today cease to have the same impact in and of themselves in the larger world of the novel.

A post-identity politics is by no means a Utopia, nor is Delany interested in crafting a portrait of a would-be Utopia. He calls the novel a Heterotopia, which is a term from Foucault that describes a space of otherness that, in part, functions to allow a Utopia elsewhere. That's where Delany's real interest lies: in the space of otherness. Neptune's moon Triton is that space in the novel. It's a place of radical individuality where nearly anything is permissible (and in the "unlicensed sector" whatever scant regulations do exist are waived). The basic needs of all residents are met and people can choose to work (or not) to earn more credits if they're interested in elevating their standard of living. But while Triton and the other outer satellites presumably play a vital role as Heterotopia for Terran and Martian societies (though the novel briefly visits Earth and it's hardly a Utopia) they remain targets for a cataclysmic war raging across the solar system. We're never told the reason for the war, only that Triton has managed to stay out of it (for now). Delany uses the tension of the war to propel the plot forward, but that's not really the focus. He's more interested in examining erudite ideas, like metalogic.

Brom Helstrom, the novel's protagonist, struggles to find happiness amid a backdrop of war and identity fluidity. He spends his days playing board games and philosophizing with his co-op neighbors, and earns extra credits working as a metalogics specialist in the hegemony. "Metalogic" being defined at one point early on in a manner that went largely over my head. What I gleaned, however, was that humans rarely employ pure logic, rather we rely on shifting parameters within discourse to approximate logic for any given circumstance (to say that the Taj Mahal is white is, in pure logic, to deny that it is any other color. But what is the Taj Mahal? Is it the building alone or also the grounds, with it's green grass and blue water and yellow sand, etc. And if it's just the building then what of the shades of brown in the grout, or the veins of various colors in the marble, etc?). Delany is stabbing right at the heart of narrative here. Triton is a book about reading, about knowledge, or, more broadly, human discourse, and in that way it ties in nicely with the surface plot. What is a Utopia (or a Heterotopia) without it's "other," and where is the distinction between the two drawn? When Bron's friend Sam reveals he used to be a different race, gender, and sexuality (and when Bron himself undergoes a similar transformation), Delany is offering a radical (perhaps more so in the '70s when the novel was published than today) vision of personal freedom, but he's also gesturing at the fragile nature of social, historic, political, etc. discourses, which are held together like a complicated web of tension rods, each balanced by the others in a stable metalogical way. A place like Triton where nothing is immutable of course will represent a danger to that balance. And so the war between the planets and the satellites rages. And so Bron's affections continue to orbit the mercurial actress known as "the Spike."

I think I'll return to this book down the line. A single read is far from sufficient.

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[Christine Sandquist · Rating 4 out of 5]

This review and others can be read on my blog, Black Forest Basilisks.

Triton , also published under Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia , by Samuel R. Delany is one hell of a trip and surprisingly relevant to modern day discourse on gender and sex. Originally written as a response to Le Guin’s The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia, Delany explores what it might be like to experience a progressive, open society as a very traditional, masculine male with conservative ideas about the roles and capabilities of men and women. Where Le Guin explored life as someone who is LGBT+ in a predominantly straight “utopia,” Delany explores the inverse.

Written in Delany’s always stellar prose, Triton takes on uncomfortable perspectives designed to discomfit readers. The narrator, Bron, has much in common with the incels of today. He believes that he’s a good guy who deserves a chance… and becomes quite angry when he is denied it. He is the epitome of white male entitlement. Although he lives in a world that is founded on everyone’s basic needs being met, including those of sexual nature, he finds that the women who he wants to love him are not the ones who love him in return. He pursues women who are not interested in him, projecting his ideal, submissive woman onto them despite it being at odds with their actual personalities. He is, ultimately, one of the most self-centered narrators I’ve come across. His truth is the truth, and he can and will misrepresent actual occurrences in order to support it. 

