Samuel R. Delany’s Triton is an experiment in radical utopian narrative. It depicts a miraculously hi-tech society, in this case set on the Neptunian moon Triton over a century hence. On Triton there are few conventional or physical restraints on the achievement of individual human desires. The novel appears to be a rigorous examination of how such a society might operate and how individual human folly, conflict, and even tragedy might nonetheless be located within it. Delany is apparently continuing such a project in an even more extreme utopian diptych whose first volume has been published as Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand. He is likely to have imitators: an impressive recent attempt at the same mode of writing by a more traditional science fiction writer is John Varley’s Steel Beach, one of the most ambitious science fiction novels of the 1990s so far.¹

Triton’s radical future is presented with a display of sociological relentlessness. Furthermore, the novel’s vagaries and inconsistencies are readily attributable to the highly self-conscious and often unreliable thought processes of the viewpoint character, Bron Helstrom; no information is given to the reader except through Bron’s perceptions and thoughts. A dense prose style, heavy with parenthetical clauses in round brackets or dashes, tracks the workings of a distinct consciousness that the reader comes to discover as both highly introspective and morally infuriating. Further, it becomes clear that Bron’s understanding of his universe is largely constructed from historical clichés, half-forgotten educational drivel, and unreliable folk wisdom. It is possible, therefore, and tempting to read Triton very solemnly, as if Delany has succeeded in writing a kind of latter-day Madame Bovary, a narrative whose every detail can be studied as the imprint of a subtly wrongheaded viewpoint character who fails to understand his world and himself.

While such a reading has its merits and produces its share of minor joys, I wish to suggest a less claustrophobic, if less reverent, approach to Triton and to Delany’s fiction generally. Triton, in particular, can be read as a more improvised but perhaps more engaging piece of work. The text of Triton causes discomforts that make textual interpretation itself problematical and call into doubt the rigor and coherence of the narrative, if not the understructure of its political philosophy. At one point, for example, Bron recalls two deaths caused by monstrous g fluctuations, triggered, in turn, by sabotage of Triton’s bolstered gravity; he “then remembered Alfred; he decided he didn’t want to go into his own room at all. If it looked like Alfred’s (up to three hundred times normal gravity? That was almost as high as the surface of Neptune!), he just didn’t want to see.”² Stop: three hundred-plus times normal gravity on the planet Neptune? In our universe the surface gravity of Neptune is nothing like three hundred gs. Perhaps Bron means three hundred times the natural gravity of Triton itself without artificial bolstering; this is somewhat ambiguous, because the concept is first introduced by another character, Lawrence, as “three hundred times Triton normal for as much as seven whole seconds. Seven seconds at three hundred gravities! That’s really incredible!” (240).

In fact, either three hundred “gravities,” if this means three hundred gs, or three hundred times “normal” bolstered gravity (said to be 0.962 that of Earth) would be incredible. Even three hundred times natural Triton gravity would doubtless be impressive and destructive. Any of these is vastly greater, however, than gravity on the surface of Neptune, which is little more than that on the surface of the Earth.³ Has Bron got it wrong again? Or are we in some alternative universe where gravity behaves very differently from in our own? Or do we step out of textual interpretation entirely at this point and start complaining?

Discomfort occurs at other levels. One thing that generally works about the novel is its consistency of language in contouring psychology and épistéme. However, even this sometimes becomes problematic. For example, Triton is set on a world that is part of a culture wherein every form of sexual activity appears to be rationalized into the social structures. It is strange, then, that the dialogue and Bron’s stream of consciousness include twentieth-century expressions that one might have thought were embedded in a very different social construction of sexuality; nor do these expressions appear to have different connotations from those in our own world. The word affair is still used in its current sense of an impermanent sexual episode and still with a seemingly pejorative connotation, though this latter point may be arguable. It is used not only by Bron—a Martian who may not know any better, having come from an unreconstructed patriarchal culture—but also by the Spike, a cool satellite-culture lady. Bron’s young friend Prynne uses the word fuckers as one of abuse. Sam uses ephemeral twentieth-century slang expressions such as get laid and make out, which, surely, are parasitic on certain more or less brutal and culture-specific constructions of sexuality. Even the expression getting in her pants is used, again by the Spike—on a world where it is not de rigueur even to wear pants.

