Status
Available
Call number
Publication
Bantam Books (New York, 1984). 1st edition, 1st printing. 376 pages. $16.95.
Description
Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand is a science fiction masterpiece, an essay on the inexplicability of sexual attractiveness, and an examination of interstellar politics among far-flung worlds. First published in 1984, the novel's central issues -- technology, globalization, gender, sexuality, and multiculturalism -- have only become more pressing with the passage of time. The novel's topic is information itself: What are the repercussions, once it has been made public, that two individuals have been found to be each other's perfect erotic object out to "point nine-nine-nine and several nines percent more"? What will it do to the individuals involved, to the city they inhabit, to their geosector, to their entire world society, especially when one is an illiterate worker, the sole survivor of a world destroyed by "cultural fugue," and the other is -- you!… (more)
User reviews
LibraryThing member clong
Let’s see… Beautifully drawn prose, but not a whole lot of plot. Powerful imagery, challenging concepts, and a book that makes you think about gender and language. Plenty of sex, little of it “normal.” In other words, exactly what you would expect from Samuel R. Delany.
Stars gives us two
We are given reasonably thorough descriptions of three very different worlds: Rhyomon, Nepiy, and Velm, with a focus more on socioeconomics than geology or biology. Of the three Velm is by far the most interesting, especially in the ways in which humans and aliens live together, although I found the climactic party scene a bit over the top, much of the baroque social structure of all the worlds left me cold.
I am a Delany fan, and I found things to like here, over and above the sheer joy of reading the author’s prose, including several intriguing ideas. One of these was that, in a universe of billions of people scattered across thousands of solar systems, not even such a momentous fact as the existence of intelligent and possibly hostile space-going aliens would be “common knowledge.” Delany also deals with gender issues in an original way--in this universe, everyone (whether human or alien) is thought of and referred to as a woman/she/her (regardless of sex), except for a person who arouses sexual desire in an observer, in which case the arouser is thought of as a man/he/him by the aroused. This is rather confusing at first, but the reader eventually gets the hang of it.
On balance, neither the characters nor the storyline are up there with Delany’s best, but second tier Delany is still a whole lot better than plenty of other authors at their most compelling. The book was published as the first half of a duology, but the promised second volume has never been published.
Stars gives us two
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protagonists – the lobotomized Rat Korga and industrial diplomat Marq Dyeth. Delany never completely sold me on either character, both of whom fit in the “more interesting than convincing” category. I found the mutual “statistically perfect erotic object” plot devise to be a rather silly way to bring the two protagonists together. Many of the supporting characters seem to offer more potential but few get extended roles.We are given reasonably thorough descriptions of three very different worlds: Rhyomon, Nepiy, and Velm, with a focus more on socioeconomics than geology or biology. Of the three Velm is by far the most interesting, especially in the ways in which humans and aliens live together, although I found the climactic party scene a bit over the top, much of the baroque social structure of all the worlds left me cold.
I am a Delany fan, and I found things to like here, over and above the sheer joy of reading the author’s prose, including several intriguing ideas. One of these was that, in a universe of billions of people scattered across thousands of solar systems, not even such a momentous fact as the existence of intelligent and possibly hostile space-going aliens would be “common knowledge.” Delany also deals with gender issues in an original way--in this universe, everyone (whether human or alien) is thought of and referred to as a woman/she/her (regardless of sex), except for a person who arouses sexual desire in an observer, in which case the arouser is thought of as a man/he/him by the aroused. This is rather confusing at first, but the reader eventually gets the hang of it.
On balance, neither the characters nor the storyline are up there with Delany’s best, but second tier Delany is still a whole lot better than plenty of other authors at their most compelling. The book was published as the first half of a duology, but the promised second volume has never been published.
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LibraryThing member ocgreg34
In the very distant future, the government of the planet Rhyonon is gently persuading the uneducated and slow-witted Korga to undergo Radical Anxiety Treatment (RAT) in order to purge him of his tendencies toward lawlessness and, subtly, homosexuality. The procedure is over in the blink of an eye
In another part of the universe, Marq Dyeth, an intelligent industrial diplomat traveling the different worlds, first hears of the destruction of an entire planet and wonders at the possibility of survivors. When he tries to search the Web for information, all records of the planet have been deleted, as if the planet never existed in the first place. Marq almost succeeds in distancing himself from further thoughts of the destroyed world when a distant friend reveals to him that someone did survive the destruction. And that someone is a perfect erotic match for Marq.
