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abroadwell's review against another edition
3.0
In the future described here, we can choose to change our gender and sexual orientation. The main character, Bron, thinks that his problems will be changed if his gender changes or if she becomes a lesbian. But the problem of being human outweighs the particular genders or preferences we may have...
mkennedy13's review against another edition
3.0
Average male redditor still finds a way to be a self-centered judgmental prick despite living in a literal utopia.
This book has so many extremely modern concepts for something written in the 70's, much of which we didn't even have words for until very recently. And for none of the trans characters to be misgendered (not even by the MC, except a fleeting thought) in the 70's! This book is simultaneously such a modern 2020's story and also a product of the 1970's. I would be super interested in a retelling that can account for our more modern understandings of gender, sex, and science.
This book has so many extremely modern concepts for something written in the 70's, much of which we didn't even have words for until very recently. And for none of the trans characters to be misgendered (not even by the MC, except a fleeting thought) in the 70's! This book is simultaneously such a modern 2020's story and also a product of the 1970's. I would be super interested in a retelling that can account for our more modern understandings of gender, sex, and science.
nickel_is_neat's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
This was a good book but it was so difficult for me to read. Bron sucks and his perspective is frustrating to read. This was not a book I could speed through. I did not understand the appendices.
colin_lavery's review against another edition
5.0
would be widely banned if its political opponents could understand it
mishnah's review against another edition
challenging
dark
funny
mysterious
reflective
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
A masterpiece — a freakish, ugly, cruel, loving, humanist response to The Dispossessed and Left Hand of Darkness, yes, but also a ridiculously funny and insightful work on its own. Also, inadvertently coined the term “e-girl”!
acaskoftroutwine's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
Trouble on Triton is an examination of male psychology through the lens of a seeming utopian society.
Trouble on Triton takes place in a free-love future. Far out from the planets of Earth and Mars, the moons of gas giants like Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune have been colonized by libertarian societies that are structured around the ideas of individuality and sexual freedom. While the worlds are still burdened by the politics and rigidity of millennia of history and culture, the moons are a melting pot of religion, sexuality, and gender identities. Any form of identity is accepted, and sex changes (down to the genetic level if someone wishes), sexual preference changes (not like today's horrific conversion therapy, more like consensual adjustments to love who you feel most comfortable with. So say a straight woman who feels like they'd feel more comfortable as a lesbian, or a gay man who wishes to be bisexual or asexual. Its a quick surgical switch and always reversible), and body adjustments are freely available. Bron Hellstrom is miserable and doesn't know why.
Bron is a psychological holdover from 20th century masculinity. They are emotionally lazy, selfish, and unable to form serious relationships due to their inability to appreciate that other people have internal lives. They're casually cruel, vindictive, and prone to emotional decision-making while insisting on their logical viewpoint. They have a certain level of self-awareness, certainly enough to understand that there is something wrong with them, but they're completely incapable of doing much about it. Their memory quietly reframes their actions to be less vindictive, less cruel, and less random than they are, and they're quick to apply the most positive interpretation to themself. Most of the book is watching them struggle and fail to learn much from it. This is, of course, without getting into their internalized homophobia and casual misogyny.
As interesting as they are to read, it's also fascinating to see how effortlessly Delany is able to create a set of circumstances that could craft a personality like Bron's in a future so unlike our present. Bron was raised on a colonized Mars and worked as a legal male prostitute for the majority of their life (I believe it was from 13 or 14 until his late twenties). The rigidity of Martian society, their constant contact with women being exclusively through their sex work, seems to have created a perfect storm of sexual confidence and casual misogyny, with an inability to work in a society that doesn't provide them with the same structure they felt choked by on Mars.
Even when, late in the novel, Bron goes through a gender reassignment, it's based more in a sense of misogyny than from gender dysphoria. Bron quite literally believes that they could be a better woman than other women, as only Bron has the experience of the emotional needs and desire of isolation that they assume other men have and must desire. And much like how the first three fourths of the novel are about how Bron being a man made for (a very specific subset of) women, the last section flips it and deals with the unhappiness of being a woman made for men by a man.
And this sense of unhappiness is the driving force of the novel, as stated by Bron at one point while having an emotional breakdown: In a society that can give you anything that you want, what happens to the people that don't know what they want? As much as Bron understands that they have a psychological need that isn't being met, a desire for something that is missing from their life, because they are so unable to articulate or understand what it is, they are endlessly frustrated by it. Which is why the society is labeled a heterotopia in the subtitle of the book: it is a society that is seemingly built around alienating Bron, at least from their perspective.
I think that Delany has crafted an incredible work that shows a very unflinching look at someone who is horribly mundane, who is both sympathetic in some ways, and unsympathetic in most others.
Included in the back of the book are several essay's. The first is about how more than anything, Science Fiction is separated by a unique language, with words and phrases used in ways that are unique to SF and which carry over into other SF books in a way that allows readers to quickly understand different settings and their implications based solely on wordage. I believe that this essay gets expanded on in Delany's The Jewel-Hinged Jaw collection of essays.
The other essay/short story included is "Some Informal Remarks Toward the Modular Calculus", which is a piece written from an in universe perspective about several characters mentioned in passing and a system of meta-logic called the Modular Calculus. While this section was interesting to read, and is expanded on through another of Delany's work the Nevèrÿon series, I felt a little bit lost reading it. The closest I can come to understanding it's inclusion is through the irony that meta-logic, Bron's job and field of work, is also something he can't apply to his own life. Meta-logic is a system of studying different systems of logic, and Bron's incapable of seeing how different people might see a situation or even having empathy towards them. The Modular Calculus was a never completed system of studying how much a system needs to absorb of a different system to be able to understand it. Bron is incapable to accepting any part of a different person's perspective, and so can't understand them. However, I may be entirely wrong on this.
