SOURCE: “Debased and Lascivious? Samuel R. Delany's Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand,” in Ash of Stars: On the Writing of Samuel R. Delany, edited by James Sallis, University Press of Mississippi, 1996, pp. 26-42.

[In the following essay, Blackford examines Delany's presentation of gender and sexuality in Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand. Blackford contends that the novel, while often confusing and overly ambiguous, reveals Delany's innovative effort to subvert gender-coded language and popular stereotypes about physical beauty and sexual norms.]

I.

Samuel R. Delany has been a prolific writer in recent years, having just completed the trilogy that began with Tales of Nevèrÿon, as well as working on a far-future diptych that begins with Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand. The Nevèrÿon books deserve a separate extended discussion.

Stars in My Pocket has its own internal structural complexities: it is actually two stories, or perhaps three counting its Epilogue, as well as forming the first half of a diptych, the second half of which is still awaited. This is to be entitled The Splendor and Misery of Bodies, of Cities, a suggestive title when read against the subject matter of Stars in My Pocket.

The two stories which make up Stars in My Pocket are a virtually self-contained novella, actually listed as the Prologue and entitled “A World Apart,” and a notably ragged-ended set of “Monologues,” with a final “Epilogue.” Presumably the ragged or open-ended nature of this whole sequence, and hence of the novel itself, will be tidied up when the second half of the diptych becomes available. From the shape of the first book, it appears that the two volumes might be going to form a genuinely unified work, and not just a novel with a sequel to keep readers and the publisher going. I say this because the overall shape of Stars in My Pocket is somewhat peculiar, with a major unresolved crisis taking place at the end, and with a number of major elements left unexplained. Most obviously, the full roles of a universal information-distributing organization called “the Web” are left quite unclear, even though it is the conspiratorial force driving many of the events. Even more unclear is the role of a species of aliens known as the Xlv. It may well be that the second book of the diptych will be written in such a way as to be virtually inaccessible to anyone who has not read the first book, while Stars in My Pocket itself appears to end prematurely unless we go on to tackle The Splendor and Misery—but that the frayed edges of the two novels will be sewn neatly together. It may also well be that the manner in which the Prologue is injected into a larger political and imaginative context in the first book will provide the pattern for the entire two-volume work, in which case I would be unwilling to criticize the first book for having loose ends; in fact, if Delany is able to develop the pattern he has established within the first book, I for one will consider this to be a refreshing and courageous development in sf—he will have my applause.

This is not to say that every difficulty I will be drawing attention to in the plotting of Stars in My Pocket can be given the benefit of the doubt on the ground that the sequel will make all clear: some of the difficulties would appear to be endemic to Delany’s fundamental approach in this novel. But I am suggesting that the unexpected overall shape of the book is not necessarily to be considered a fault, depending on what Delany is going to come up with next.

In trying to analyze the aesthetic and thematic characteristics of Stars in My Pocket, I have found myself thinking about how typical the book is of Delany’s work in general, and how much it illuminates what Delany has been doing in his other more recent books. I am very aware that such critics as George Turner and Bruce Gillespie, among other skeptics in this country, have been unwilling to accept that Delany is saying anything profound or worthwhile behind the often difficult surfaces of his narratives. While I have not taken the opportunity to refresh my reading of the whole Delany oeuvre at this stage, it does seem to me that Delany has been saying important and potentially explosive things in his recent novels. I am not going to attempt to explore the extent to which the same themes and attitudes found in Stars in My Pocket also appear in Delany’s earlier work, but I would suggest that many of the same tropes are present and should probably be given the same significances. It also seems to me that the strengths and weaknesses which I have found in Delany over the years, and which have been commented on by George Turner and others (particularly the weaknesses in Turner’s case), are exemplified very well in this latest book.

The Prologue, which I have referred to as a virtually self-contained novella, tells the story of an (initially) unnamed slave on an unnamed world. Later on, we find out that the slave’s name is “Korga”—he comes to be called “Rat Korga”—and his planet is Rhyonon. Korga is a misfit on a very backward planet. On the first page (all my page references are to the hardback Bantam edition), we are introduced to him at an Institute which practices a process called “Radical Anxiety Termination.” This consists of destroying certain neural pathways in the brain so as to turn off the capacity for aggression, anxiety, and original thought. It is a kind of far-future lobotomy with more drastic results: once subjected to the RAT treatment, a “rat” is apparently completely tractable, even to the extent of being willing to sleep in his own excrement. The social practices on Rhyonon declare that rats should be made the slaves of institutions which have need for the cheap but menial labour they can provide. Individuals are not entrusted with owning human lives, and the institutions which use rats are supposed to be screened to ensure that they are humane—but this is treated as a great, if bitter, joke by Delany, since the institution where Rat Korga spends most of his time withholds even the most universal and fundamental dignities. It is difficult to imagine how a society such as this would work, or how any pretensions to humanity could be found in a society which contains people who think like this, but so Delany has stipulated. As soon as I start to describe what is going on here, it seems to me that I am unmasking something of the kind of inconsistency in Delany that has rightly worried George Turner, though alleged practices in this country’s mental institutions make me wonder whether Delany is not, against expectation, right.

