| Author: | Samuel R. Delany |
| Copyright: | 1984 |
| Date Reviewed: | 11/15/85 |
| Rating: | 4.0 |
Review/Synopsis: A terrible novel. An almost complete waste of my time. Delany writes with style. When I begin a book written with style, my reaction is almost always the same. I am annoyed because I have to learn a new way to read and because of what I know is coming later. After 20 pages or so I become used to the new style and may even come to enjoy it. Eventually, after another 100 or so, I begin to realize that style is all there is to the story. The author has once again forsaken any semblance of a plot in order to write in a flowery prose.
In "Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand" there actually was a plot for a while but that was forgotten. There is a very long prologue (everything about this book is too long) to the main novel which tells about a poor, unintelligent man who has volunteered for the RAT procedure (Radical Anxiety Termination) which is basically a frontal lobotomy. The Rat is then made a slave, as all are, and the narrator tells of the squalor he must live through as he does mindless manual labor. The Rat is transferred from one outpost to another. This part of the story was very depressing to read but that's OK. Strong negative emotions are at least as good as strong positive ones and both are infinitely better than no emotions at all. After being a slave for 17 years, Rat Korga's world Rhyonon is destroyed.
The story now shifts to Marq Dyeth, who is an Industrial Diplomat. For the next 80 pages we follow Marq through two assignments and back to his home world. We learn that there are 6,000 inhabited planets in the galaxy and from time to time one may reach Cultural Fugue and die. The death of a world in such a case is much slower than what happened to Rhyonon and is caused, some say, by an over abundance of information supplied by the General Information service or WEB. There are two political fractions or religions vying for control of the known worlds. The Sygn, of which Marq and his family are members, suggests that people live life to the fullest that they can. On the other hand, the Family is concerned about God and life after death. For them, life in the galaxy is just a preparation for the after life so it had better be morally correct.
Back home on the planet Velm, we meet Marq's family, called a stream. The stream consists of two different types of women, humans and evelms. In the South they live together but in the North they fight. Marq's seven time great grandmother created the stream after serving for Vondramach Okk for 5 years as an assassin. In return for her loyalty, Okk gave Mother Dyeth the palace now called Dyethhome. We also meet the Thants, an eccentric family who are friends of the Dyeth's and have unlimited travel rights. This whole part of the story, really another introduction, was incredibly boring but at least it set the stage for a good plot that could have been written. Marq is told by an insane assassin about how Rhyonon was destroyed by the Xlv, an entirely alien life form. For the next three chapters after this introduction, Marq seeks out the rest of the knowledge about Rhyonon and learns how it was destroyed. He also learns about Rhyonon's sole survivor, Rat Korga, who is a complete sexual match out to 9 decimal places. Marq and Korga are both homosexual. At this point the novel could have become interesting. There could have been an investigation of why Rhyonon was destroyed. Was it a form of Cultural Fugue and what part did the Xlv play in it? Why was Korga alone spared? What prompted his world to lobotomize so many of its citizens.
Instead the story becomes a love/lust story between two males. Korga is brought to Velm, after his lobotomy is partially reversed by rings that Vondramach Okk once wore. The two men fall madly in lust (the rest of the novel, all 200 sleep-filled pages, occupy only one day which doesn't give the pair time enough to fall in love). Marq teaches Korga the lifestyle and social niceties of Velm and takes him on a dragon hunt. They meet people in their travels and come home to a formal party in honor of the Thants. The story is so sweet by now that I had to be careful not to read too soon after eating. The most excitement is generated when the Thants insult the Dyeth's in their own home with blatant abusive social protocol. Snore! Eventually the spiders from the WEB who brought Korga to Marq, take him away because the experiment failed (which one?). As they leave, a fleet of 360,000 Xlv ships in orbit around Velm (this future society has a very poor early warning defense system) are also seen to leave. Somehow, Velm has just missed the same destruction that Rhyonon suffered but we don't know why.
There are a lot of open questions in this novel. The Writer's Notes say that this book is the first in an SF diptych so perhaps the questions are answered in the second. However, the questions are not interesting enough for me to suffer through another reading of this type. The book does have a few good points. The science fiction is good. There are many interesting advanced devices that I had not read about before. Still, images alone, like special effects, can not make a story without a plot. This is probably the last Delany I will ever read.