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    Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia
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    Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia
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    Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia
    Ebook466 pages10 hours

    Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia

    By Samuel R. Delany

    3.5/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    In a story as exciting as any science fiction adventure written, Samuel R. Delany's 1976 SF novel, originally published as Triton, takes us on a tour of a utopian society at war with... our own Earth! High wit in this future comedy of manners allows Delany to question gender roles and sexual expectations at a level that, 20 years after it was written, still make it a coruscating portrait of "the happily reasonable man," Bron Helstrom — an immigrant to the embattled world of Triton, whose troubles become more and more complex, till there is nothing left for him to do but become a woman. Against a background of high adventure, this minuet of a novel dances from the farthest limits of the solar system to Earth's own Outer Mongolia. Alternately funny and moving, it is a wide-ranging tale in which character after character turns out not to be what he — or she — seems.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWesleyan University Press
    Release dateJan 1, 2012
    ISBN9780819571953
    Unavailable
    Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia
    Author

    Samuel R. Delany

    Samuel R. Delany published his first novel, The Jewels of Aptor, at the age of twenty. Throughout his storied career, he has received four Nebula Awards and two Hugo Awards, and in 2008 his novel Dark Reflections won the Stonewall Book Award. He was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 2002, named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America in 2014, and in 2016 was inducted into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame. Delany’s works also extend into memoir, criticism, and essays on sexuality and society. After many years as a professor of English and creative writing and director of the graduate creative writing program at Temple University, he retired from teaching in 2015. He lives in Philadelphia with his partner, Dennis Rickett.  

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    Reviews for Trouble on Triton

    3.5/5

    185 ratings11 reviews

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    • 2/5
      This was hard to get into. The writing style took some getting used to, and the setting and characters and what was going on in the beginning was all so different that it took a lot of energy to parse.But once I settled into things, it got better, it got easier.The society he's set up is interesting. Though there doesn't seem to be a lot of room for people who wouldn't want to live in any sort of commune, even if there's all sorts of different communal living groups.And, I don't know if I have much more to say about it. It's interesting. Oh! And I had stopped reading it, and had to go back to it because I'd started reading Among Others by Jo Walton and it was totally spoiling me for this book! That was annoying. But it prompted me to finish this book anyway.
    • 1/5
      Absolutely one of the worst novels I have ever tried to read. Steve & I both gave up. A shame considering Dhalgren was so amazing. I'm going to read more Delany later, but not this particular title unless someone can tell me what I am missing.
    • 2/5
      A story that would appear to be a timeless recount of one man's search for universal meaning and true love is everything that Triton, by Samuel R. Delany, is not.

      Within this surprisingly antiquated and anticlimactic patchwork of a tale, Delany opens for us a lens into the universe of one Bron Helstrom – a sociopathic "metalogician," who very soon realizes that you just can't be the center of everyone's universe. The novel prattles on for some three-hundred pages with content that I'm sure was quite progressive for the year of publication (but also not surprising, considering that year), but today seems not only benign, but completely disconnected from several social issues that are today's real ones.

      If you're looking for an exciting tale of love overcoming the oppressions of war strewn with thought-provoking philosophic ramblings, then I recommend you look somewhere else. Anywhere else.
    • 3/5
      A challenging read. I enjoyed the discussions I had with people about this book despite not enjoying the reading of it. Bron strikes me as a kind of woke anti-hero. I can't completely hate him, but it's hard to find something to like. Through that lens, his interactions with people are cringy facinating thought experiments that I can't quite make fit together.
    • 3/5
      Triton by Samuel R. Delany was originally published in 1976. The book was reissued under the title Trouble on Triton with an introduction by Kathy Acker in 1996 by the Wesleyan University Press. It was nominated for a Nebula when it was first printed and in 1996 it was shortlisted for a Tiptree Award. While not as well-known as some of Delany's other works, such as Dhalgren and Babel-17, Triton has garnered its own attention, especially in its portrayal of inter-solar system war and in how it addresses the future of sex, sexuality, and gender.Bron Helstrom is a middle-aged, ex-prostitute from Mars who has immigrated to Triton, one of Neptune's moons. Fed up with dealing with women, he currently lives in an all male cooperative. But then he meets and becomes obsessed with the Spike, an enigmatic, grant-funded performance artist native to Triton. With his planetary mindset and out-of-date value system, Bron has trouble relating to others on the moon and his relationship with the Spike is bound to be bumpy. Told with an impending war between the solar system's inner planets and its outer satellites in the background, there's very little plot. Mostly it's just Bron whining and complaining and generally being miserable. Bron is really not that likable a character to begin (or end) with--pretty much a self-absorbed bastard through and through.I really, really wanted to like this book, but I could hardly stand to read it. Oh, there were parts of it I absolutely loved--it was filled with all sorts of fantastic queeriness--but even those aspects couldn't save the book for me. Triton is a very difficult read and requires undivided attention to the point of bringing on headaches from concentrating so hard on the text. And despite this need to carefully pay attention to what is written, large sections serve virtually no purpose to the book overall (at least that I, with no advanced degree in literature, can tell). I actually found myself barely skimming for pages at a time on a fairly regular basis. (This really says quite a bit right there because I generally make a point to read everything once I've started a book.) Granted, this technique may have been used just to show how much of an ass Bron really is--but I already got that, really, I did.So ultimately, I can't say that I enjoyed Triton nearly as much as I wanted to. Yes, there were some wonderful bits and incredible ideas, but I really struggled with the book as a whole. The writing style and technique was often quite clever, but even more often it was impenetrably dense and maybe even a little artificial. Unfortunately for me, Triton was probably not the place to start reading Dealany. While I can appreciate his immense skill and vision, I won't be ready to try another of his works for quite a while yet.Experiments in Reading
    • 3/5
      I didn't like Delany’s setting and find his characters repulsive, but that’s probably the intention as the more one identifies with Bron the more repulsive Bron is. Interesting more than enjoyable. Since I’ve read books influenced by this and other of Delany’s works, without recognizing the influences,This doesn't move me to re-emurse in serious mid 70s SF, even for a better understanding of [[Jo Walton]].
    • 3/5
      Stylistically, this felt close to the Heinlein that I've read, with lots of free love, gender bending, libertarianism, communal relationships, and non-Terran humans at odds with Earth. Plus lots and lots of infodumping--not a chapter went by without several pages of the classic sf "as you know Bob..." explanations. The concepts were interesting enough; the method of conveying them, deeply boring. I starting skimming them about halfway through this book.