Bron meets a theatrical artist, known publicly as The Spike. I would have loved to read a book from her perspective. She is, in fact, more interesting than Bron in every single way - and it’s quite a shame that Bron himself is entirely oblivious to this fact. He views himself as better than her, wanting her to give up her lifestyle and dreams to come live with him and… do what? He never stops to think about that, because her life after it wouldn’t matter to him. His happiness and his ability to possess her is the only thing important to him, and he is aggressively jealous towards anyone and anything that stands between him and his prize. In Bron, Delany personifies the nightmare of every woman who has ever had a man place her on a pedestal with an uncanny degree of understanding - almost certainly drawing on his own experiences as a queer black man in the 70s. Delany understands what power, entitlement, and discrimination looks like. Bron is terrifying. 

No (he narrowed his eyes at Miriamne, who was a step ahead), she said the Spike was just her friend: Like me and Lawrence, he thought. Then, the sudden questioning: Does she feel about the Spike the way Lawrence is always saying he feels about . . .? His eyes narrowed further at the gray-caped shoulders ahead. I’ll kill her! he thought. I’ll make her sorry she ever heard of metalogics! Miriamne, staggering, drunk, in the co-op corridor, grasping at the Spike, caught in her arms, falling down soused on the corridor floor . . . He thought: I’ll—Miriamne glanced back. “You’re looking preoccupied again.” 

“Huh?” he said. “Oh. I guess I am.” He smiled: I will kill her. I’ll kill her in some slow and lingering way that will hurt amazingly and unbelievably and continuously and will seem to have no source and take years.

In his journey to find fulfillment and satisfaction, Bron has passed through many different social sects, organizations, and living situations. On Triton, many of these groups can become quite interesting, and their creeds may involve self-mutilation, self-imposed restraints, or deal with ceremonies or mannerisms that someone today would find horrifying. Bron at one point joined a group called the Mumblers, who panhandle in the street with their eyes blinded (either with a blindfold or by keeping them shut - no mutilation for these folks, at least) while chanting “mumbles.” He was hoping to find a group he could meld himself into - but failed to make that connection. 

Men like Bron are the ones who are easiest prey for the alt-right groups of our current political ecosystem. Men who are aimless, educated, but self-centered and entitled. They don’t have a support network that fulfills their need to be better than others, and so they find themselves drawn into a group that tells them that they are better because of their gender or race. If Triton had not so assiduously stamped out such groups, Bron almost certainly would have been a part of one. As it is, he is fortunate enough to have a support group… even if he doesn’t listen to them or appreciate them. It’s not enough for him to have peers and friends. He needs to have someone who he can feel is beneath him and under his power and control. And more than that, he wants it to be a woman who will be both submissive while also being motherly. He expects a woman to sacrifice their own wants and dreams, their own emotional needs, in favor of his own. When he tries to force The Spike into this role, she pushes back because she understands its futility and his fundamental inability to become a fully independent human being. 

What’s the difference between that and emotionally injured? Emotionally crippled? Emotionally atrophied? Maybe it isn’t your fault. Maybe you weren’t cuddled enough as a baby. Maybe you simply never had people around to set an example of how to care. Maybe because you quote feel you love me unquote you feel I should take you on as a case. I’m not going to. Because there are other people, some of whom I love and some of whom I don’t, who need help too and, when I give it, it seems to accomplish something the results of which I can see.

Disclaimer: obviously not all men. I hate that I have to add this, but I know that I do. If you're a considerate and kind individual, you're obviously not the person this book is addressed at. This book is aimed at the subset of white men who are like Bron and think it's okay to only ever talk about themselves and lecture about logic at young, highly educated black women. Although entitlement and privilege affect more people than just white men, they are a particularly privileged group wherein these issues are pervasive and encouraged in a way that is much less common in other demographics. Historically, they are the ones who have held power in Western civilization... and this has lasting consequences. If you're aware of your privilege and do your best to use it well and to help others who face roadblocks you don't, congrats, you're not Bron. 

“Let me tell you a secret. There is a difference between men and women, a little, tiny one that, I’m afraid, has probably made most of your adult life miserable and will probably continue to make it so till you die. The difference is simply that women have only really been treated, by that bizarre, Durkheimian abstraction, ‘society,’ as human beings for the last—oh, say sixty-five years; and then, really, only on the moons; whereas men have had the luxury of such treatment for the last four thousand. The result of this historical anomaly is simply that, on a statistical basis, women are just a little less willing to put up with certain kinds of shit than men—simply because the concept of a certain kind of shit-free Universe is, in that equally bizarre Jungian abstraction, the female ‘collective unconscious,’ too new and too precious.”

