Scan barcode
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
bigenk's review
challenging
slow-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
2.5
I like this novel well enough for it's ideas and themes. Delany explore a society in which individuals can be, and seemingly do, whatever or whoever they want to be. At the same time, this society is one that is still overwhelmed with the weight of social and economic class, a government that apologetically spies on it's citizens, and war that indiscriminately kills citizens. It's a deeply troubled world that has very specific freedoms, most of which revolve around sexuality and gender. It feels very forward thinking in that manner, considering it's date of publication.
That being said, it was (at least most of the time) a painful slog to read through. Reading through the internal monologue of a misogynist that struggles to find their place in a libertarian utopia is, unsurprisingly, not the most fun thing in the world. Not that I think it was intended to be. But I can't help but feel that there is a middle ground here somewhere. I think you can explore all the same ideas about sexuality, gender, and self expression, while also having a story that is at least interesting. The writing style didn't help either, though I did find myself getting used to it over the course of the book.
I'm hoping to find other examples of Delany's work that I enjoy more. I also hope that a re-read in the future can be more enjoyable, because I really did like the underlying themes
That being said, it was (at least most of the time) a painful slog to read through. Reading through the internal monologue of a misogynist that struggles to find their place in a libertarian utopia is, unsurprisingly, not the most fun thing in the world. Not that I think it was intended to be. But I can't help but feel that there is a middle ground here somewhere. I think you can explore all the same ideas about sexuality, gender, and self expression, while also having a story that is at least interesting. The writing style didn't help either, though I did find myself getting used to it over the course of the book.
I'm hoping to find other examples of Delany's work that I enjoy more. I also hope that a re-read in the future can be more enjoyable, because I really did like the underlying themes
indigo78180's review against another edition
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
As with Delany's other works, this novel is difficult to parse and rich in thematic complexity. I think if I were made to write an essay on the book, I might appreciate it better, but as of my first reading, I found the main character to be so incessantly annoying that I can say it definitely impacted my reading experience. It's good for reading and better for talking about!
bdorf's review against another edition
5.0
I finished this book weeks ago and I can't stop thinking about it. Hard to read, but excellent and thought provoking.
tlabresh's review against another edition
adventurous
dark
mysterious
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.5
smallison's review
adventurous
challenging
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
3.0
futuriana's review against another edition
2.0
Originally published under this title, but later (and currently) as Trouble on Triton.
This is the only Delany novel I've read, previously I was only familiar with his wonderful short fiction. It doesn't really measure up, imo, although there are certainly some interesting ideas in it.
The social aspects are pretty cool, and I should probably pick up The Left Hand of Darkness to compare and contrast. But all the same, the novel suffers from an unlikeable and rather passive protagonist. That's at the point of course, but knowing that doesn't help me as the reader much.
As for the ending, it is simultaneously satisfying in that it doesn't go for easy solutions, and disappointing in that I don't know that I care at the end. If the point is that not even Utopia can make some people happy... well, that doesn't seem like much of a revelation.
This is the only Delany novel I've read, previously I was only familiar with his wonderful short fiction. It doesn't really measure up, imo, although there are certainly some interesting ideas in it.
The social aspects are pretty cool, and I should probably pick up The Left Hand of Darkness to compare and contrast. But all the same, the novel suffers from an unlikeable and rather passive protagonist. That's at the point of course, but knowing that doesn't help me as the reader much.
As for the ending, it is simultaneously satisfying in that it doesn't go for easy solutions, and disappointing in that I don't know that I care at the end. If the point is that not even Utopia can make some people happy... well, that doesn't seem like much of a revelation.
jpod26's review against another edition
1.0
Absolutely horrible, wish I could give it negative stars
davidgillette's review against another edition
5.0
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.
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.