At the polar research institution where Rat Korga spends most of his time working, he lives a life which appears fantastically debased and humiliating, and there is nothing in the book to compel us to see it in any other way. However, the book goes on to present us with a series of apparently degraded lifestyles, actions, and desires, and leaves us to sort out which are which in terms of morality and value. The conditions under which Korga lives in slavery on Rhyonon provide one version of degradation, or one touchstone for it, but that is all.

The main action in this first part of the novel concerns a woman who seeks the company of her own slave; she is a sadist who wants someone for sexual use and abuse. In a key episode, the woman demands that Korga make love to her (he is not interested since he is entirely homosexual, but his RAT treatment does not allow him to refuse), to allow her to whip him bloodily, to allow her, also, to spit upon him without defending himself. But she also gives him a glove-like device which plugs into his neural circuits with the effect of healing his mind, while, at the same time, she grants him the release of knowledge. It transpires that under certain conditions a rat can absorb information many hundreds of times faster than a human being who has not had the RAT treatment. The woman wishes to be able to spit upon a man who has read all the books she has not, so she sets him to read a sequence of major works through direct neural input, scoffing down the equivalent of tens of thousands of pages within seconds. It appears that the effect of the RAT treatment is not only to eliminate anxiety and so on but also to eliminate certain filtering mechanisms that limit or retard the processing of input information by our brains. The glove which the woman sadist provides compensates for the RAT treatment rather than undoing it, so Korga is able to retain his enhanced information-processing potential even while enjoying his return to something like a state of creativity and initiative. Once again, Delany has so stipulated the technology, though it is all suspiciously convenient to his thematic purpose.

The description of Korga’s first experience of reading—and, with it, the exponential expansion in his consciousness as he starts wolfing down books—is very impressive as a straight sf rendering of experience beyond the edges of anything which we could ever encounter. It is also full of successful tricks, some of which I shall return to. Preeminently, Delany provides a sensitive depiction of a feeling of splendor, the exploration of new realms of consciousness, completeness, and joy. This is the other side to Stars in My Pocket: it presents forms of degradation and misery, even versions of what might be the definitive forms of degradation; but, at the same time, it shows startling forms of splendor and joy, once again verging upon the extremes or the definitive versions of these things. Throughout, Delany’s emphasis is that the obvious question, “which is which?”, is either a wrong question even to ask or, at least, the assumptions which our own society might make in answering it are so parochial and problematical that we may as well start over again and dismiss what our society assumes. Stars in My Pocket is very much an attack on notions that there is an accumulated traditional wisdom about these things. The premise is radically constructivist: meaning, significance, value, and the social organization of relevant behavior are not inherent in brute physical/biological fact, but are more or less arbitrarily constructed for and by societies.

In the case of Rat Korga, the woman who inflicts what we might consider the most degrading experiences of all upon him is also the woman who makes available to him the vistas and the splendor of thought and intellect. When Korga is “rescued” from her, we feel immediately—some might say that Delany has tricked us into feeling—that he has suffered an overall loss. Indeed, in a kind of coda to this section we get a poignant description of what Korga is like afterwards, wistfully and pathetically teaching his fellow rats to wear one work glove, in memory of the device which gave him his mind and a mental world—before it was literally torn from him, and both mind and world rushed away.

