First impressions review: Stars in my Pocket like Grains of Sand, by Samuel R. Delany
How has it taken me this long to discover Samuel Delany? I’ve long been a fan of Ursula Le Guin’s science fiction and its focus on culture and interactions between biology or environment and society. Based on this book, and what I’ve read about his works in general, Delany (a slightly younger contemporary of Le Guin) does the same thing but more, particularly leaning into sexuality and alternative social structures. ‘Stars in my Pocket like Grains of Sand’ is weird, even by my standards, but it was fascinating, and I kept thinking about it weeks after reading it.
This particular book is rather hard to pin down. There is some planet-hopping going on, but it isn’t a space opera in anything like the usual sense. A planet is mysteriously set on fire, destroying the local civilization, but the mystery is never solved, nor is an apparent political conflict resolved. The relationship between two gay men is central to the story, but it isn’t exactly a love story, nor is it erotica, and the ultimate fates of both are left up in the air. Part of this ambiguity probably comes from the fact that it was originally intended as the first half of a “diptych” (as Delany called it), the second part of which was never finished. If we take ‘Stars’ as the whole, I would say that it is a character study where the cultures we encounter as well as the people are the “characters”.
If there is one thing I feel comfortable saying regarding how this book is meant to be interpreted, it is that it is written to evoke the unsettling feeling of culture shock. As with encountering an unfamiliar real culture, if you can push through the disorientation, it is exciting to figure out what certain reactions or uses of language or whatever actually mean. I’ll explain just two so that you can see what I mean. First, when we meet the main POV character, an industrial diplomat, Marq Dyeth has a “huh? what?” reaction to a character being called “he”. At first you think this is because an alien was misgendering a human woman, since that is how Marq refers to this person. In fact, ALL people in the segment of galactic culture Marq grew up with are called women, in the same way that in English it used to be common to use “man” or “mankind” to refer to all humans. In Marq’s mind there are female women, male women, and neuter women; all are called “she” UNLESS you are thinking of them in a sexual way, in which case the male women become “he”. Neat, right? (I’m going to call Marq “he” as a shorthand, though, because his maleness is important). I also quickly started noticing that any words associated with labor got a numbered subscript of 1,2, or 3 in Marq’s language (eg. job2, housework3, or boss1). At first, I was entirely baffled. Then I hypothesized that it had to do with the native inhabitants of his world having three tongues, which they can speak with alternately. But no – subscript 1 is for anything relating to one’s primary profession (eg. Marq’s diplomatic assignments), 2 is for temporary work assignments (which people on Velm rotate through), and 3 to more casual, personal tasks (homework, etc.). Again, this is pretty cool, and matches with Velm’s form of government: “Bureaucratic anarchy1”!
1. “That’s the plurality governing structure among the six thousand – the thirty percent of them that have world governments. Syndicated communism comes next; then benevolent feudalism – which any communist who’s spent time in one will tell us is never all that benevolent; then oligarchic collectivism; then industrial fascism…Bureaucratic anarchy means a socialist world government in which small sections are always reverting to some form of feudal capitalism for anywhere from a week to two years standard – the longest we’ll allow it to last.”
I must admit, reading this in 2021, I couldn’t look at the world of Velm, with its habit - derived from the native reptilian inhabitants - of interacting with objects and people by licking them, and its universal bathhouse culture of casual sexual interactions, without repeatedly thinking: “Do you WANT a pandemic? Because THIS is how you get pandemics!” That probably wasn’t the thought in Delaney’s mind when this was published in 1984 - though probably it soon was…and I have to wonder if that was a factor in why the second part was never finished2. I created the head canon that this sci-fi world just has really good anti-virals - we do see them re-grow someone's whole leg, which indicates advanced medical technology - which allowed me to just go with it.