This book has grown on me more and more as I’ve thought about it. When I first set it down, my initial impression was that I’d wanted more of the world and more of the characters I found interesting, despite understand that the point of the book was that Bron himself was too wrapped up in his own onanistic world to ever look outwards. I felt a little dissatisfied. I still do wish we’d gotten to see more of Triton, its various political maneuverings, and the war that sat as a backdrop to the book; yet… the social aspects hit closer and closer to home the more I think about them. Although some portions of the novel most certainly did not age well, including some of the language surrounding race (be prepared for slurs), the underlying horror of white male entitlement remains a part of the fabric of our culture and is more relevant than ever before. 

If you enjoyed this review, please consider reading others like it on my blog, Black Forest Basilisks.

[Jeanne Thornton · Rating 4 out of 5]

(sppoilerzzz)

I feel very weird about this book! I love a lot of it, but in the end it felt just too terrible to spend this much time with bron--i kind of would have been elated with the book just ending after the spike's letter arrives and a Big Event happens in the war? the subsequent gender stuff is very gratifying to me on one level and very depressing on another: i appreciate that pains were taken to establish that bron's Gender Journey is not typical, but that also kind of grosses me out. and I feel like I'm missing a key thing somewhere (the street sign letters everyone is wearing? the deeper ironies of Bron being into metalogics? the meaning of the vlet Gods??) that, were I to understand it, would make the whole thing come clear to me. but I did not find it! i think I was just a lot more interested in the spike than in bron's gross ways, and something about the book's ironic ending being like--"the transsexual sits in her bar, and many wish to love her, but she can let no one in" hit pretty hard.

I appreciate this book a lot--it was extremely gratifying to see how swiftly society responds to bron's transition, and there are multiple models of cis desire for trans / t4t that are pretty magical for like 1973??? like no joke that is great! but i feel like the book kind of wants it both ways--trans ppl are both Very Normal and Somehow Unseemly--and something about its final specter of transsexuality as Eternal Punishment (again, if you're an evil trans who does it for evil reasons, not a true trans who will be happy) felt sad.

I love the elemental restaurant very much

[Guy Barnhart · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am slowly making my way through all the Hugo and Nebula winning novels, having embraced science fiction over the last few years. Along the way, I have been open to reading other authors who may not be winners of the aforementioned awards but have either been nominated multiple times, or written works in response to the wider conversation of sci-fi itself. And that’s what led me to my first Delany book, Trouble on Triton, written as a response to Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Dispossessed (which I very much enjoyed).

While other reviewers have written much more thorough responses, I am going to just write as a relative newbie to the genre.

Samuel Delany doesn’t write the type of sci-fi I’ve read so far. His writing is a little more dense, his point (if there is one) is usually opaque. He tends to be truly writing a fiction for the world that only exists in his novel, which can make it difficult to finish this book because it can be hard to understand (you’re kind of thrown right into it). Fortunately, this book really grabbed me. The horribly unlikeable main character, in a world that seems pleasant and utopian, is utterly miserable and I kept wanting to find out if he will ever find his peace - which is essentially what the whole novel is about.

In the end, Delany presents a utopia that is a relatively positive experience for the majority of its citizens but still suffers from the same problems that all humans encounter no matter how positive the external circumstances, the individual search for happiness. Delany shows us that a utopian society, at least in how science fiction tends to imagine it, maybe isn’t so great after all.

[David Gillette · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book as Triton, in a yellowed 1978 Frederik Pohl Selection mass-market paperback edition. Someone stamped it with their name, and Delany signed it, inside, twice, to that reader, exciting me enormously when I found a copy in Second Story. I'd wanted to read it for a while, because it's one of those postmodern libertarian utopias that SF writers occasionally turn out. A lot of important people have written their versions of The Good Society; Heinlein has The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (to which Triton responds interestingly) and (to an extent, arguably) Starship Troopers (mentioned in the ancillary materials to my version of the text); Le Guin has (primarily) The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (see above) and Always Coming Home. Ken MacLeod did four very interesting books on the topic (the Fall Revolution series, each installment on a different kind of libertarian society). Kim Stanley Robinson also did a multiple-variants series of utopias/dystopias, with the Three Californias books, and of course the Mars trilogy is a great big excruciatingly worked out hopeful story of human possibilities. I'm told his recent 2312 has bits of that too. Oh, and Terry Bisson has a book where the Civil War happens differently, and better, called Fire on the Mountain.