At the end of the Prologue, Korga’s world is destroyed, and with it, apparently, Korga himself. In this context, all questions of moral judgement or disgust seem to be held in abeyance, and we are aware only of pathos, futility, and a splendor which has been lost. The Prologue, however, is injected into the larger story, wherein it becomes clear that Korga is possibly the only survivor of a cataclysm which destroyed Rhyonon. The larger story is narrated by one Marq Dyeth, a small bearded male human (within the larger Universe where Marq roams, the word “man” is an archaism seldom encountered). Rat Korga and Marq Dyeth are spectacularly sexually attracted to each other, and the larger novel is mainly concerned with their relationship in the context of staggering political conspiracies that are impacting upon the lives of humans and other intelligent beings (generically known as “women” in this Universal meta-culture) on 6000 planets: the backdrop is grand space opera in the inimitably baroque Delany mode, while the foreground is a kind of love story which could have been produced by Robert A. Heinlein revising Stranger in a Strange Land with the aid of a manual of (supposed) perversions and fetishes, or perhaps a manual of safe sexual practices and a determination to exemplify the don'ts. Of course, our cultural definitions of what constitutes a perversion or fetish are very much at stake here.

II.

As I have already described, the RAT treatment undergone by Rat Korga has the effect of destroying the will, despite sophistical assurances to the contrary which Korga is given early in the narrative. But it also makes possible a super-accelerated expansion of knowledge under particular circumstances. Accordingly, the RAT treatment, while destructive in itself, or perhaps by itself, contains within it a potential for experiences of splendor as well as degradation. Thus it provides an example of how degradation and splendor can be conjoined, can be inextricable within a set of experiences, can even be aspects of the same identical experience, a point to which Delany returns again and again. Note that Delany here has simply stipulated that this is how the technology works. He is able to gain a very poignant effect in the Prologue, and one which challenges our own deepest cultural revulsions, but it is worth asking whether he has not gained part of his effect by cheating.

The answer to this question is not simple. Delany is certainly entitled to use whatever thematic images he likes and to set up his technology how he likes—but only in the context of the larger world which he is creating. The trouble with the RAT treatment and the way it works is that it is just too thematically convenient, since we are not given any detailed information about a larger technological context in which it might function: when it is revealed that RAT has a splendid as well as a degrading side this looks more as if Delany is trying to pull a rabbit out of his hat—it was up his sleeve all the time, of course—than as if the logical outcome of the information we have been given has been reached. This does not mean that Delany is a slipshod writer, at least not entirely: within the super-speed-reading sequence, Delany is brilliant. The description of what it is like for Korga to build up a world of vicarious experience for the first time is sensitive, vivid and moving, and this reader, for one, did not care whether it would or could really work that way or not. Delany launches forth on a rich and seemingly inexhaustible account of the books Korga reads; they are luxuriantly and precisely named and described; more profound is the manner in which Delany describes the patterns which the different books form in Korga’s mind, each throwing the ones before into a different series of relationships and significances, each enriched by the patterns which Korga has already built up. This is a very acceptable sf technique, extrapolating from the process of literary growth that we all know so well, but presenting a version of the experience far beyond the edges of what we can ever go through—but not what can be imagined. The scene also contains some wholly successful trickery, and even jokes. It turns out that Korga has dipped into a pile of women’s literature by mistake, and he has failed to realize that what he has taken to be the literary canon of his world is actually a literary ghetto. There is even a note of self-deprecation here, since Delany is one of those writers whom we would expect to champion such alternative literary canons. There is a surprising amount of humor in the novel, but some of the other jokes are at the expense of the reader rather than the writer.

The joke on the reader in this “books” sequences is that Delany provides some clues that he is actually writing about a women’s literary ghetto, but the reader misses them: in the development of this joke there is a sense that Delany is concerned with narrative logic rather than with mere stipulation and contrivance. Every time the sex of one of the writers of the material Korga is reading is revealed, it turns out that the writer is female. Yet, we find ourselves assuming automatically that the other writers are male. So strong is our cultural heritage that we do not even notice that only feminine pronouns are ever used, when pronouns are used, until the trap is finally sprung on us (I wonder whether women tend to fall so readily into the trap … ). So Delany is able to have a laugh at himself, at Korga, and at us, too, all with perfect narrative logic, and in an extended scene which works too powerfully when read “straight” to be dismissed as just a cheap narratorial trick. Yet, though the scene works well internally, and follows a logic which is very satisfying, it appears in the context of a quite unsatisfying technological stipulation, which, in turn, is in the context of a stipulated society that is vague and problematic. It seems to me that this unsatisfactoriness at the contextual levels of the societies and technologies which Delany works out, combined with a satisfying development of symbols and of narratorial direction within sequences, is part of the reason why some critics such as George Turner remain so skeptical about the value of Delany’s work, while other critics and readers find a great deal to read with admiration and delight, even awe.