In this engrossing novel by Samuel Delany, these two characters -- Marq Dyeth and Rat Korga -- try to understand their singular attraction to each other in a universe of open sexuality, where gender doesn't come into play unless two beings become intimate, and where multiculturalism of not only differing genders but differing species is commonplace. But their being together also threatens to brink Marq's world to the brink of a Cultural Fugue which could bring about the end of his world.
I'm not a big fan of sci-fi books -- with the exception of Philip K. Dick and Kurt Vonnegut -- and I attempted another of Dealny's books a few years ago, finally setting it aside as I could not follow a word of it. This book, however, kept me glued to the pages, feeling Korga's amazement when he started to read the information cubes and did not want to stop learning, marveling at the elaborate dinner (and dance, if you will) that Marq's "family" throws for the unappreciative Thants, and smiling at how closely to two dissenting factions in the novel's universe -- the conservative Family and the liberal Sygn -- resemble almost two much the society in which we on Earth live. Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand truly is a remarkable book.
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when they finally get the okay from him, and he finds himself working as slave labor though he doesn't care one way or the other how he got there or what he's doing. Years pass with very little outside world contact, and while working in an underground tunnel, his whole world literally collapses around him, burying him under dirt and machinery as his former world is destroyed.In another part of the universe, Marq Dyeth, an intelligent industrial diplomat traveling the different worlds, first hears of the destruction of an entire planet and wonders at the possibility of survivors. When he tries to search the Web for information, all records of the planet have been deleted, as if the planet never existed in the first place. Marq almost succeeds in distancing himself from further thoughts of the destroyed world when a distant friend reveals to him that someone did survive the destruction. And that someone is a perfect erotic match for Marq.
In this engrossing novel by Samuel Delany, these two characters -- Marq Dyeth and Rat Korga -- try to understand their singular attraction to each other in a universe of open sexuality, where gender doesn't come into play unless two beings become intimate, and where multiculturalism of not only differing genders but differing species is commonplace. But their being together also threatens to brink Marq's world to the brink of a Cultural Fugue which could bring about the end of his world.
I'm not a big fan of sci-fi books -- with the exception of Philip K. Dick and Kurt Vonnegut -- and I attempted another of Dealny's books a few years ago, finally setting it aside as I could not follow a word of it. This book, however, kept me glued to the pages, feeling Korga's amazement when he started to read the information cubes and did not want to stop learning, marveling at the elaborate dinner (and dance, if you will) that Marq's "family" throws for the unappreciative Thants, and smiling at how closely to two dissenting factions in the novel's universe -- the conservative Family and the liberal Sygn -- resemble almost two much the society in which we on Earth live. Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand truly is a remarkable book.
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LibraryThing member gefox
I had long wanted to read this famous book — a space fantasy far from my usual choices of fiction reading; it's good to break routine once in a while, as industrial diplomat and star traveler Marq Hyeth (the narrator of most of this book) might say. And it was not at all what I expected. Which is
As I did expect, it is fantastical and ironic. But it is not light comedy. It is a story contrived to reflect on complicated, unresolved philosophical questions, with dark hints about the answers: how the brain really works and how its processes can be disrupted; the construction of memories, creating myths; the varied ways of negotiating our sexual obsessions, and, finally (finally!) time, space and death.
The setting: Millennia from now, when humans and other intelligent beings from other planets (some of them with 6 legs, multiple tongues, wings and metallic claws) have achieved relative peace in their competition to colonize the 6,200 or more known worlds in the universe, a big (7'4") 19-year old social misfit, homosexual and long drug user in a world that discourages that sort of thing volunteers for Radical Anxiety Termination to turn him into a "rat", an anxiety-less and thus ambition- and curiosity-less human used as a slave by the more-or-less corrupt state industries. His partial recovery of his mental faculties and belated discovery of emotion, described mainly by the short, stocky interworld traveler and industrial diplomat (ID) Marq Hyeth, his perfect love object, is the central story around which we witness many other relationships, experiences and memories. And hovering over all of it are two massive, possibly related conflicts which may threaten them all: first, an internal rivalry among the federated worlds between a fundamentalist political-ideological movement called the Family (apparently the inventors of Radical Anxiety Termination) who want everyone and everything to be controlled and orderly and invent exquisite punishments for those who are not, and the more tolerant, laid-back, open-to-experimentation Sygn; and beyond them, outside any known federation, a mysterious and immensely powerful system of beings who offer no communication to the others, the Xlv, whose intentions are unknown but, if hostile, may be spell disaster.
