Samuel Delany has been the cutting edge of the SF revolution for more than ten years. He works within the traditional SF iconography (i.e., spaceships and cyborgs), but his characters come straight from Desolation Row.

Triton is set in a sort of sexual utopia, where every form of sexual behavior is accepted, and sex-change operations (not to mention "refixations," to alter sexual preference) are common. But Bron, Delany's anti-hero (who becomes, for the last quarter of the novel, an anti-heroine) doesn't know what he wants. All he knows is that he's miserable. When his lover tells him, "Your confusion hurts people," Bron replies, "Then people like me should be exterminated."

Bron's downhill drift is underscored by carefully fragmented syntax, the withholding of crucial bits of information, and a series of deliciously self-conscious set-pieces. In one, Bron enters a booth on which a sign reads: "Know Your Place In Society." The booth is supposed to display taped sequences from an individual's life, but when Bron puts in his money the tape breaks, and he doesn't even get his dough back. In another sequence, as he's reading a brutal get-lost letter from the woman he's in love with, a full-scale interplanetary war breaks out around his ears, gravity fails, and only negativity pulls him through.

Triton is an alienated, ambiguous novel. Delany's running concern with characters on the fringe of society (poets, musicians, actors and prostitutes), his stylistic departures (an incomprehensible 14-page lecture on "metalogic"), and his open bisexuality have put off many longtime SF readers. Yet Delany may very well turn out to be as important a writer as Thomas Pynchon. At the very least, he's taking up where [Theodore Sturgeon] left off; that's not very least at all. (pp. 62-3)