I am one of the readers who feel some of the abovementioned awe, admiration, and delight when reading Delany, but I must admit that I do not find his novels entirely satisfying. A related difficulty in Stars in My Pocket to what I have been describing is that much of the impetus behind the plot is provided by vast powers of universal scope, particularly the Web and the Xlv. The result is that there are no clearly scrutable rules by which the logic of the events may be assessed: almost any coincidence has a chance of being justified as really manifesting conspiracy; almost any sequence of events can be shaped by powers which have no clearly defined restraints. Accordingly, the book loses some of its appearance of accountability to the reader, and to the reader’s sense of narrative logic and the characters’ psychology. This is a very common fault (or at least cause of dissatisfaction) in sf, but this book seems to take it to extremes—particularly because it does rely, extravagantly, on coincidences, which presumably we have to interpret as conspiracy, without any ground rules being established to test the workings of the conspiracy. At the same time, there are occasions where we have a sense that what Delany is stipulating about this universe is very unlikely, even nonsensical. For example, there is a great deal of discussion and argument about the nature of “fuzzy-edged” concepts, some of it logical: the total population of the Universe can never be given exactly because it continually fluctuates by a billion—fair enough, though the only reason why this could be so is that the Universe’s population is so vast that an approximation to the nearest billion, or five, or ten billion would be highly precise in percentage terms. The idea of fuzzy-edged concepts is used to equivocate about whether Rat Korga was or was not the only survivor of the destruction of Rhyonon. The simple answer seems to be not that the concept is particularly fuzzy but that the question is ambiguous. Delany tries to pretend that there is a difference in principle between being the only survivor when a world is destroyed and being the only survivor when, say, a town is destroyed. But the very same ambiguities arise: what about people on the way out? the way in? normal residents who were not home?

While the fuzzy-edged concept is a respectable philosophical animal, Delany appears to deploy it in such a way as to suggest that he is prepared to try to dazzle the reader with the first bit of old rubbish he thinks of—in this case, apparently, just to avoid admitting that there is a meaningful sense in which Rat Korga does seem to be that melodramatic phenomenon, the sole survivor of a planetary cataclysm (a conclusion which he appears to want to fob off on to his characters, disowning it himself while still getting mileage out of it). Another such piece of old rubbish is the old assertion made by Marq that “You may assume, about absolutely any fact … that nine hundred and ninety-nine people out of a thousand do not know it—which goes for the working assumption too” (139). This is really used as a piece of humorous hyperbole, yet Delany appears to wish us to take it seriously as an explanation of the otherwise mysterious state of affairs wherein nobody much in the Universe he has created is aware of the existence of the Xlv, despite the fact that this is the only alien species capable of space flight. Delany tries to persuade us that there is no area of common knowledge in his far future Universe at all—and is completely unconvincing. Despite anything he has Marq tell us, it is impossible to shake off the feeling that there would be plenty of knowledge of such general interest that virtually anybody would be acquainted with it.

Part of the difficulty in reading this novel is that it takes away many of the codes which we are used to in constructing pictures of characters and actions from black marks on paper. In doing so, it draws attention (by their absence) to some of the most basic codes which are involved in the process. Most obviously, Stars in My Pocket dispenses with the simple distinction in language between male and female people. In this novel the word “man” for “male human being” is said to be an archaism seldom encountered, while the pronouns “he,” “she” and their cognates are not used to denote gender; rather, these words are used to distinguish only between the mass of humanity (together with other species) and those by whom the speaker is sexually excited. Intelligent life-forms are called “women,” and the pronouns “she” and “her” are used; the pronouns “he” and “him,” by contrast, indicate that the speaker refers to someone who sexually excites her. The result is that we have difficulty visualizing characters as Delany presents them, because in our culture the first vital piece of information we need in attempting to visualize someone is knowledge of his or her sex. Because of the roles and values traditionally assigned to males and females in our own society, we tend to assume that characters in books and human agents in general are male unless we have evidence to the contrary, and this is reinforced by our language, which traditionally uses the masculine gender in many contexts to include the feminine. In Delany’s novel, however, we find ourselves routinely encountering what strike us, though not Delany’s characters, as feminine pronouns. We come to assume that characters are female as the default option, even though we know that the “feminine” pronouns do not have the same meaning as in our own culture. This effect seems to corroborate the hypothesis that language does actually shape assumptions (it is an interesting experiment in the area on Delany’s part). However, we are able to go beyond the effect I have described so far, to some extent, to get used to the idea that “masculine” pronouns indicate not the male sex but the excitement produced as a sexual object by the person spoken of.