The book is full of invention, with new worlds and new sorts of intelligent beings and new technologies with strange names appearing in every chapter, almost on every page. Which often makes it very difficult to figure just who is having sex with whom, and how they're doing it, or what's really going on in the dinner parties. (There's a lot of explicit, sloppy sex, but unless you're attracted to six-legged evelmi with shiny scales, or have an opportunity to stroll or float through a love-park on one of the Sygn controlled worlds, it will be beyond reach for you.)
My favorite parts include the long first section, before Marq Hyeth even appears, where we witness the brain-zapping in the Radical Anxiety Termination Institute and its consequences — which include the inability to take in new information from the General Information (GI) network which other humans and evelmi (those six-legged, winged- beings with all the tongues) use to learn new languages or access whatever data they want. This is because, as the high-ranking interworld official Japril explains,
"It's precisely those 'anxiety' channels which Radical Anxiety Termination blocks that GI uses both to process into the brain the supportive contextual information in the preconscious that allows you to make a conscious call for anything more complex than names, dates, verbatim texts, and multiplication tables; and it also uses them to erase an information program in such a way that you can still remember the parts of it you actually used consciously." (Pp. 161-162 in my edition.)
Wow! So all that we would give up if we lost all anxiety. That is a heavy thought. If I were a rat, i.e. if I had been subjected to blockage of my "anxiety" channels, I might be able to repeat that paragraph but I would never fathom its meaning. The novel is full of rather surprising, often profound, usually wittily stated observations.
Another delight is the dragon-hunting chapter. I won't tell you more. You just have to experience what happens in Dyethshome when you go on a dragon hunt. The final chapter comes as somewhat of a relief from all the interminable invention and learning of new creatures, habits, worldscapes. For here Marq Dyeth recalls his earlier life, which helps bring some coherence to the jarring, seemingly chaotic space travels we have just gone through.
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good, I guess. I wanted surprises and got them.As I did expect, it is fantastical and ironic. But it is not light comedy. It is a story contrived to reflect on complicated, unresolved philosophical questions, with dark hints about the answers: how the brain really works and how its processes can be disrupted; the construction of memories, creating myths; the varied ways of negotiating our sexual obsessions, and, finally (finally!) time, space and death.
The setting: Millennia from now, when humans and other intelligent beings from other planets (some of them with 6 legs, multiple tongues, wings and metallic claws) have achieved relative peace in their competition to colonize the 6,200 or more known worlds in the universe, a big (7'4") 19-year old social misfit, homosexual and long drug user in a world that discourages that sort of thing volunteers for Radical Anxiety Termination to turn him into a "rat", an anxiety-less and thus ambition- and curiosity-less human used as a slave by the more-or-less corrupt state industries. His partial recovery of his mental faculties and belated discovery of emotion, described mainly by the short, stocky interworld traveler and industrial diplomat (ID) Marq Hyeth, his perfect love object, is the central story around which we witness many other relationships, experiences and memories. And hovering over all of it are two massive, possibly related conflicts which may threaten them all: first, an internal rivalry among the federated worlds between a fundamentalist political-ideological movement called the Family (apparently the inventors of Radical Anxiety Termination) who want everyone and everything to be controlled and orderly and invent exquisite punishments for those who are not, and the more tolerant, laid-back, open-to-experimentation Sygn; and beyond them, outside any known federation, a mysterious and immensely powerful system of beings who offer no communication to the others, the Xlv, whose intentions are unknown but, if hostile, may be spell disaster.
The book is full of invention, with new worlds and new sorts of intelligent beings and new technologies with strange names appearing in every chapter, almost on every page. Which often makes it very difficult to figure just who is having sex with whom, and how they're doing it, or what's really going on in the dinner parties. (There's a lot of explicit, sloppy sex, but unless you're attracted to six-legged evelmi with shiny scales, or have an opportunity to stroll or float through a love-park on one of the Sygn controlled worlds, it will be beyond reach for you.)
My favorite parts include the long first section, before Marq Hyeth even appears, where we witness the brain-zapping in the Radical Anxiety Termination Institute and its consequences — which include the inability to take in new information from the General Information (GI) network which other humans and evelmi (those six-legged, winged- beings with all the tongues) use to learn new languages or access whatever data they want. This is because, as the high-ranking interworld official Japril explains,
"It's precisely those 'anxiety' channels which Radical Anxiety Termination blocks that GI uses both to process into the brain the supportive contextual information in the preconscious that allows you to make a conscious call for anything more complex than names, dates, verbatim texts, and multiplication tables; and it also uses them to erase an information program in such a way that you can still remember the parts of it you actually used consciously." (Pp. 161-162 in my edition.)
