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language: English
country: USA
year: 1984
form: novel
genre(s): sci-fi
dates read: 4.7.16-6.7.16 // 7.9.21-30.9.21 // 26.9.22-13.10.22
Samuel Delany’s Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand is a masterpiece. I do not say this lightly but I do believe it is the greatest science fiction novel ever written. I also think it would be fair to say that it is the most science fiction novel ever written (or, at the very least, it must be in the running), in that it is a more sustained, thoroughgoing, expansive exploration of what science fiction can be and do than anything else I’ve ever encountered, even in work by other writers whose work I think displays a similar grasp of — as I mentioned before — what a truly interstellar or galactic society would actually entail.
the book is a sustained meditation on, first, the end of the world — what it means for a world (from an entire planet destroyed in Cultural Fugue to a romantic relationship too-abruptly ended) to come to an end, what it feels like — and, second, on difference: the enormous — almost ungraspably so — cultural, linguistic, gestural, racial, species, geological, atmospheric diversity that an interstellar society would entail, but also simply the difference between one person and another, between one city and the next city over, between who we are now and who we were as children or who we will become. the narration is relentless in reminding readers of the scope of difference even as it situates us deeply within the culture of Marq’s homeworld, Velm, and more specifically the mixed human-evelm society of his home urban complex, Morgre; this is, I think, its greatest achievement.
the story follows Korga, called Rat, a slave from a world that, sixty pages into the novel, destroys itself in what is called “Cultural Fugue”, and Marq Dyeth an “industrial diplomat” who facilitates interstellar commerce. the two have never met, but, abruptly, Marq is informed that he and Korga are each other’s perfect erotic objects out to seven to nine decimal places. over the course of a night and a day, Marq’s world — both his life-world and Velm — are changed, perhaps irrevocably (or perhaps not). it is a novel about the encounter with difference, and about what it means to face the possibility that a world may end.
it’s an awe-inspiring achievement, but also one that makes me want to write, myself.
(I also — having looked at some reviews on Storygraph — would like to say, to everyone who’s saying “oh, it feels unfinished, which makes sense because there was supposed to be a sequel”: what the fuck are you talking about?)
moods: challenging, hopeful, horny, reflective, sad, tense