Honestly, its a great book, and it makes me want to read The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin, which this was apparently written to complement.
7 or 8 out of 10
Trouble on Triton takes place in a free-love future. Far out from the planets of Earth and Mars, the moons of gas giants like Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune have been colonized by libertarian societies that are structured around the ideas of individuality and sexual freedom. While the worlds are still burdened by the politics and rigidity of millennia of history and culture, the moons are a melting pot of religion, sexuality, and gender identities. Any form of identity is accepted, and sex changes (down to the genetic level if someone wishes), sexual preference changes (not like today's horrific conversion therapy, more like consensual adjustments to love who you feel most comfortable with. So say a straight woman who feels like they'd feel more comfortable as a lesbian, or a gay man who wishes to be bisexual or asexual. Its a quick surgical switch and always reversible), and body adjustments are freely available. Bron Hellstrom is miserable and doesn't know why.
Bron is a psychological holdover from 20th century masculinity. They are emotionally lazy, selfish, and unable to form serious relationships due to their inability to appreciate that other people have internal lives. They're casually cruel, vindictive, and prone to emotional decision-making while insisting on their logical viewpoint. They have a certain level of self-awareness, certainly enough to understand that there is something wrong with them, but they're completely incapable of doing much about it. Their memory quietly reframes their actions to be less vindictive, less cruel, and less random than they are, and they're quick to apply the most positive interpretation to themself. Most of the book is watching them struggle and fail to learn much from it. This is, of course, without getting into their internalized homophobia and casual misogyny.
As interesting as they are to read, it's also fascinating to see how effortlessly Delany is able to create a set of circumstances that could craft a personality like Bron's in a future so unlike our present. Bron was raised on a colonized Mars and worked as a legal male prostitute for the majority of their life (I believe it was from 13 or 14 until his late twenties). The rigidity of Martian society, their constant contact with women being exclusively through their sex work, seems to have created a perfect storm of sexual confidence and casual misogyny, with an inability to work in a society that doesn't provide them with the same structure they felt choked by on Mars.
Even when, late in the novel, Bron goes through a gender reassignment, it's based more in a sense of misogyny than from gender dysphoria. Bron quite literally believes that they could be a better woman than other women, as only Bron has the experience of the emotional needs and desire of isolation that they assume other men have and must desire. And much like how the first three fourths of the novel are about how Bron being a man made for (a very specific subset of) women, the last section flips it and deals with the unhappiness of being a woman made for men by a man.
And this sense of unhappiness is the driving force of the novel, as stated by Bron at one point while having an emotional breakdown: In a society that can give you anything that you want, what happens to the people that don't know what they want? As much as Bron understands that they have a psychological need that isn't being met, a desire for something that is missing from their life, because they are so unable to articulate or understand what it is, they are endlessly frustrated by it. Which is why the society is labeled a heterotopia in the subtitle of the book: it is a society that is seemingly built around alienating Bron, at least from their perspective.
I think that Delany has crafted an incredible work that shows a very unflinching look at someone who is horribly mundane, who is both sympathetic in some ways, and unsympathetic in most others.
Included in the back of the book are several essay's. The first is about how more than anything, Science Fiction is separated by a unique language, with words and phrases used in ways that are unique to SF and which carry over into other SF books in a way that allows readers to quickly understand different settings and their implications based solely on wordage. I believe that this essay gets expanded on in Delany's The Jewel-Hinged Jaw collection of essays.
The other essay/short story included is "Some Informal Remarks Toward the Modular Calculus", which is a piece written from an in universe perspective about several characters mentioned in passing and a system of meta-logic called the Modular Calculus. While this section was interesting to read, and is expanded on through another of Delany's work the Nevèrÿon series, I felt a little bit lost reading it. The closest I can come to understanding it's inclusion is through the irony that meta-logic, Bron's job and field of work, is also something he can't apply to his own life. Meta-logic is a system of studying different systems of logic, and Bron's incapable of seeing how different people might see a situation or even having empathy towards them. The Modular Calculus was a never completed system of studying how much a system needs to absorb of a different system to be able to understand it. Bron is incapable to accepting any part of a different person's perspective, and so can't understand them. However, I may be entirely wrong on this.
Honestly, its a great book, and it makes me want to read The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin, which this was apparently written to complement.
7 or 8 out of 10
m4tr1m0ny's review against another edition
3.0
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
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
moorelaborate's review against another edition
3.0
A challenging read. I enjoyed the discussions I had with people about this book despite not enjoying the reading of it. Bron strikes me as a kind of woke anti-hero. I can't completely hate him, but it's hard to find something to like. Through that lens, his interactions with people are cringy facinating thought experiments that I can't quite make fit together.
jsmithborne's review against another edition
3.0
Found this book hard to get into, and hard to stick with. Didn't help that I have a stack of interesting (easier?) stuff on my ereader waiting for me to finish up and move on. As lots of people have commented, the main, POV character is not at all likable, but I did enjoy the glimpses you get of him from what other people say. Also loved the gender-play--enforcer-girls, or e-girls, can be female or male, it's just that they were only women for so long that the name stuck even when men started doing the job. And how male prostitution is illegal on earth, but female prostitution is illegal on Mars. I couldn't find the line to quote it exactly, but the bit about how you can get used to seeing people of an unexpected gender in positions of power, but still be surprised by seeing them in positions of service kind of smacked me in the head.
catcouch's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0