Wow! So all that we would give up if we lost all anxiety. That is a heavy thought. If I were a rat, i.e. if I had been subjected to blockage of my "anxiety" channels, I might be able to repeat that paragraph but I would never fathom its meaning. The novel is full of rather surprising, often profound, usually wittily stated observations.
Another delight is the dragon-hunting chapter. I won't tell you more. You just have to experience what happens in Dyethshome when you go on a dragon hunt. The final chapter comes as somewhat of a relief from all the interminable invention and learning of new creatures, habits, worldscapes. For here Marq Dyeth recalls his earlier life, which helps bring some coherence to the jarring, seemingly chaotic space travels we have just gone through.
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LibraryThing member Crowyhead
This is a fabulous book, full of intricate ceremony and exotic landscapes. Be forewarned, however -- while Delaney once intended to write a sequel, the is no direct sequel, and probably never will be one.
LibraryThing member janeajones
In his afterword to the novel, Delany states that the "notion of a fragmented subject as a 'natural' condition is among the easiest notions....to read as supporting STARS IN MY POCKET LIKE GRAINS OF SAND...." And the novel is fragmented -- among the thousands of inhabited worlds of a galactic
While events happen in the novel, it is essentially plotless. It is a potential love story, an exploration of how knowledge alters consciousness, a book full of evocative descriptions of landscapes and mindscapes. It requires the full attention of the reader to sort out the multitude of characters and new vocabulary introduced. It's a challenging novel that probably would reward a second reading -- but not one I'm going to do anytime soon.
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civilization -- with different languages, different cultures, different intelligent life forms, all tenuously held together by the WEB, the source of GI or general information into which most of its inhabitants are hooked. The protagonist-narrator, Marc Dyeth, is an Industrial Diplomat, who travels among these worlds, a descendant of humans who long ago left the home planet of Earth. The most interesting character, and in some ways, the most recognizable, is Rat Korga, the sole survivor of world that was destroyed by some kind of an explosion. His story is told in the Prologue of the novel. His life intersects with Marc Dyeth when it is discovered that they are the perfect erotic objects of desire for each other. But after the Prologue, we never really get inside his head again.While events happen in the novel, it is essentially plotless. It is a potential love story, an exploration of how knowledge alters consciousness, a book full of evocative descriptions of landscapes and mindscapes. It requires the full attention of the reader to sort out the multitude of characters and new vocabulary introduced. It's a challenging novel that probably would reward a second reading -- but not one I'm going to do anytime soon.
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LibraryThing member DirtPriest
Finally finished the Group Read book. I won't say much yet except that I wanted to like it, but didn't really at all and was glad to be done reading it. When the reader quits caring about the characters because the story is so drawn out in ways he doesn't care about, that sucks. It was way too much
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work for what I got out of it. I'm sure others will like the Dyeth family, or stream, or whatever, but it was like only getting one bite of apple pie when a huge slice is called for. And no ice cream either. Disappointing with no conclusion at all. Show Less
LibraryThing member ben_h
Delany believes that delayed gratification is all the more sweet, so that may explain why we're left hanging by this never-completed "diptych." (What was supposedly an excerpt from the second part appeared in the Review of Contemporary Fiction in 1996, but a complete book seems unlikely.) The first
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half alone is still a classic; stories like this are what science fiction is for. Show Less
LibraryThing member thesmellofbooks
These stories blew me away.
LibraryThing member sumariotter
Weird, interesting. I did not understand much of this book but as it is a favorite of a good friend of mine, I kept reading. Delaney truly creates a unique world here--alien worlds within alien worlds-- and there were parts of this story I found really fascinating. I felt like I needed cliff notes
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for it! Still, I would venture that this is sci fi at it's most inventive. Show Less
LibraryThing member JenneB
I'm not going to say that I totally understood this book, but once I stopped trying to, I really enjoyed it a lot.
As far as I can tell: there is a guy who has this procedure that removes all his anxiety, but also his free will, so he becomes a slave on his planet.
Then the planet is totally
Then we switch to this other guy, who is what they call an Industrial Diplomat, and he lives on a planet where humans and these sort of lizard/dragon aliens coexist peacefully and have sex a lot. They have a lot of entertaining social occasions--there is this dinner party scene that is hilarious and bizarre.
Then these other people rescue the first guy from the cultural fugue holocaust, and somehow while they are fixing him up they find out that he and the industrial diplomat guy are each other's Perfect Erotic Object to within 3 decimal places, or something, so they figure hey, let's introduce them.
Then some other stuff happens, which I won't spoil for you, but the main reason to read this is really for the little details of the alien cultures rather than the plot.