This whole effect is very disorienting, and we sometimes balk at being unable to use our normal basic clues in attempting to visualize characters. On the other hand, we also learn to take some pride in picking up the new cues Delany provides and responding with upraised eyebrows at the occasional use of the pronoun “he” and its cousins. Another point demonstrated here is that language, as well as shaping, or at least reinforcing, cultural attitudes also manifests them. In the highly permissive universal meta-culture which Delany has created, it is obviously not only acceptable to reveal openly when one is sexually excited and by whom—such revelation is actually demanded by the language itself, and it seems scarcely less “natural” for these people to distinguish in the course of speech by whom they are excited than it is for us to distinguish whether the person spoken about is male or female.

Apart from the level of language, Stars in My Pocket also challenges our assumptions as to what sort of details will be selected to evoke the nature of people when they are described. In particular, Marq Dyeth does not automatically tell us whether a character is male or female, so the information we look for in pronouns is not supplemented by his descriptions. Moreover, in selecting evocative details, Marq will often point to veins, scars, calluses, and fingertips, rather than hair, breasts, facial features and other characteristics which we are more used to when visualizing people. As a result, the narration seems to be very vivid; yet we end up with many aspects not properly visualized because they do not fit in with our normal codes. Delany provides at least as much sensory detail as the average writer, and he thus draws our attention to the way we are dependent upon being told certain kinds of detail in constructing pictures and identities out of the black-on-blanks that make up a novel. However, as with the point about the use of pronouns, the violation of normal descriptive conventions also works in direct ways creating a strong cumulative sense that we are in someone else’s mental world. Different readers will probably find different levels of disorientation in Delany’s various techniques. For myself, I found it very difficult to understand some of the array of new concepts which Delany expects us to absorb, often with no simple discursive explanation. At the end of the book I decided I did not really understand the distinction made between work, work, and work, despite the concept appearing at times to be perfectly simple. We need to cope with a range of high-powered sf concepts: the Web, the Xlv, Cultural Fugue (the state reached by a planet before it destroys itself), the Web’s officers, who are called “spiders.” Also Marq does not explain anything more than is necessary for someone in his own culture, as a result of which we never get sustained descriptions of the things he is familiar with. At the end of the book I am still not precisely sure what the evelmi, a race of six-legged reptiloid aliens who live in symbiosis and sexual interrelationship with human beings on their home world, look like. Yet, as with the humans of whose sex I remain unsure, the evelmi are treated as individuals, and some sharp individual distinctions are made by Marq on coloration, the shape of talons, and so on.

A final question which should be raised about these various new codes of language and description is how much they can simply be stipulated, and how much they should be placed in some historical context to allow the reader to understand how they could have evolved. George Turner has placed great emphasis on his view that anything new about a future world should be explicable as having evolved from our own culture. Delany obviously prefers a “black box” technique: we are to assume that the intervening time represents whatever “box” is required to have produced the necessary transformations of our own experience; if the passage of time is great enough, it can be envisaged that almost any sort of “box” could have been there, given that human nature is considered to be plastic rather than fixed. On this point, I am inclined to agree with Delany, provided that what we are shown does not violate our (admittedly problematic and vulnerable) sense of the most basic human needs, interests and capacities, and provided that the individual elements of future society, language, technology, etc. are mutually consistent and exist in some sort of shaping context that we can understand, rather than merely providing an arbitrary and convenient set of symbols. Delany does sometimes merely stipulate stuff which is symbolically convenient, but he is also able to develop sequences and far-future changes with great rigor, even while plundering them for all the poetic effects that they are worth. These are his fiction’s strengths and weaknesses.

III.

The thematic centre of Stars in My Pocket is the idea of degradation or debasement. This takes many forms: a great deal of emphasis is placed upon nudity—which can signify a lowering of status combined with great vulnerability, or can signify a situation where clothes are seen as unnecessary. Stripping a victim or enemy is a well-known method of humiliating him or her, making the enemy vulnerable, demeaned, attacking some of the sources of identity and pride. At the polar station where Rat Korga works in the early part of the book, he is treated negligently and demeaningly in that he is not fed enough meals, is not provided with toilet facilities, is forced to work naked—his clothes are never replaced but are allowed to wear out. However, this is not the only context in which nudity is presented in the book, since the characters are also shown as going naked at Dyethshome, where Marq and his fellows live in an innocent symbiosis with the evelmi. Here the emphasis is upon the lack of need for clothes. Nakedness is a sign, in other words, both of shame and degradation and of innocence and transcendence; Delany is able to exploit this widely-recognized ambiguity.