The linguistic problem becomes more complicated when it is hinted that the whole book is a translation from some language other than English, but, if so, what are the concepts that are being translated in this way, and, if they differ from more familiar concepts reflected in the twentieth-century slang usages, what is the text doing with other words such as sexualizationship? This appears throughout and suggests, albeit awkwardly, an entirely different attitude to sex, more in keeping with a culture that seriously classifies people into a multiplicity of sexes. But this last concept is far from honored in the book as a whole, in which the traditional binary opposition of male-female is assumed as primary at each step of the story and the dialogue.

Again at the center of the story development is a lengthy set piece wherein Bron escorts the Spike to a fancy restaurant in Mongolia, Swan’s Craw. During his elaborate attempts to impress his friend and the restaurant staff, he reveals himself, with pathetic transparency, as unspontaneous, egocentric, coarse, and culture-bound. This scene is imaginative, witty, generous writing, a creative jewel. But for its events, critical to the story, to take place, Bron must meet up with the Spike on Earth. This necessitates some narrative improvisation: Bron is given two weeks’ nonrefusable leave from his job just in time for Sam, a high-level official who lives in the same co-op, to invite him to join his entourage for a diplomatic/political visit to Earth. All this, in turn, gets moving the very day after the second occasion on which Bron and the Spike make love, at which point he has just left her about to pack up for her interplanetary theatrical itinerary which—surprise!—will include performances on Earth.⁴

Now, we might imagine a society in which public officials, like 1990s tennis stars, gather private entourages for their working journeys—even with nonindoctrinated acquaintances being thrown in at the last minute. However, I find this incredible without a lot more imaginative underpinning than is provided. The entire contrived chain of causation is not helped by some clumsy dialogue in which the Spike explains at great but unconvincing length (citing various facts revealed especially for the occasion) why—though this is hardly the point—it is not a coincidence that the two of them ended up in the same place on Earth.

The Swan’s Craw scene itself is rendered problematic by some strange discussion of money, of tangible currency. While the novel generally assumes that paper money is now obsolete, Sam explains that Swan’s Craw is “a restaurant—where they still take this stuff. Some people consider it mildly elegant” (188). In fact, all this seems to be introduced only so as to allow considerable fuss to be made by Bron, who later plays sadistic ego games with the “stuff”: it is not embedded in other aspects of what we learn about twenty-second-century finance and, indeed, seems to run against everything we do know. While any objection that paper money is likely to be obsolete in the hi-tech cultures described is met by the presentation of it as anomalous, this only shifts, does not remove, the problem with the text: the dialogue about money seems like special pleading.

On close inspection Triton is not a seamless, highly coherent piece of world-building and narrative construction but an improvisation, precariously and sometimes untidily built from scavenged parts left out to rust in some conceptual Junk City, analogous to the “high-tech moment” Delany has described elsewhere: “the coffee table with the missing leg propped up by the stack of video game cartridges, or the drawer full of miscellaneous Walkman earphones.”⁵ The analogy is fair not only with respect to Triton; it is true of all of Delany’s efforts at prose fiction up to and including recent work such as Stars in My Pocket, where we still find the inclusion of pieces of rusty conceptual junk. See, for example, that book’s extensive and incoherent discussion of fuzzy-edged concepts, which does no more than dissolve into complexity—or, rather, fail to dissolve—the melodramatic concept that Rat Korga is the sole survivor of the destruction of his world, the planet Rhyonon.⁶

Much of Delany’s fiction is barely held together with such fast-spoken nonsense. In Triton itself other examples include a baroque discussion that to some extent dissolves any objections to the datum that men and women are of similar height and bulk in the societies of 2112. At times it is difficult to decide how seriously these passage should, after all, be taken. Early in the novel, Bron explains his job as a metalogician—a dubious concept in academic philosophy.⁷ Much of what he has to say makes perfectly good sense as a discussion of the limitations of standard symbolic logic, of familiar propositional and predicate calculi; however, metalogic, as conceptualized in Triton, makes very little sense. Bron asks his new staff member, Miriamne, “If a hen-and-a-half lays an egg-and-a-half in a day-and-a-half … how many eggs does one hen lay in one day?” (57). Of course, an arithmetical attempt at the problem quickly yields the solution two-thirds; there is, however, a nice psychological question as to why so many people respond intuitively with the answer one, as does Miriamne. Bron sees the question not as one of human psychology but as explicable by metalogic; he ultimately approaches it in terms of topological relations between “P” and “not-P” in the n-space volumes of metalogic:

From here he skirted into the various topological representations of metalogical interpretations of ‘P’ and ‘not-P’. … “We have a very useful P/not-P relation where we say that, for whatever the space, not-P is completely contained by P, is tangent to it at an infinite number of points, and cleaves it into an infinite number of pieces—that’s such a common one we have a special name for it: we say that not-P shatters P. That’s the metalogical relationship the hen-and-a-half wrongly suggests you use to get a quick answer of ‘one.’”