      The plot itself is thin: Bron is very self-absorbed but also dissatisfied with his life, and a chance encounter with a performance artist known as The Spike leads him to examine what he wants out of life. Watching him consistently just refuse to recognize what others tell him reminded me of the truth in Tiptree, particularly her "The Women Men Don't See". Delaney is assuredly aware of what an ass Bron is, but because Bron himself never realizes, and despite his periodic half-hearted attempts to change, never manages to stop being so completely selfish, I couldn't feel happy about this book. Delaney has a lot of great concepts and ideas caught up in here, and when he's not infodumping about politics or space or logic, he's got an engaging writing style. But after reading through this, I mostly just felt dissatisfied.
    • 3/5
      I can't say I either really understood or enjoyed this book. It seems to fall into that genre of social science fiction envisioning the repurcussions of various social changes. Set on Triton in the near future there is a way between the inner system and the outer system. Bron - a statistician - struggles with his social, sexual, and personal identity during this conflict. Other than exploring these issues,not really sure what the point was. Three stars for respect of the work and its craft - rather than enjoyment of it.
    • 3/5
      Re-read after a long time. Unfortunately, I had the same reaction: I was much more interested in the politics and the war than in Bron. I get that this forms a kind of bookend to "The Stars in my Pockets..." and is important, but I just never felt engaged with the novel.
    • 5/5
      On a decade of reading DelanyIn the summer of 2003 my then unemployed-self searched for a form of entertainment to get through the summer. In a used bookstore somewhere in Boston Massachusetts, an employee made a recommendation, based on whatever I had been searching for, of Samuel R Delany’s Trouble on Triton, summing the work up as a book about a sex change. In the theatre of my mind I remember the employee as seeming old enough for me to automatically consider him wise, yet young enough for me to imagine a certain simpatico between us. I have absolutely no idea what about the clerk’s barbaric synopsis of the story sparked an interest in me, although the store’s lack of stock of seemed to give the recommendation a degree of validity. I journeyed to the Boston University bookstore where, standing neatly in row next to all his other works published by Wesleyan University Press, I found and purchased a copy of Trouble on Triton.The foreword alone confused me. Skipping that, I found the rest of the book to be a very difficult wall of seemingly meaningless words. I interlaced my reading, throughout the remaining weeks of summer, with maybe a dozen false starts with that book before finally giving up on it. Perhaps through these failed attempts I gleamed some value from the book, or perhaps in my naiveté I merely confused my perception of the books impenetrability to be a sign of its genius; either way, the book never strayed too far from my side in the hoped that when the my own genius arrived I would have it immediately at hand to finally decipher it. A year later the book had travelled with my some eight thousand kilometers, where every morning it accompanied me on my morning train rides from Vicenza to Venice and my evening ride back again. On one such trip I peered out the train’s window to stare thoughtlessly at some townscape of the Veneto, feeling a since of accomplishment that I had finally finished reading Delany’s book. Unfortunately, the flag of my accomplishment at best flew at half mast; though I could give anyone who asked a rough synopsis of the book, the sense that very much of it evaded me lingered well after I had turned the last page. Again recalling the very thin description of the book recommended to me by the book seller one year prior, I realized the book I had struggled so long with to be one whose significance very likely evaded many of the readers who attempted it. Despite a year of failed attempts, I decided not to give up on the book, to see if, with the passing of time, maybe something of the book would become clearer to me. In the mean time, I found and read a copies of the Jewels of Aptor, The Ballad of Beta-2, Babel 17, Empire Star, and the fall of the Tower trilogy. I interspersed these with every kind of literature imaginable; Bourgeois fiction, pop fiction and esoteric fiction; I read authors famous and authors unknown; I read works lauded and works criticized. The lessons I learned from reading Trouble on Triton stayed with me all through this period of heavy reading, and knowing that I could always put something too difficult down with the determined promise to one day return to it. Sometime in the spring of 2006 I read Delany’s Dhalgren for the first time, a work that I still to this day hold as a model of excellence in literature. No book had ever given me such an incredible aesthetic