Samuel Delaney
Jun. 19th, 2011 11:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sub_dividedStars in My Pockets Like Grains of Sand: I'm about 100 pages in and I take back everything bad I ever said about Delany! This book is GREAT.
Context: I had a warped view of Delany after reading The Fall of the Towers, a novel he apparently completed when he was 17 or 18. Here is the livejournal post where I complain about how bad it was. The thing is that you can still see some of the same elements at play in this novel - the obsession with complexity and systems that don't function properly, the ambition, and the poor physical description - but they are so much more interesting and better thought out in this novel that it's like reading a totally different author.
For instance, take the (poor) physical description. There's a device in this book puts information directly into your brain, like being permanently connected to the Hitchhiker's Guide, only you never have to interact with a physical device because it responds to mental requests for into, and you actually know everything you ask the device after you've asked it, without having to look up the words you've never heard of, because everything is cross-referenced and, again, linked directly with your brain.
When other storytellers put a "direct transfer of knowledge into the brain" device in their stories, they'll show that it is "direct" by making the transfer wordless: images, sounds, sensations and did I mention images? are what the brain receives. BUT NOT DELANY. His device talks to you, in words.
In other words, I don't think Delany is a very visual guy! He is a word guy, and the stuff with words in this book is fantastic. Stars in My Pocket is set in a universe with six thousand (in some cases barely) inhabitable planets, but travel between planets is rare, reserved for the privileged 1%. So culture on these planets can be quite distinct, and language can be used in unusual ways.... and also Delany, to trick you (the reader). For instance, there are planets where one default gender (call it "she") is used for everyone most of the time, but another gender (call it "he") is used for people you are sexually attracted to. And so, therefore, you read a sex scene and only afterward realize that actually, it was a gay sex scene1 And then you go back to the previous chapter and realize that the (female) human and the (female) alien were totally attracted to each other! And then you are like, I see what you did there, Delany.
Another example: in the first story in the book, you learn that "bitches" is what men on this one planet call the women on the planet when the women aren't there to overhear them. And maybe you think, like I did, "Oh, that's just like it is here on Earth." But then you read on, and eventually you realize that the culture on this planet is sick, and the casual and ubiquitous use of "bitches" is in fact a symptom of the disease. And that, in turn, causes you to question the way that "bitches" is used in our society.
In fact the writing is full of little things like that - redefining the way language is used in order to get you to question your underlying assumptions about how the universe works, particularly how privilege works. I'm trying to stay vague here because I think the effect is greater when you read the book yourself, and have to put the pieces into place yourself - the insight you finally get when you make the connection between how emotion and cognition are linked in Delany's SF scenario, compared to how the same forces play out in our world, is something that sticks with you more than if you'd read the same thing by a very accomplished author who laid all those principles out for you and just kind of took you along on a guided tour, because YOU had to make the connection, meaning you had to THINK.
And I think that goes for the physical descriptions too. I'm even kind of fond of the description of the car moving through the rings under a bright blue sky, with little bits of things glittering in the canyon walls, far away below - because Delany forgot to mention that the car is a flying car, and somehow having to go back and mentally insert that detail makes the scene more vivid.
I have some specific commentary on the first hundred pages, which I will put below the cut. Took these notes as I was reading, so there's some repetition and LOTS of speculation. No spoilers, please!
1.Okay, this description of "stupidity" is brilliant. Also brilliant: the description of how a poor, uneducated, illiterate person stays poor and uneducated, because he's got a mental block against asking questions after being told he was stupid one too many times. I bet someone in the black power movement would recognize the description of impotent rage in this section. Also: "the refrain didn't go away, but the other things he was learning now were so much more interesting" = awwwwwwwww.
2. The world is skewed just enough so that the arbitrariness of cultural signifiers of attractiveness is obvious: on this world, being short is attractive. (And middle class people have sex by wearing masks and whipping each other.) It's different enough to be thought-provoking, but familiar enough to be understandable. Also ties in with IRL stereotypes of big, dumb, (typically black) brutish people. So now the narrator is stupid and ugly, in both cases for reasons outside his control.
3. The narrator is capable of learning, but no one ever asks him about anything. "They object to slavery because it is inefficient" <-- there are so many economists who think this way. That other Delany book I read was also obsessed with systems that don't work right.