I like a lot of these books. I like the rigors of the American pulp SF idiom (hereafter designated "SF"), that Gernsback-Campbell-Sturgeon narrative formula, brought to bear by someone with a social conscience, or at least some ideals, some narrative that they're willing to live for. SF is sometimes seen as apart from utopia/dystopia: the idea being to show the world getting in some ways better, in some ways worse, as technology develops or we encounter aliens or whatever. Whereas a utopia is a story that's supposed to provide a blueprint, and a dystopia is sort of a scurrilous attack on one's political opponents. But obviously SF carries a lot of … notions; I still find myself genuinely challenged and interested by Heinlein's better semi-utopias (basically the ones mentioned above—I hear Farnham's Freehold is basically a racist tract, though), and Charles Stross has recently put out the notion that SF became a kind of default propaganda organ for ideological technocracy, even as those ideas fell out of mainstream political discourse in the chaos of the 1940s. I enjoy SF's suspicion of utopia: it reminds me of the older anarchist suspicion of utopia (although Déjacque wrote L'Humanisphere, so it's not like anarchists were above practicing the form). And, sure enough, there is plenty of anarchist or anarchist-inflected SF. Almost all of the writers I've listed tend to incorporate at least a strongly civil-libertarian current into their presentation of the Good Society, and most present societies developing without or beyond states. (On the other side of the split in the First International: Delany has spoken in interviews about the Foundation trilogy being sort of historical-materialist, and I think that can be extended to SF more generally: other than Karl Marx, what non-SF writers dealt seriously with technological change and society?)

Triton isn't really set in an anarchist society. It might be, arguably, panarchist. Sexual freedom and sexual safety are probably its main selling points to readers today. It has a class structure of sorts, with credit ratings and bosses. There's a war, a terrible one that kills millions, although, conveniently, not really any of the major characters. Mainly it's seen from the American point of view, as casualties racked up from afar, a war fought with buttons and machines. (There's a recurring joke in the book about the cliché being that "at least nobody's using soldiers," when the mechanization of war has made the practice at last entirely a matter of murdering civilians.) There is tension with regards to immigration to the outer moons from the inner worlds of the Solar System, and that may or may not frame the action—the reader isn't really given enough on the topic to decide. I think this lack of reference is Delany commenting on the experience of oppressed people before there's an ideological framework for them to conceptualize their oppression (I say that because I've read him talking about the freedom movement and its later shift from using the term "Negroes" to using the term "black people," and I know that he's gay and has talked about queer people not seeing themselves as a community pre-Stonewall, so it's something he's lived through a couple of times); I think that part of the point of this tendency in the book is that without a way of understanding what's happening, one always has to wonder: is it me? Is it my fault I'm not happy in this society?

Bron Helstrom, of course, isn't happy in his extremely understanding, open society. He is a fabulous portrait of a twentieth-century misogynist, and he certainly seems to be racist too. Delany writes the word "nigger" a few times in this book, mainly w/r/t Bron's attitudes toward a black man named Sam, who was born a white woman, and who occupies a position of governmental authority, and is remarkably competent, and ends up delivering a lot of extremely good exposition. The book doesn't, so far as I can tell, give us much on the racial dynamics of the society; one imagines they're different, given that people can present as any race they wish at almost any time with freely available outpatient cosmetic surgery, but there's apparently still a current of racism present … in the appendices, it's mentioned that the language these characters speak is some mixture of Hungarian and Cantonese. What's the term that Delany is "translating" from, then? Or is Bron using an English loan-word? Fascinating stuff. Delany is really fucking good at his job. The most sustained stuff has to do with gender, sex, and sexism, though, and the book really shines in its sensitive, understanding, and utterly effective attack on a bunch of trends in misogynist behavior that are painfully visible today, particularly on the internet.