I enjoyed the detail that the Dyeth “stream” is not only bi-species, but propagated entirely by adoption for several generations – yet they are unquestionably a family. And one of my favorite episodes from Marq and Korga’s time together on Velm is when they go dragon hunting; Korga assumes this means killing a dragon, but the reality is far more interesting and surprising! And, while I would personally enjoy the mostly3 delicious-sounding Velmish cuisine more if I didn’t have to eat it off of forks shoved in my face by strangers or lick it off a family member’s tongue - seriously, this world would be hell for introverts and germophobes! - I got very offended on their behalf when a group of offworlders started talking smack about the mixed human-elvemish culture. At a party they insisted be held in their honor, no less!:
“…Are they human? Yes, but they’ve been reduced to beasts…reduced to animals who copulate with other animals, call animals their sisters and mothers…eat and procreate, eat and – but one can’t even say that. Not only the males with the females, but the males do it with the males, the females do it with females, within the race, across the races – and what are we to make of neuters – as if they had not even reached the elementary stage of culture, however ignorant, where a family takes its appropriate course…” There were at least ten, now, circling them, spits extended…We circled, waiting for them to taste, refuse, disdain, even insult. But all they did was ignore.
You can tell this is a family of diplomats: anyone else would have kicked those bigoted jerks out of their house half an hour ago!
2. A mysterious ailment first named GRIDS (gay-related immune-deficiency syndrome) had just surfaced in 1981, but the HIV virus wouldn’t be identified until 1986. Still, given the uncomfortable images Velm can conjure in a reader who only peripherally experienced the AIDS crisis – my mom’s cousin died, but I was just a child – and who hasn’t lost anyone close in THIS pandemic (fingers crossed, knock on wood)…I can only imagine what trying to write this culture again would be like for Delany.
3. Not sure about the “long pig” and “short pig” (human and elvemi flesh, respectively), but it doesn't come from a person - it is cloned as a boneless mass of meat! Again, I just hope they de-virus the cell cultures before growing them…
The story doesn’t start with Marq or Velm, though; It starts with Rat Korga. Korga comes from a somewhat isolated world that does things quite differently. The title “Rat” comes from a lobotomy-like procedure – Radical Anxiety Termination - which he technically agreed to, though the informed consent procedure is very sketchy:
“Of course,” they told him in all honesty, “you will be a slave.” His big-pored forehead wrinkled, his heavy lips opened…the ideogram of incomprehension… “But you will be happy…I mean, look at you, boy. You’re ugly as mud and tall enough to scare children in the street…You’ve been in trouble of one sort or another as long as there are records on you…Sexually?” Lozenge tinkled against lozenge: the man’s headdress shook. “In this part of the world your preferences in that area can’t have done you any good4”… “You can change me?” The voice in his nineteen-year-old throat was harsh as some fifty-year-old derelict’s. “You can make me like you? Go on! Make me so I can understand things and numbers and reading and stuff!”… “As I said, we’re not out to change the fact of who you are. We only want to change the small bit of you grossly unhappy with that fact…You only have to say ‘yes’”
He spends the next fifteen years as a slave, in conditions that are almost ridiculously terrible, but none of the “rats” complain – the microsurgery has essentially eliminated their ability to worry about anything or feel strong emotions like anger. Then a woman buys/steals him, with the aim of using Korga to fulfill her own fantasies…which doesn’t quite work out as she planned, obviously!
But because the fantasy involves a man who is well-read, she fits him out with a glove that seems to both augment his mind and lets him tap into knowledge stores and upload texts to his brain. Importantly, it starts to counteract the internal narrative that was half of what made him seem slow-witted in the first place:
A pedal voice-“stupid, stupid, stupid,” – that had begun sometime in unremembered childhood whenever he’d been asked questions he couldn’t answer…and that had finally come whenever he’d been asked any questions at all…But the reason he heard it at all, now, was because another voice…declared “stupid,” on the beat, and then went on, off the beat and overwhelming it: “… ‘Stupidity’ is a process or strategy by which a human, in response to the social denigration of the information he or she puts out, commits him or herself to taking in no more information than she or he can put out.”
He begins to read voraciously before this new tool is cruelly and abruptly stripped from him. But it changes him all the same.