4. Speaking of, this is a VERY SICK SYSTEM this world is locked into. The assumption that people who lack free will are happier than regular people can't be contradicted, because "rats" don't have the free will to say whether or not they are happy. And people sign up for this, even after seeing how badly the free-will-less slaves are treated. But of course this is all a part of a cycle where more women than men want have their anxieties "terminated," which naturally causes society to associate women more than men with physical and sexual slavery, which naturally drives more women to undergo the procedure, which naturally causes society to become more sexist. Kind of like slavery and racism, or degrading porn and sexism, in our society.
5. What I then wonder is, if there is a world in the universe that is THAT sick, and getting sicker all the time, how does there then also exist a world that makes something as perfect as the GI glove? It would be so easy to compromise this tech. The obvious downside to offloading your brain to an external storage device is that you are then reliant on that device to think or remember. And while the device responds to what you already "know", it also overwhelms those thoughts by offering a much more potent fount of (seemingly inexhaustible) knowledge. So why would it be in anyone's interest to create an unbiased source of information??
6. That said, this glove is SO COOL. It's like machine learning, but more effective because it is initiated by an unconscious thought and requires no effort to digest. Whereas stuff you learn about online, you need to first realize that you want to know it, and then look it up, and then process it, and then remember it, which means it is work to learn stuff that way, which means that people will restrict what they know to what they can easily process.
7. But in this case, there's no worry about understanding since the machine teaches you all the concepts directly, and no memory limits since you are actually using the thing's memory, not your own. So on the one hand, it's like outsourcing your memory to a computer you are then dependent on. But on the other hand, it's like having someone explain something to you whenever you ask about it, which is like growing up with a really intelligent adult who actually answers all of your questions - not just that, but in a thoughtful and comprehensive way. Which is probably the best way for us to learn.
8. I realized reading this that you need to be pretty smart to ask someone else the right follow-up questions. For instance, when the main character says he had 250 sexual encounters before undergoing Radical Anxiety Termination, I just thought, as his purchaser did, holy cow! It was just a large number to me. But as I was walking home from the train station, I worked out that if he was converted at 19, and became sexually active at 13, that's around one sex act every 8 days, for six years. That much sex, and he still believes he is ugly and worthless?
9. But of course, the kind of sex would matter too. If he did it for money, if he was abused by a caregiver, if he was going to a "free sex" center, that wouldn't necessarily contribute anything to esteem. So the important question to ask is, under what circumstances did these sexual encounters take place? But it didn't occur to me to ask that until I'd had some time to process the 250.
10. Lots of little things in this book seem to be off. If the south pole is dark for six months in the winter, it will not be hot, no matter how close to the sun the planet is! Possibly there are two suns, the station is only dark indoors, and winter is just a (misapplied) word? Or is this just bad science? There were other things - I think they stick out because the rest of the book is so brilliant, otherwise you'd just shrug them off as part of Genre.
(Made these notes on my phone at the beach on Saturday)
1. Jailbroken GI in the first story? Since we now know that the company (?) that provides the service charges premium rates for access (so it is even more of a pity that when the device was discovered in the first story, it was simply destroyed). If total access is prohibitively expensive, it would make sense to have a subscription model with just some libraries available for the general public? Like premium cable channels or sports channels? Also, is this why the GI prodivided info is of such high quality? Because it's part of the business model, and the device is not available to the general public?
2. Women are the default gender of citizenship and men are the default gender of sexual attraction. LOL.
3. Later, we realize that the narrator is a light-skinned black man (though "light skinned black" doesn't apply in this setting: he's got nappy sand-colored hair and is tan) and that his type is blonde (yellow) haired men with grubby fingernails. DOUBLE LOL.
4. Smart move to open the noevl with someone who not only does not have access to unlimited info, but in fact has access to no info at all. So his universe expands all at once, and you realize how great this tech really is. Then you have his viewpoint to compare to that of a third generation industrial diplomat - basically a class of people who make a living off access to the data motherload (but without the protection of having the ego-and-decision-making parts of their brain removed, and who therefore must have great mental discipline to use the tech properly) - someone who takes access to that kind of information for granted.
5. ...and here's the line about takong it for granted! In earth terms, this person is a member of the global elite, while most of the settled worlds are like an America-without-immigrants, where the people who have been their the longest and so don't have connections outside the country, and aren't rich, never leave. That explains how the narrator in this section can be open minded enough to accept the GI feed telling him all these relativistic things (the first narrator accepted these things because he didn't have any emotional responses to protect from the ego-crushing feeling of not knowing anything).