As already touched upon, many elements of the book simultaneously convey ideas of degradation or shame and splendor or transcendence. Stars in My Pocket seems to have little to do with the concepts of good and evil as such. Such concepts are largely abstract and intellectually-based ones; more visceral feelings than those of moral condemnation are horror and disgust, and it is at the concepts associated with these feelings that Delany appears to direct his analysis. An attempt to hold together the disparate elements of the novel by relating them directly to moral approval or disapproval would fail, since many of the experiences described, though emotionally potent, would probably be considered to be morally neutral upon dispassionate analysis. For example, it is hard to believe that anyone would be morally concerned one way or the other about Marq’s sexual interest in calluses and bitten fingernails rather than the conventional bums and tits—but the feeling could easily be that such sexual interests are nasty, debased, and unfortunate, comic rather than wicked, with the comedy based upon a mild form of disgust. Other aspects, such as Marq’s sexual relations with reptiloid aliens, would be both disgusting and wicked according to conventional wisdom. However, Delany challenges our assumptions of what experiences should strike us as degrading, should disgust or repel us, or make us feel vicarious shame. In doing so, he also challenges much of the basis for conventional morality. Delany goes to the core of what is natural or acceptable experience for a human being, and to the question of the limits of tolerance for behavior which his own society constructs as degraded or disgusting; he stretches the boundaries of what can seem acceptable or even, in the right circumstances, delightful. As far as Marq’s relationships with evelmi go, the view that interspecies sexuality might be shameful is made to appear mistaken, parochial and itself comic.

Towards the end of the book, the Dyeths’ friends, the Thants, attempt to make a statement distancing themselves from and denouncing the Dyeths. Their way of doing this is to avoid coming to dinner, instead huddling about, wrapped in privacy clouds, and saying scornful and insulting things about “lizard lovers” (earlier we have been introduced to other insulting terms, such as “front-face” for heterosexual). The Dyeths, both human and evelm, find the whole display incomprehensible but are most perturbed that their carefully prepared meal is being left uneaten. Under the circumstances, the Thants appear to be rude and narrow-minded, while we identify with the Dyeths. It all seems like a humorous clash of a more generous and a meaner culture—in which the upholders of what we might normally consider the most basic assumptions of sexual morality are simply ridiculous.

Delany places in the foreground the whole idea of cultural difference and the social construction of meaning and value that goes with it. Marq’s job is that of an industrial diplomat, someone who has to deal in trading relationships between many cultures and even species. For him, it is second nature to assume that responses to situations, together with the very concepts which are employed in those situations, will vary fundamentally from culture to culture. He has internalized this assumption so much that, ironically, he sometimes appears bemused when not all others share it but are sometimes locked into their own cultural assumptions. Marq is very aware that he lives in a Universe of 6000 inhabited planets, each with cultural variations of its own.

The outer limit of acceptable behavior seems to be marked when Marq encounters the proclivities of a male sadist, Clym, early in his narrative. Clym is a professional psychopathic killer, as well as being sexually excited by torture:

“… I am going to take you by force, chain you in a special chamber I have already equipped for the purpose, and do some very painful things to your body that will possibly—the chances are four out of five—result in your death, and certainly in your permanent disfigurement, mental and physical.” (We live in a medically sophisticated age. You have to work very hard to permanently disfigure any body.)

(96)

Marq responds coolly enough by our standards: Delany employs a mixture of conventional humor and his own far-future codes to show us how his protagonist feels. Marq says: “Just tell me, is this part of your job, or just your way of being friendly?” (97) At the same time, he suddenly refers to Clym as “she” and adds “from then on ‘she’ was the only way I could think of her”—Marq’s sexual distaste is emphasized more than any familiar moral reaction! However, he takes the opportunity to warn a more innocent-seeming acquaintance to beware of Clym before moving “sixty million kilometers away” and adding “And I wished it were sixty million light years and in another sun system” (98). The tone here is comic self-deprecation at being unable to cope with such an experience as meeting Clym, rather than of disgust or moral outrage. Marq refers to Clym as one of the “odd creations of our epoch.” but does not judge him any more harshly than that, and does not denounce him to anyone.