(62)

At this point a reader is perhaps prepared to retreat, on the basis that if this is, as I would assert, gobbledygook, it is very difficult to prove it so!

In his mighty critical essay “To Read The Dispossessed” Delany explicitly, though perhaps disingenuously, refrains from pursuing the argument that the various “thinnesses” that he identifies in Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel add up to “a political template at odds with the surface form of Le Guin’s apparent political sympathies.” He states “that is beyond the scope of this treatment.”⁸ To attempt such a deconstruction of Delany’s own work would be a daunting task and would require far greater elaboration than is possible here, although there is a real question as to whether the jerry-built structures of Delany’s texts are sufficient to support their radical social constructivist philosophy.

My point in this essay, however, is a less ambitious one: it is possible to read Delany’s texts too solemnly, and this seems to happen even, or especially, in the most careful critical accounts.⁹ If we are to read Delany honestly and with open eyes, we will acknowledge how his future worlds and the stories that take place in them have been improvised from bits and pieces to create an overall effect; yet they more or less work, creating on a scale of breadth and depth achieved by few other science fiction writers at least the impression of rigorously alternative épistémes. Nor does the improvised construction of his fiction prevent Delany from producing some grand, generous, and often subtle passages, jewels in a conceptual Junk City. An entire study could be produced showing the nuances of Bron’s psychological presentation and development in Triton. However, it ultimately does the author neither justice nor even service to misread the way his art works: whatever impression a Delany story creates—it ducks and dazzles; it fizzes and weaves—Delany is not a grand SF synthesist. Triton shows him, rather, as a street smart conceptual bricoleur: the SF writer as archetype and prototype of a Junk City hero.

Notes

1. John Varley, Steel Beach (New York: Putnam, 1992). This book clearly owes much to Triton; like Triton, it even includes as a central incident a hi-tech zipless sex change undergone by its protagonist. However, in tone, style, and specific allusions it is much closer to Robert A. Heinlein’s later novels than to Delany’s.

2. Samuel R. Delany, Triton (New York: Bantam, 1976), 241; hereafter cited parenthetically.

3. Standard reference works will reveal that, even now, insufficient hard information is possessed on the moon Triton to estimate its surface gravity reliably but that it is likely to be a significant fraction of a g. As noted in Andre Bahic, “Neptune,” Cambridge Atlas of Astronomy, 2nd ed. (1968), 212, “Triton is sufficiently massive to have an atmosphere and a melted core.” The surface gravity of Neptune is 1.4 times that of the Earth according to “Neptune,” Encyclopedia Americana, 1990 ed. For what it is worth, material facts from which to calculate such a figure and to deduce a significant fraction of Earth’s gravity for the surface of Triton were readily accessible when Triton was being written in the mid-1970s.

4. The review of the novel by one of Delany’s alter egos, K. Leslie Steiner, refers to all this as “a bit of novelistic sleight-of-hand that should leave anyone fascinated with pure SF storytelling technique gasping and applauding with delight.” Perhaps so, but any such delight is at the effrontery of the blatant improvisation, rather than at seamless storytelling. See “Trouble on Triton,” in Delany’s collection The Straits of Messina (Seattle: Serconia Press, 1989), 96.

5. Samuel R. Delany, “On Triton and Other Matters: An Interview with Samuel R. Delany,” Science-Fiction Studies 17 (1990): 304. While Delany elaborates on Junk City as a modernist worldview promulgated in SF, the images of industrial improvisation that he cites are appropriate as analogies for his own makeshift practices of world creation.

6. Russell Blackford, “Debased and Lascivious?”, rev, of Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, by Samuel R. Delany, Australian Science Fiction Review Second Series 1.4 (1986): 13–14.

7. As acknowledged extratextually by Delany himself in “On Triton and Other Matters,” 297.

8. “To Read The Dispossessed,” in Delany’s collection The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes of [sic] the Language of Science Fiction (New York: Berkley, 1977), 272.

9. Although I do not wish to seem ungrateful to a critic from whom my own understanding of Delany has benefited. Tom Moylan appears to write with no sense of the improvisation and even prankish element in the construction of Triton. See his Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination (New York: Methuen, 1986), 156–95. This is close to being a definitive “straight” account of the novel.