6. If the point here is to make homosexuality seem less weird by contrasting it with some truly weird stuff (which is normalized within the story), it's working.
7. So there's a "worship the founding fathers and the classic canon" faction and a "preserve local cultures" faction? How are they even in competition? Second one seems like it would surely win on merit... Also, why I am not at all surprised to learn that this book was written in 1984. LOL eighties assumption that in the future, on six thousand worlds, there are two superpowers and they are in competition.
8. So it makes sense that the narrator, an ID, comes from Sign territory and that Rhiannon, that diseased culture from the first story, went with the more conservative Family. (I am already anticipating how great it will be to re-read this book again from the beginning after I am finished.)
9. Two different words for "work" (conveyed by subscripts): the first is your calling or profession and the second is what you do short term for money? Or your first job is something you do with your hands and the second is something you do with your mind? Or something else? Using the subscripts does draw attention to how much time when spend talking about "work" without distinguishing between different kinds of work. Again using language to draw attention to an underlying assumption.
10. Delney has faith in his readers' intelligence, I like it!
11. Delaney is DEFINITELY a North American, lol. (It's more prestigious to live on the outer rim of a city than to live in the city center. All the best-paying jobs(2) are on the outer rim, but the inner city is more exciting and enriching, and draws more young folks.)
12. And then you get the privileged 1% who can travel offworld - and not just that but travel constantly! They are the people that SkyMall and Departures magazines are targeted toward. The dinner party where they make fun of the planet-bound plebes for not being as informed as them is a nice touch. I also particularly liked how Delany stressed that they could have this lifestyle because they essentially won a lottery when their rich geosector decided to fund this kind of lifestyle for a small number of people, to promote "enrichment".
I'm at the "dinner party" and so I ask that all further spoilers be limited.
Context: I had a warped view of Delany after reading The Fall of the Towers, a novel he apparently completed when he was 17 or 18. Here is the livejournal post where I complain about how bad it was. The thing is that you can still see some of the same elements at play in this novel - the obsession with complexity and systems that don't function properly, the ambition, and the poor physical description - but they are so much more interesting and better thought out in this novel that it's like reading a totally different author.
For instance, take the (poor) physical description. There's a device in this book puts information directly into your brain, like being permanently connected to the Hitchhiker's Guide, only you never have to interact with a physical device because it responds to mental requests for into, and you actually know everything you ask the device after you've asked it, without having to look up the words you've never heard of, because everything is cross-referenced and, again, linked directly with your brain.
When other storytellers put a "direct transfer of knowledge into the brain" device in their stories, they'll show that it is "direct" by making the transfer wordless: images, sounds, sensations and did I mention images? are what the brain receives. BUT NOT DELANY. His device talks to you, in words.
In other words, I don't think Delany is a very visual guy! He is a word guy, and the stuff with words in this book is fantastic. Stars in My Pocket is set in a universe with six thousand (in some cases barely) inhabitable planets, but travel between planets is rare, reserved for the privileged 1%. So culture on these planets can be quite distinct, and language can be used in unusual ways.... and also Delany, to trick you (the reader). For instance, there are planets where one default gender (call it "she") is used for everyone most of the time, but another gender (call it "he") is used for people you are sexually attracted to. And so, therefore, you read a sex scene and only afterward realize that actually, it was a gay sex scene1 And then you go back to the previous chapter and realize that the (female) human and the (female) alien were totally attracted to each other! And then you are like, I see what you did there, Delany.
Another example: in the first story in the book, you learn that "bitches" is what men on this one planet call the women on the planet when the women aren't there to overhear them. And maybe you think, like I did, "Oh, that's just like it is here on Earth." But then you read on, and eventually you realize that the culture on this planet is sick, and the casual and ubiquitous use of "bitches" is in fact a symptom of the disease. And that, in turn, causes you to question the way that "bitches" is used in our society.
In fact the writing is full of little things like that - redefining the way language is used in order to get you to question your underlying assumptions about how the universe works, particularly how privilege works. I'm trying to stay vague here because I think the effect is greater when you read the book yourself, and have to put the pieces into place yourself - the insight you finally get when you make the connection between how emotion and cognition are linked in Delany's SF scenario, compared to how the same forces play out in our world, is something that sticks with you more than if you'd read the same thing by a very accomplished author who laid all those principles out for you and just kind of took you along on a guided tour, because YOU had to make the connection, meaning you had to THINK.
