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language: English
country: USA
year: 1976
form: novel
genre(s): sci-fi
dates read: 10.8.16-11.8.16 // 18.10.22-21.11.22
the plot of Trouble on Triton really is: boring, off-putting, moderately reactionary man in a vaguely libertarian lgbtq space future becomes so convinced that humanity will die out without more tradwives that he decides he must become one. also the settled outer satellites (Triton, Europa, etc.) fight a horrific automated space war with Earth and Mars that leaves millions, perhaps billions, dead. insane.
Samuel Delany’s Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia is, on the one hand, not as wholly successful as Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand. to a great extent I think this is because of its decidedly weird treatment of transness — on which note, following Bron’s self-conception and because the starkly different experiences of gender are the point, I’m using “he” to refer to pre-transition Bron and “she” to refer to post-transition Bron. it’s not an ideal solution, but using “she” consistently (or “they”) would be to elide how important the gender divide is for the novel, where it’s clear that post-transition Bron understands herself to have been a man up until suddenly she wasn’t.
it’s unequivocally clear that Bron is living in a society that does not regard gender as fixed, such that a trans woman can and will be accepted as a woman, no questions asked, and open transphobia, including misgendering, is clearly regarded as regressive and bad (including by post-transition Bron, although that doesn’t stop her from doing it to other people). I actually think it does a good job hammering this home and, not least by making its main character so deeply unlikable, critiquing transphobia.
Bron, however, is clearly very much a) a misogynist and b) a transphobe — he thinks of himself pre-transition as reasonable and normal (albeit with a vague ennui), but as soon as he finds out Sam is trans (something he never previously thought about or suspected) he immediately starts mentally misgendering Sam and speculating about his gender. the book ultimately kind of dances around the implication that the reason Bron decided abruptly and with no prior thought to transition was — bluntly — a kind of ~autogynophilia~, that she has (tried to) become the kind of woman she wanted to be with as a man.
at the same time, though, I think there’s a reparative possibility in her weird dream about confronting her old self and trying to rip his face off (“I shall destroy you—as you destroyed me!”). her transition was built on pre-transition Bron’s assumption that after transitioning he would be the same person, but a woman. the actual result is very much not that, leaving post-transition Bron caught between the old Bron’s desires, which she still feels bound by, and the person she’s actually becoming. even if Bron wasn’t always trans, post-transition Bron does want to be a woman; she’s just trapped in the misogyny she developed as a man even in this ostensibly completely egalitarian society, such that even as a woman she — for example — falls back on the trope of the the crazy ex-girlfriend when describing the woman she used to be in love with. Bron is a regressive anachronism in a society that’s moving on — except that she can only have developed her anachronistic regressive views in that society. something is not quite right. this is, after all, an ambiguous heterotopia.
in many ways this last bit is the central point of the novel, manifest especially in its treatment of gender and gender relations but also its reliance on racial and sexual categories (and use of racial and homophobic slurs, sometimes still with the apparent intent to hurt). Trouble on Triton — as its subtitle suggests — is a meditation on both the possibility and the limits of social change. it presents us a bright space future where so much of society is organized radically differently from our present, and its exploration of this is — if somewhat less overwhelming — definitely as intensive as Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand. at the same time, it poses the questions: how much have we (in the 1970s, in 2022, in 2112) really changed? how fast does change occur? can we truly get away from race, gender, sexuality, at least without confronting them head-on? will there always be people like Bron Helstrom, and what do we do about them — to help them, to stop them from hurting themselves (present or future) or others?
it’s also a meditation on art and aesthetics, and on the nature of home, and an I honestly think prescient exploration of remote warfare. I think the apocalyptic (for Earth) war was probably originally written with mutually assured destruction in mind, but now all I can think about is drones. the constant refrain of “at least we’re not fighting with soldiers”, as if a war that kills upwards of 80% of the Earth’s population, such that there is no-one left on the planet with the ability to officially surrender, and wipes out cities of millions of people on Mars and the satellites, is better because only civilians are dying.
that’s the US war machine in the twenty-first century.
moods: challenging, reflective