Actually there's a whole lot of spectacularly effective prediction in Triton: Facebook stalking, for example. Also the ubiquitous surveillance. When it was written, I believe the intention was to throw the reader into perceiving a very repressive government: they have everything on their citizens! To the point that now you can watch five minutes of yourself on camera going about your business in the booths they've set up in the street! And then later the reader would have that attitude complicated, and would come to see profound good things about the society. Now that we live in a society where the government and non-governmental state organizations (corporations of one kind or another) actually do have huge amounts of our information, the effect is rather spoiled, but it is delightful and fascinating, particularly the way Delany admits the possibility of a Stasi-like surveillance state that would tolerate the dissent that leads to the establishment of the booths. Which is rather like our own condition today, except that the government would never be so responsive.

If there's a problem, I think that it's in the goodness of the people around Bron. Maybe that's a consequence of the Good Society. Bron wishes he could live in a closed, misogynist patriarchy, so that he could be served by a woman in the way he would like to be served. His friend Lawrence points out that if his desires were just for sexual domination, he would have no problem: it's the emotional domination he's starving for. It's a fascinating idea: what if, for a few people, it's not social conditioning, but real need that drives them toward oppressive relationships? (Although maybe it is social conditioning, since Bron is from Mars, not Triton: like I said, we can't quite tell.) Lawrence, Sam, and the Spike, though, are all there for him, even when he's being truly terrible. In the end, admittedly, he loses all of them, but they give him an awful lot of leeway, explaining to him precisely what's happening, offering him options. Lawrence and Sam particularly have a sense of social responsibility and historical perspective that may occasionally seem a bit false … although I've met people like that. Maybe a utopia turns up more of them. The Spike is mainly a pleasant cipher, partially because of the limited third-person: we can see when Bron is twisting logic and memory and gaslighting crudely, but, probably because we're seeing her through his eyes, we don't really get much of her as a person. Which is too bad. Bron, though, is an astounding creation: he's so awful, but I found myself empathizing, at times, even as Delany dissected him. Clearly, SRD has listened, really listened, to these people. This book is a superb handbook to a certain type of psyche.

Bron's reliance on a certain kind of rationality is also excellently skewered, through the fictional metalogic (a nice complement to Asimov's psychohistory, really); it's a great way to show that certain type of misogynist "rationality" for the spectacularly irrational tripe that it is. That's my favorite thing about this book: it demonstrates hypocrisy as well as does, say, Orwell in Homage to Catalonia, although much more sympathetically. I can't say I entirely followed the revelations about the Spike's relationship with Ashima Slade … perhaps on another pass. The idea bits of the book are delightful; one of the best things in SF is the drop-into-a-fascinating-essay, and Delany is a genius, so you can just sit back and be dazzled. He also integrates those ideas with the psychology of his protagonist much better than most writers, which is interesting, because he's presenting a person whose ideas haven't really been shaped by his society (or so it seems), in a reverse of what SF usually does. The book has so little of the usual SF action-plot, too, that it's a relief: this book manages as a character study, with a pleasantly 19th-century attention to the protagonist's economic circumstances and place in history. The prose, too, is the real deal: from the pleasant apothegms, like (roughly) "bravery is just making a big deal about doing what's best for the largest number of people" to the food descriptions to the, well, the Spike's letter is dazzling and funny and heartbreaking (and predicts voice-to-text and maybe autocorrect), and there are descriptive sentences that are just brilliant.

I didn't see as much of The Dispossessed as others have in Triton: there's the trip to the Bad Society, with Bron's truly disturbing encounter with the cops. I was more struck by the Moon Is a Harsh Mistress resonances, especially the really horrifying devastation of Earth (contrasted with Delany's defense of the pro-war sentiments of Heinlein's Starship Troopers in the work notes: really interesting).

The whole book is extremely, extremely enjoyable, shot through with a warmth and humanity that keeps the humor from getting too Evelyn Waugh, an bracing intelligence, a vast insight. Probably my favorite thing I've read by Delany, and I love Delany. I am immensely impressed.