And I think that goes for the physical descriptions too. I'm even kind of fond of the description of the car moving through the rings under a bright blue sky, with little bits of things glittering in the canyon walls, far away below - because Delany forgot to mention that the car is a flying car, and somehow having to go back and mentally insert that detail makes the scene more vivid.
I have some specific commentary on the first hundred pages, which I will put below the cut. Took these notes as I was reading, so there's some repetition and LOTS of speculation. No spoilers, please!
1.Okay, this description of "stupidity" is brilliant. Also brilliant: the description of how a poor, uneducated, illiterate person stays poor and uneducated, because he's got a mental block against asking questions after being told he was stupid one too many times. I bet someone in the black power movement would recognize the description of impotent rage in this section. Also: "the refrain didn't go away, but the other things he was learning now were so much more interesting" = awwwwwwwww.
2. The world is skewed just enough so that the arbitrariness of cultural signifiers of attractiveness is obvious: on this world, being short is attractive. (And middle class people have sex by wearing masks and whipping each other.) It's different enough to be thought-provoking, but familiar enough to be understandable. Also ties in with IRL stereotypes of big, dumb, (typically black) brutish people. So now the narrator is stupid and ugly, in both cases for reasons outside his control.
3. The narrator is capable of learning, but no one ever asks him about anything. "They object to slavery because it is inefficient" <-- there are so many economists who think this way. That other Delany book I read was also obsessed with systems that don't work right.
4. Speaking of, this is a VERY SICK SYSTEM this world is locked into. The assumption that people who lack free will are happier than regular people can't be contradicted, because "rats" don't have the free will to say whether or not they are happy. And people sign up for this, even after seeing how badly the free-will-less slaves are treated. But of course this is all a part of a cycle where more women than men want have their anxieties "terminated," which naturally causes society to associate women more than men with physical and sexual slavery, which naturally drives more women to undergo the procedure, which naturally causes society to become more sexist. Kind of like slavery and racism, or degrading porn and sexism, in our society.
5. What I then wonder is, if there is a world in the universe that is THAT sick, and getting sicker all the time, how does there then also exist a world that makes something as perfect as the GI glove? It would be so easy to compromise this tech. The obvious downside to offloading your brain to an external storage device is that you are then reliant on that device to think or remember. And while the device responds to what you already "know", it also overwhelms those thoughts by offering a much more potent fount of (seemingly inexhaustible) knowledge. So why would it be in anyone's interest to create an unbiased source of information??
6. That said, this glove is SO COOL. It's like machine learning, but more effective because it is initiated by an unconscious thought and requires no effort to digest. Whereas stuff you learn about online, you need to first realize that you want to know it, and then look it up, and then process it, and then remember it, which means it is work to learn stuff that way, which means that people will restrict what they know to what they can easily process.
7. But in this case, there's no worry about understanding since the machine teaches you all the concepts directly, and no memory limits since you are actually using the thing's memory, not your own. So on the one hand, it's like outsourcing your memory to a computer you are then dependent on. But on the other hand, it's like having someone explain something to you whenever you ask about it, which is like growing up with a really intelligent adult who actually answers all of your questions - not just that, but in a thoughtful and comprehensive way. Which is probably the best way for us to learn.
8. I realized reading this that you need to be pretty smart to ask someone else the right follow-up questions. For instance, when the main character says he had 250 sexual encounters before undergoing Radical Anxiety Termination, I just thought, as his purchaser did, holy cow! It was just a large number to me. But as I was walking home from the train station, I worked out that if he was converted at 19, and became sexually active at 13, that's around one sex act every 8 days, for six years. That much sex, and he still believes he is ugly and worthless?
9. But of course, the kind of sex would matter too. If he did it for money, if he was abused by a caregiver, if he was going to a "free sex" center, that wouldn't necessarily contribute anything to esteem. So the important question to ask is, under what circumstances did these sexual encounters take place? But it didn't occur to me to ask that until I'd had some time to process the 250.