4. This is partly about Korga being gay, yes, but also on his world there is a prohibition on sex between people of a certain height difference, and he happens to like short guys.
I was really sympathizing with Korga at this point, which made the shift to seeing him through Marq’s eyes both jarring and a bit frustrating. You see, I think this is the first time I've seen “male gaze” turned on a male object, at least in such an obvious way. That's actually the word used: Korga is described as being Marq's “perfect erotic object”. Well, technically they are each other's, but we never actually get inside Korga's head. Marq, on the other hand, describes how he can only see Korga in pieces, not as a whole: a hand with bitten nails, the curve of a shoulder, other...things. In fact, he declares that it would be impossible to see one's perfect erotic object as a whole. Which is male gaze film language in a nutshell!
Now, this was not as disturbing as it might have been because Korga has been given some high-tech rings that function much like the glove to compensate for his brain damage and help access information. I kept being reminded of Rocky from ‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show’ – a character created to be Dr. Frankenfurter’s sexual ideal, remember- because Korga is big and blonde (not to mention being re-born in a vat)5 and doesn’t talk much. But that isn’t because there is nothing going on in his head: He seems to think slow but deep and makes some rather poignant observations. For instance, when Marq complains about their guests’ rude statements making him feel like he was on a world where everything they do is illegal:
Rat said: “No, they didn’t…That’s the way they made me feel.” “I don’t understand what you mean.” “You didn’t grow up on such a world. You didn’t spend your childhood and make your transition to maturity on a world where bestiality and homosexuality were legally proscribed. So you do not possess the fund of those feeling to draw on. I do…They come from such a world…Otherwise it would never have occurred to them to say such things.”
However, we are still seeing him through Marq’s eyes and, as with the female “muse” or love interest character in many stories, Korga doesn’t get much agency and we only get fleeting glimpses of his wants and needs. When Korga starts to be mobbed by people who want to know what it is like to be the only survivor of a destroyed world, he is removed from Velm by the woman who sent him there…and Marq’s first concern is not for Korga’s psychological well-being – however much he claims he may have been falling in love with Korga - but about how he’ll never be satisfied with anyone else again after having known him!
It’s entirely possible that this is the point; reportedly, Delany has written other POV characters that one is supposed to dislike. On the other hand, given that Marq feels a little like an author proxy, that seems less likely. From what I’ve been able to find out about the never-finished second half, Marq and Korga were supposed to get some time to themselves, which might have fixed all this; Korga is getting pretty good at standing up for himself by the end of this one, so Marq could have learned to see him as a full, complex, flawed person. But…that book doesn’t exist! Regardless of the authorial intent, however, this book can be considered an excellent example of “male gaze” that could better illustrate the concept to those who are so used to the way women are objectified that it just seems normal.
5. Marq, from what I can tell from snippets of description, probably looks like a young Delaney. I wasn’t sure whether to tag him as a “black MC”, because current racial categories seem archaic in the world of the book. But, since I don’t get to do that much for older sci-fi…
There are several other really interesting concepts that come up that I wish had more time to be explored in this book or its unfinished sequel. For instance, there is a conflict brewing in the galaxy between two sort-of-religious factions: The Family, which seems rather conservative and xenophobic, looking back to the way things were done on Old Earth and not really approving close human-alien connections such as exist on Velm, and the Sygn, which is never fully explained but appears to be more pluralistic and interested in accurate local history. Both are concerned with the possibility of “cultural fugue”, an accelerating technological spiral that can lead to the death of a world, though a clear example of what that would look like is never given. There’s a mysterious species called the Xlv who are the only other race besides humans to have invented interstellar travel, and yet one of the few with whom humans have not been able to establish any communication…and they may or may not have been involved in the destruction of Korga’s world. But, alas, all that will likely remain a mystery!
Overall recommendation: If you like explorations of creative alien cultures (and aren’t too squeamish about sex – there technically aren’t any explicit on-page sex scenes, but it is omnipresent all the same – or saliva), I would urge you to give this one a try. It is unique, challenging, and rather haunting.