[Harris]

Spivak once wrote something kinda like 'we deconstruct not tally up errors, but to make a text more useful to us.' I really want to believe that's what Delany is up to here in this response to Le Guin's Dispossessed.

Here's a little mess of some thoughts:

Delany's immense knowledge of the theory of language makes me regret not being more familiar with so many of his sources. What I do understand, though, is the deconstructive theme of 'naming' here that points to a web of differences without positive terms. I think this violence of naming, for Delany, results in heterotopia, not utopia. There's a point in the book where Delany writes "the essence of such places was anachronism" and I can't get over that line. Any attempt to make a the meaning of a place stop and represent a specific something (or sometime) does result in an anachronism, a Heterotopia. Without fail, I always walk away from a Delany with a handful of new ways to think about things and that is the primary thing I want from my books.

"Such systems, once begun, insinuate themselves into the greater system in overdetermined ways: ... such overdetermined systems, hard enough to revise, are even harder to abolish."

[Tentatively, Convenience · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was probably the Delany bk that most intersected my own life. As I recall, the novel begins w/ a street performance group entering the "u-l" wch I think meant "un-lawful" zone or some such. I've done many a guerrilla 'performance', I've walked down the streets of Baltimore dressed in totally bizarre clothes completely high at 3AM KNOWING that it was always open season on people who looked different, that I cd be killed at any moment, that there was no such thing as police protection for people like me, & knowing that the only thing likely to keep me alive was my alertness, my articulateness, my quick wit, my very audacity, my extremely necessary psychosis. Like the time 2 thugs flanked me & sd "You owe me $5" to wch I replied "No, I distinctly remember that you owe ME $5." Back & forth, them fucking w/ me, me giving it right back, defiant. Finally a 3rd friend of theirs appeared & heard the interchange & told them to leave me alone & they left. In order to defend myself physically I wd've had to've gone completely psycho - something I was prepared to do - & it wdn't've been pretty - but I preferred talking my way out of it. A dangerous game to play. But I wasn't going to hide in a car, in a protected neighborhood - even if I cd've afforded to - wch I cdn't. & Delany's characters were just like I was. This was the 1st novel where I ever saw MYSELF depicted. & one of the very, very few.

[Michael Burnam-Fink · Rating 1 out of 5]

I wanted to like this book, but rather than develop characters, a plot, or setting, Delany appears to throw a bunch of interesting ideas into a blender and set to frappe. Delany can do military sci-fi well, witness the ferocious creativity of Babel-17. He is a master of unconventional bodies and sexes, as in "Aye, and Gomorrah...". But in Triton, a fundamentally unlikeable main character wanders through an interplanetary war without witnessing any of the machinations of power. Triton society places an emphasis on the diversity of sex and gender, yet total gender and sexual reassignment is a state provided out-patient surgery that is apparently easier than deciding what to wear to dinner. While some of the fragments are interesting, the book itself is a uncomfortable lump of uncooked ideas, without the redeeming literary qualities of Delany's other works.

[A.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

A somewhat cautious and tentative 4 for a very unique and interesting book. As with all things, interesting does not always mean "good," but in this case it leans more in that direction.

I must admit that some of my trepidation early on was due to not having built sufficient trust yet in the author, being uncertain what sort of ride I had agreed to and how it would come together. It is an often rambling book, with a more internalized, character-oriented focus than much SF. The events that would be primary in so much SF are treated almost as background, though they are an important and intrinsic aspect of the plot. We tend to think of inter-planetary wars as the "main event" so to speak in these sorts of novels, not on par with the kinds of skirmishes we can ignore while other people (or drones) fight them for us. That would almost be like real life, one supposes, and we should like to see cool spaceships.

Instead, we have Bron, former Martian native, trying to adapt to life on Triton after many years of living there, thinking maybe he is happy and then not being so sure of it. Oddly, this world is a sort of libertarian/anarchist utopia--or what Delany calls a heterotopia--where very few restrictions are placed on ones dress or sexuality, but where marriage is illegal and money does not exist. Delany calls this a heterotopia, because his goal isn't to depict some ideal, perfectly functioning society; rather, he problematizes (his words) his world by showing how surveillance is done openly and also by the fact that it fails to provide happiness for all its citizens. Such as Bron and others from Earth or Mars, where a more restrictive value system is in place.

