Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand
Dust-jacket from the first edition
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| Author | Samuel R. Delany |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Science fiction novel |
| Publisher | Bantam Books |
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Publication date
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1984 |
| Media type | Print (hardback & paperback) |
| Pages | 368 pp |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 11685942 |
| 813/.54 19 | |
| LC Class | PS3554.E437 S7 1984 |
| Followed by | The Splendor and Misery of Bodies, of Cities (unfinished) |
Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (1984) is a science fiction novel by Samuel R. Delany. It was part of a planned duology ("diptych", in Delany's description) whose second half, The Splendor and Misery of Bodies, of Cities, remains unfinished.
The novel takes place in a distant future in which diverse human societies have developed on some 6000 planets. Many of these worlds are shared with intelligent nonhumans, although only one alien species (the mysterious Xlv) also possesses faster-than-light travel. In an attempt to find a stable defense against the phenomenon known as Cultural Fugue (a process where "socioeconomic pressures [reach] a point of technological recomplication and perturbation where the population completely destroys all life across the planetary surface"), many human worlds have aligned themselves with one of two broad factions: the Sygn, which promotes and celebrates social diversity, and the Family, which promotes adherence to an idealized norm of human relations modeled on the nuclear family.
The story opens on the planet Rhyonon. Korga, a tall, misfit youth, undergoes the Radical Anxiety Termination, or RAT, procedure, a form of psychosurgery which makes him a passive slave, after which he is known as Rat Korga. After he has lived under a number of masters, Rat Korga's world is destroyed by a conflagration. This is later explained to be the result of Cultural Fugue, though the explanation is open to dispute, especially since Xlv spacecraft were present in the Rhyonon system when the disaster occurred. Because he was deep inside a mine shaft at the time of the disaster, Rat Korga survives (though badly injured), the only known being ever to survive Cultural Fugue. Rat Korga serves as a reminder of the possibility of Cultural Fugue and the destruction of a planet, which is part of what makes him so appealing to the inhabitants of Velm.
The action then moves to Velm, a Sygn-aligned world that humanity shares with its native three-sexed intelligent species, the evelm, and where sexual relationships take many forms — monogamous, promiscuous, anonymous, and interspecies. Resident Marq Dyeth, an "industrial diplomat" who helps manage the transfer of technology between different societies, is informed that Rat Korga is his perfect sexual match by an associate in the powerful and mysterious Web, an organization that manages information flows between worlds. Equipping him with a prosthesis (the rings of Vondramach Okk, a tyrant who once ruled ten planets and employed of one of Marq's ancestors) that restores the initiative he lost due to the RAT procedure, the Web sends Rat Korga to Velm under the pretext that he is a student, and he and Marq begin a romantic and sexual affair. They go on an unusual hunting expedition and return to a dinner party which becomes chaotic due to the disruptive presence of visitors from a Family world and intense planetwide interest in Korga. Soon after, Rat Korga is forced to leave Velm and be permanently separated from Marq (their pairing having been an alien cultural experiment) because their interaction was creating a threat of Cultural Fugue.
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