The initial implication, and not a trivial one, seems to be that here is a variety of nastiness beyond the pale of cultural relativism or sexual permissiveness, but that even Clym merits some respect and consideration in that he gave his potential victim fair warning. In this book’s terms, Clym seems to be just about at the far limits of tolerance. We may contrast the woman who wished to treat Rat Korga sadistically—the two scenes, both occurring fairly early in the book, are obviously to be read against each other. The woman seems harmless compared with Clym, even though her desires are selfish and spoilt. She is unable to do Korga any real physical harm, and she begins to do him a great deal of good. Even within the ambit of sadism, it is possible to make distinctions as to what is tolerable and what is not tolerable behavior: there is no attempt to apply conventional blanket judgements. Here, then, is perhaps the further implication of such scenes; as the feminist anthropologist Gayle Rubin has emphasized in another context, we tend to construct less privileged forms of sexual activities in our own culture’s moral hierarchy as uniformly repulsive—without grace, consideration, or individual complexity. Delany is prepared to create and juxtapose scenes which include a range of intelligent interaction and a degree of complexity that subvert the popular cultural assumptions.

Degradation is frequently associated with both sex and sin in our own culture, and the equation is shown as not forgotten in Stars in My Pocket, though it is much attenuated in the ultra-sophisticated culture in which Marq Dyeth moves. When the woman who buys Korga does so, she underlines the equation by asking whether he is willing to obey her every whim and caprice, “no matter how debased or lascivious?” (19). He responds simply “Yeah … ?” The desires which she wishes to articulate are both lascivious and debased by the standards of our culture—debased in part because they are lascivious. But the concept of what should count as “lascivious,” a value-word if there ever was one, is just one more which is very much up for grabs.

Accordingly, in reassessing what debased behavior might be, Delany is looking mainly at various kinds of less mainstream sexual activities. In some cases, these are somewhat comic, even for Marq, such as when one of his encounters is with a fetishist interested in high-tech paraphernalia: Marq’s friend ends up described as “a-crackle with sparks from the low-amperage high-voltage electrodes that he had me play across his handsome, lithe body in its various manacles and restraints” (76). Other behaviors shown, however, would normally strike most of us as ugly, off-putting, even disgusting. Marq is attracted to people whom we would conventionally think of as ugly, and to bits of their bodies which we would consider blemishes: calluses, severely bitten fingernails, acne scars. All this is apart from the fact that Marq, a male human, has sex both with other male humans and with the lizardish evelmi. Throughout, Delany builds up ideas of what it would be like to be sexually attracted by things which are usually thought of as ugly or disgusting in a sexual context. In doing so he manages to create a romance of ugliness, deformity, and mutilation.

Science fiction has tackled the question of cultural relativity as it applies to sexual behavior before. The most celebrated example, prior to Delany’s work on the theme, would be Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land; Delany. the “left-wing” constructivist, and Heinlein, the “right-wing” libertarian, agree on the parochialism of our cultural taboos on sexuality, and on much else. But the most obvious difference between Heinlein and Delany, leaving aside their underlying politics (as interpreted by a society which defines political difference in terms of certain concepts rather than others), is that Heinlein’s characters are all the stuff that wish-fulfillment is made of. His supermen and superwoman display a transcendent morality, which includes the area of their sex lives—in fact especially the area of their sex lives—but they are basically folks who can be recognized as the fantasies of well-heeled types brought up on the symbols offered in Playboy, Cosmopolitan and their ilk. While Heinlein usually has at least one character of advanced years in each novel, the familiar Jubal Harshaw-Robert Heinlein figure, his characters would never be shown as in any way ugly or even plain: the men are handsome, clean, heterosexual, usually dashing; the women are beautiful in standard Western terms, ultra-smart, perhaps with a trace of fashionable male-fantasy bisexuality. It is easy to scorn Heinlein, and possibly more relevant to praise him for the success he has had in the area he has mapped out. But Delany has gone far beyond Heinlein’s justification of a narrow form of sexual radicalism in terms of the other values of his culture, and has suggested that the most intense assumptions within that culture of what is nice and what is nasty might be without foundation. (Perhaps the most obvious example of libertarian thought generally falling short of true radicalism is in its complacent or rationalized acceptance of socially-constructed property concepts; Heinlein, with his millionaire heroes, is not an exception to the rule.)