It's worth noting here that the novel is titled "An Ambiguous Heterotopia," in blatant reference to the subtitle of La Guinn's classic The Dispossessed. But the bulk of this novel was written prior to Delaney having read that novel. The story here is not set up as a direct analogy, and the subtitle is meant more to position it in dialogue with La Guinn's utopia.

Delaney here is not so interested in the minutia of how the government on Tritan functions (though he does sketch in the parts that are necessary) and instead focuses his concern on Bron's experience of the place--moreover, his development as a character within it. Bron is initially likable, has the qualities we would deem intrinsic to a more heroic protagonist--good-looking, seemingly principled, even spontaneous (also male, white). As the story progresses, it doesn't take long to see that he is not really so principled, that he is willing to bend the truth to suit him, that he's egotistical and defensive, that he's resentful of others' success. This will all come to a head in his relationship with The Spike, who he will come to resent as his feelings are unrequited.

It's really rare (at least in my experience) to find a SF novel that invests this kind of concern in the characters and uses the SF context as a means to develop and push them further. This aspect surprised me, and by the middle of the book, when I understood that this would be the primary thrust of the story, I settled in and waited for everything to unfold. It wasn't because I cared deeply about Bron (I doubt I could even stand someone so blatantly dysfunctional), but because he was an interesting personality and I wanted to watch him develop. I wanted to understand why he would eventually change his sex and gender identity and what that would mean for him. The resolution does not bode well, but leaves an opening for some turn...perhaps.

All this is quite wonderful, but the novel is still rambling at times and could potentially throw off the reader unable to get into the rhythm of the thing. I am reminded somewhat of Gormenghast novels, which also take a more character-oriented approach within a fantasy context and are similarly rambling. It is an exploratory, immersive approach, like a child being given a box of crayons and marveling at the marks they're making as a form begins to take shape. Delany is not the same caliber of writer as Peake, at least not in this novel (he's simply not so masterfully lyrical or even as expansive), but he does have a similar willingness to freely explore his self-created world, always bringing it back to the themes that concern him most.

Along with the tendencies to wander, there are the numerous infodumps, whose purpose was initially lost on me. After reading the appendix and an interview with Delany, however, it all began to make sense and what I had confusedly read as a nonsensical explanation of the shields and what-not…turned out to be, well, nonsense. As another reader aptly points out, these thematically fit well with Bron's efforts to explain his own reasoning and collection of lies and half-truths about himself and others. They also comment on the nature of science fiction and its tendency toward truthiness.

Whether the novel fully gels into a whole, whether it ever fully justifies its ramble is a tough question, and that is why my rating here is tentative. This is the sort of novel that improves the more I think about it, the more I think about Bron and the world of Triton, and the world around it, the more I consider the mix of playfulness and seriousness of the parts. But I'd be lying if I said there were not parts where I wondering where it was getting to and how soon. Or whether the writer's skills was always up to the challenge of his aims. A writer can have all the brilliant ideas in the world, but if the parts don't add up to a whole experience, what does it matter? Nonetheless, in this case the author *does* bring the story to a unified conclusion for its troubled antagonist, and that is why when I finished it was easy to cast my doubts aside. I am looking forward to reading more of Delaney's work.

[Ken-ichi]

Lordy, could not deal. Usually I try to give a book 100 pages, but like 60 pages in there's a good 2-page description of a *board game* and that was pretty much the end for me. Add to that the constant–CONSTANT–interruptions (there was not a quote without an em dash severing it), and the book was approaching unreadable. I think Delany's just not for me.

I picked this up because it was mentioned as a response to The Dispossessed in Among Others, but I don't think I made it to the part where it had anything to say about that book that I like so much. Alas.

[I · Rating 3 out of 5]

when you're a man who hates women so you become a woman who hates women, in order to increase the sum total of misogyny in the world

edit: actually it's quiteeeee interesting to think of this as a futuristic pygmalion tale in which bron is pygmalion as well as the statue come to life