satisfaction. Upon completing it, I simply turned the book over and began it again from the first page. Not too long there afterI began Delany’s Shorter Views, a book that more than any other fostered my interest in Critical Theory, Semiotics, and Literary Criticism. From there, I again began to read, voraciously, in thousands of other directions. Throughout this journey I every now and again would open Trouble on Triton to some random page and read, maybe a chapter or maybe a page, just to see if my reaction to it much changed. I very often found that it had. As my sophistication in many other subjects grew, so did the sophistication with which I read and comprehended Delany’s work. In some respects, I credit my Master’s degree in Semiotics to Delany’s works. I can easily go one further than this; I consider myself a better person thanks to Delany’s work.As if any other Apologetic were even necessary, I this year recalled that my adventures with Delany’s work began one decade ago. In light of this fact, I decided to finally reread Trouble on Triton, word for word. When I finally found another Wesleyan University Press copy of it (the one I had originally purchased had been stolen by a University professor my last year of undergrad) I decided the time had arrived to see just how far I had progressed as a reader in a decade. The experience was in no way disappointing, as this reading differed greatly from the previous one. The books achieved the highest of aesthetic honors, where while reading one simply ignores all else around them, completely engrossed in what is occurring on the page. This time around, the force of will came not from trying to read it, but from trying to put it down after each chapter to go do something else. A few times I failed to do so.As if ease with which I reread were not proof enough, I stopped at every epigraph and wondered how much I could have gained from them ten years ago, knowing neither who Popper of Quine were at the time. And I feel that in many respects that experience indicates the magic Delany’s work holds over me. It has, I am grateful to say, led me to a better world; not just a world where I people read and are familiar with great thinkers of philosophy, but a richly described and wonderfully detailed world where different (if not better) forms of society are envisioned, and we journey through them with a carefully created cast of characters who ferry us from one shore of understanding to the other. In short, Delany led me, gradually, painlessly, to a richer, more complex and more interesting world, and for this I remain incredibly grateful.
    • 4/5
      There is a type of science fiction novel one expects from the late 60's and 70's. It is the kind that feels as if it was written in a drug-induced haze. And reading it often makes the reader feel they are in the middle of that haze – sometimes understanding what is happening, sometimes understanding more than is happening, and sometimes not having the vaguest clue. Some of these novels I like; some I want to throw away in disgust. Let's change the subject slightly. I almost always enjoy Delany's work. I still feel one of the all-time greatest collections of short stories is his Driftglass. Yet, in spite of this, I find myself still shying away from some of Delany's work. And I think it is because I read once, somewhere, that his work is incomprehensible. So, with the fear of the worst of the 60's and 70's ringing in my head, completely ignoring the experiences I continued to have with his work, I shied away from Triton (as I have shied away from some others.)I should have come around sooner.Don't get me wrong, there are portions of this novel that swerve towards the "the drugs made me do it" side. (I'm not saying drugs were involved; I'm just saying it feels that way.) And every once in a while there is speech rather than writing. (And don't even get me started about the appendices – I don't understand why they are there or what they were meant to add.) But any of those excesses are to be forgiven as the story and images unfold. The protagonist is on Triton, a world that is fairly free and open. His past comes from a less open upbringing (he was a prostitute on Mars), and his experiences color his interpretations of Triton. (It happens to all of us.) And, when all is said and done, there is a devastating interplanetary war.This plot is fine. But what really makes this novel are the images Delany has left in our minds. (Something that he does so well in all his writing.) There is the pleasure spot on earth where he takes the woman he is trying to impress. There are the guerilla theaters that spring up in a lawless area. There is the way destruction occurs in the war. There is something as simple as the game played by individuals at the residence where the protagonist lives.They are ideas and images that help flesh out Delany's world, and make it unforgettable. This is a book that you should not shy away from. The story works well. But the ideas bombard you throughout.