The point has already been labored: degradation and splendor are not necessarily separated in Stars in My Pocket. Many things which would normally be considered ugly or sordid are actually splendid to those involved, and the two kinds of experience often seem to go together. A notable example is the dragon hunt on which Marq embarks with Korga: this is not actually a quest to slay a dragon (a larger biological relative of the evelmi) but to capture its thoughts and momentarily be a dragon. The feelings in this state are wonderfully rich, exhilarating, and a monument to the goal of understanding rather than destroying—but also explicitly sexual. In addition, Korga and Marq make love during the dragon hunt, apparently exploring each other in intimate physical ways which our culture conventionally and automatically considers degrading. Without bothering even to provide any explanation, Marq tells us: “He came twice, I, once, and we joked about it. Later, both our hands wet with his urine, we lifted our bows …” (260). The title of the book is a reference to the idea of personal splendor, and is picked up in such a context within the book, and it also links with the description of a particular star, Aurigae, the largest star in the Universe, which appears like a vast sunset. Though the woman who tries to own Korga identifies lasciviousness and debasement, the book as a whole more identifies splendor and degradation, or perhaps splendor and misery.

It should not be thought that Delany attempts in this book to redeem notions of sexuality by equating sex with love. At times, the question is raised as to whether Marq and Korga love each other; the question is not ultimately answered, because, as Marq tells the spider, Japril, who originally brought them together, they were able to know each other for only a day. Delany does not attempt to sentimentalize lust as equating with love, but neither does he deny the splendor in lust itself. Rather, Stars in My Pocket seems to be ordered consistent with a viewpoint most often articulated in our society by the male gay community, but now being taken up by at least some radical feminists and others, that the ideals of fidelity and permanency are not necessary to give value to sexual relationships, and nor is it necessary that the physicality of sex should be subordinated to deep emotional experiences for sex to be in itself a splendid experience. Any idea that the sexual experience stands in need of redemption by particular emotions and ongoing relationships, emotions and relationships which might accompany the experience but are not demanded by it, is parasitic upon a socially constructed fear of sex in itself as somehow debased or degrading. If this insight is followed through, it becomes, for example, false and sentimental to defend gays by claiming that their relationships can be as faithful, profound and “spiritual” as those of traditional couples—for, in the process of developing such a defence, one accepts an unnecessary and repressive construction of the nature of sexual experience.

Towards the end of the book, Marq defends his particular sexual makeup in a powerhouse speech worthy of Shakespeare’s Shylock reminding us that Jews bleed. This speech is a kind of manifesto, though elsewhere Marq cannot be precisely identified with the implied author, suffering as he does from his own failings of understanding—we often see him bemused by what is going on around him, but only in contexts where we are led to understand that bemusement is a civilized, even if not a totally comprehending, reaction. Civilization is another possible opposite of degradation, and no matter how degraded Marq’s tastes and actions would appear in our own society. Marq always strikes us as preeminently civilized, a true diplomat. Despite this, Delany sometimes attempts to make aspects of Marq’s life take on poignancy—and here he fails where elsewhere he succeeds. It may be that the apparent failure is based on an inability to win us over from our own cultural assumption that a relationship needs to be based upon more than sexual attraction and even wonder before it can affect us as poignant.

In conclusion, Stars in My Pocket is a courageous attempt to dramatize explosive themes in the teeth of traditional social attitudes and the recent anti-sex attitudes that have been having such a successful run, encouraged by social elements as disparate as cultural feminism and the New Right. By creating whole new cultural/linguistic codes and forcing us to live with them, Delany tackles his theme more radically than any other sf writer before him. Much of what is given dramatic expression in Stars in My Pocket was already latent in the earlier books. It was there in Dhalgren, which explored the taboo areas of sexuality—kinky, flaunted, polymorphous, and sudden—in such a way as to show interaction, complexity, and humanity: it is in the Nevèrÿon books where, for example. Gorgik the Liberator’s interpretation of his slave collar makes it both an emblem of servitude and a sexual statement or focus. But Delany is writing closer to the bone than ever in his new diptych, and using far-future sf tropes with a radicalism and ruthlessness that justifies the far-future sub-genre itself. If his work is uneven and not entirely satisfying, it is nonetheless pointing the way for the rest of sf, including the works of less audacious but more conventionally perfect writers. Once what Delany is doing, or attempting to do, is understood, it is difficult to be satisfied with the ambitions of any other sf writer, much less the overwhelming bulk of mainstream fiction.

Still a young man in his early forties, Delany has many years of pioneering sf and fantasy ahead of him. We can only await with enthusiasm what he is going to do, first of all in the second half of his present diptych, and then in greater things to come.

Note

Author's note: This review was based upon a talk presented to the Nova Mob, a science-fiction interest group in Melbourne, Australia, in 1985. It was first published in the following year. Some stylistic changes have been made for republication.