Books - Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand

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Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (1984) is a science fiction novel by Samuel R. Delany. It was part of a planned diptych whose second half, The Splendor and Misery of Bodies, of Cities, remains unfinished; in September 1996 the Review of Contemporary Fiction printed an excerpt.

The novel takes place in a far future in which human societies have developed divergently on many planets, and are beginning to coalesce into two broad factions, one generally permissive (the Sygn) and one generally conservative (the Family) by today's standards, in an attempt to find a stable defense against the fatal phenomenon of "cultural fugue". On one of the Sygn worlds, where sexual relationships take many forms—monogamous, promiscuous, anonymous, and interspecies—Marq Dyeth, an "industrial diplomat" who liaises with alien cultures, has a romantic affair with Rat Korga, a freed slave from a destroyed world.

As in Trouble on Triton
, the novel explores conflicting ideas about personal freedom and desire (Korga has voluntarily opted for a form of psychosurgery making him incapable of anxiety or independent thought), and definitions of gender (the novel invents an alternate use of grammatical gender, in which the pronouns he and she reveal the speaker's sexual interest in the subject rather than the subject's biological or social gender). Like several of Delany's other works, it portrays a relationship between an intellectual and a disadvantaged person. It also includes extended digressions by Dyeth as the narrator, speaking to the reader about history, art, sex, politics and civilization.

Editions

Delany, Samuel R. Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand. Bantam Dell Pub Group, 1985. ISBN 0553050532
Delany, Samuel R. Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand. Wesleyan University Press, 2005. ISBN 0819567140 (paperback)
"From The Splendor and Misery of Bodies, of Cities". .

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