OH, and I also forgot to mention that there's a whole thing where you call everyone "she" unless you're sexually attracted to them, in which case you say "he". So that can be confusing, plus also they use "women" as the default instead of "men". Subversive! (well, maybe for 1984)
As far as I can tell: there is a guy who has this procedure that removes all his anxiety, but also his free will, so he becomes a slave on his planet.
Then the planet is totally
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destroyed as an effect of something called "Cultural Fugue", and he is the only survivor.Then we switch to this other guy, who is what they call an Industrial Diplomat, and he lives on a planet where humans and these sort of lizard/dragon aliens coexist peacefully and have sex a lot. They have a lot of entertaining social occasions--there is this dinner party scene that is hilarious and bizarre.
Then these other people rescue the first guy from the cultural fugue holocaust, and somehow while they are fixing him up they find out that he and the industrial diplomat guy are each other's Perfect Erotic Object to within 3 decimal places, or something, so they figure hey, let's introduce them.
Then some other stuff happens, which I won't spoil for you, but the main reason to read this is really for the little details of the alien cultures rather than the plot.
OH, and I also forgot to mention that there's a whole thing where you call everyone "she" unless you're sexually attracted to them, in which case you say "he". So that can be confusing, plus also they use "women" as the default instead of "men". Subversive! (well, maybe for 1984)
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LibraryThing member anderlawlor
This is one of my favorite of Samuel R. Delany's mighty ouevre, but it's not for everyone. You have to like science fiction and dirty queer sex, and you have to want to read in extreme detail about the social organization of other worlds.
LibraryThing member DinadansFriend
Samuel Delany is a good writer. This is a tale about power and sexual identity, and probably won't play well in the mid West of the USA. Pity, for it is perceptive about the urges of primates, and how it may play out politically.
LibraryThing member raizel
Very clever: default term for people is 'women' and the related pronouns are feminine, subscripts for certain terms like 'job', creatures with multiple tongues say multiple things at the same time; but some ideas are too clever for me to understand, and I just wanted to get to the end of the book
A quote I liked:
"stupidity: a process, not a state. A human being takes in far more information than he or she can put out. 'Stupidity' is a process or strategy by which a human, in response to social denigration of the information she or he puts out, commits him or herself to taking in no more information than she or he can put out. (Not to be confused with ignorance, or lack of data.) Since such a situation is impossible to achieve because of the nature of mind/perception itself in relation to the functioning body, a continuing downward spiral of functionality and/or informative dis-semination results," and he understood why! "The process, however, can be reversed," .... [p. 31]
As I understand the first few sentences, stupidity is a behavior imposed on you by others who do fairly listen to you. Not sure I get the rest.
Another quote:
"The greatest rudeness on my home world---in our particular geosector of it, at any rate, among the particular people we associate with, from our particular range of acquaintances in 17---is to act in such a way as to compel rudeness from others." [p. 311]
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to see if anything was concluded or happened. And then I see that the novel is half of a diptych, with the second half never published. (There is a quote, as if it were a common expression on Velm millenia in the future from "Hello, Young Lovers" from The King and I.)A quote I liked:
"stupidity: a process, not a state. A human being takes in far more information than he or she can put out. 'Stupidity' is a process or strategy by which a human, in response to social denigration of the information she or he puts out, commits him or herself to taking in no more information than she or he can put out. (Not to be confused with ignorance, or lack of data.) Since such a situation is impossible to achieve because of the nature of mind/perception itself in relation to the functioning body, a continuing downward spiral of functionality and/or informative dis-semination results," and he understood why! "The process, however, can be reversed," .... [p. 31]
As I understand the first few sentences, stupidity is a behavior imposed on you by others who do fairly listen to you. Not sure I get the rest.
Another quote:
"The greatest rudeness on my home world---in our particular geosector of it, at any rate, among the particular people we associate with, from our particular range of acquaintances in 17---is to act in such a way as to compel rudeness from others." [p. 311]
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LibraryThing member tornadox
The novel was as weird and good as I remembered. Knowing that the proposed sequel will never be written, I wasn't as disappointed this time around. Ironically, this edition includes an essay by Delany defending science fiction even though he pretty much stopped writing in the genre in the last 10
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years. Show Less
Subjects
Awards
Gaylactic Spectrum Award (Nominee — Hall of Fame — 2000)
Arthur C. Clarke Award (Shortlist — 1987)
Otherwise Award (Special Mention — 2005)
Prometheus Award (Nominee — Novel — 1985)
Language
Original language
English
Original publication date
1984-12
ISBN
0553050532 / 9780553050530