10. Lots of little things in this book seem to be off. If the south pole is dark for six months in the winter, it will not be hot, no matter how close to the sun the planet is! Possibly there are two suns, the station is only dark indoors, and winter is just a (misapplied) word? Or is this just bad science? There were other things - I think they stick out because the rest of the book is so brilliant, otherwise you'd just shrug them off as part of Genre.
(Made these notes on my phone at the beach on Saturday)
1. Jailbroken GI in the first story? Since we now know that the company (?) that provides the service charges premium rates for access (so it is even more of a pity that when the device was discovered in the first story, it was simply destroyed). If total access is prohibitively expensive, it would make sense to have a subscription model with just some libraries available for the general public? Like premium cable channels or sports channels? Also, is this why the GI prodivided info is of such high quality? Because it's part of the business model, and the device is not available to the general public?
2. Women are the default gender of citizenship and men are the default gender of sexual attraction. LOL.
3. Later, we realize that the narrator is a light-skinned black man (though "light skinned black" doesn't apply in this setting: he's got nappy sand-colored hair and is tan) and that his type is blonde (yellow) haired men with grubby fingernails. DOUBLE LOL.
4. Smart move to open the noevl with someone who not only does not have access to unlimited info, but in fact has access to no info at all. So his universe expands all at once, and you realize how great this tech really is. Then you have his viewpoint to compare to that of a third generation industrial diplomat - basically a class of people who make a living off access to the data motherload (but without the protection of having the ego-and-decision-making parts of their brain removed, and who therefore must have great mental discipline to use the tech properly) - someone who takes access to that kind of information for granted.
5. ...and here's the line about takong it for granted! In earth terms, this person is a member of the global elite, while most of the settled worlds are like an America-without-immigrants, where the people who have been their the longest and so don't have connections outside the country, and aren't rich, never leave. That explains how the narrator in this section can be open minded enough to accept the GI feed telling him all these relativistic things (the first narrator accepted these things because he didn't have any emotional responses to protect from the ego-crushing feeling of not knowing anything).
6. If the point here is to make homosexuality seem less weird by contrasting it with some truly weird stuff (which is normalized within the story), it's working.
7. So there's a "worship the founding fathers and the classic canon" faction and a "preserve local cultures" faction? How are they even in competition? Second one seems like it would surely win on merit... Also, why I am not at all surprised to learn that this book was written in 1984. LOL eighties assumption that in the future, on six thousand worlds, there are two superpowers and they are in competition.
8. So it makes sense that the narrator, an ID, comes from Sign territory and that Rhiannon, that diseased culture from the first story, went with the more conservative Family. (I am already anticipating how great it will be to re-read this book again from the beginning after I am finished.)
9. Two different words for "work" (conveyed by subscripts): the first is your calling or profession and the second is what you do short term for money? Or your first job is something you do with your hands and the second is something you do with your mind? Or something else? Using the subscripts does draw attention to how much time when spend talking about "work" without distinguishing between different kinds of work. Again using language to draw attention to an underlying assumption.
10. Delney has faith in his readers' intelligence, I like it!
11. Delaney is DEFINITELY a North American, lol. (It's more prestigious to live on the outer rim of a city than to live in the city center. All the best-paying jobs(2) are on the outer rim, but the inner city is more exciting and enriching, and draws more young folks.)
12. And then you get the privileged 1% who can travel offworld - and not just that but travel constantly! They are the people that SkyMall and Departures magazines are targeted toward. The dinner party where they make fun of the planet-bound plebes for not being as informed as them is a nice touch. I also particularly liked how Delany stressed that they could have this lifestyle because they essentially won a lottery when their rich geosector decided to fund this kind of lifestyle for a small number of people, to promote "enrichment".
I'm at the "dinner party" and so I ask that all further spoilers be limited.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-06-22 05:25 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-07-09 02:13 am (UTC)Something else I noticed was that even though there are machines, and things like natural-language computers and the internet (the GI system and its crystal storage banks), all the machines are always operated by people, there's never any automation. Maybe that's because Delaney's not-a-utopia-I-swear world is basically communist except in periods when the gov't allows some capitalism so something new can be developed, so there's no cutthroat race-to-the-bottom going on. After all, the book was written in 1984, so it's not like automation and offshoring didn't exist in Delaney's universe.
Korga isn't even a stupid person!! ...I wonder how much of that feminist stuff he was able to remember, after he wasn't plugged in to the System anymore. Possibly a lot, after all it's not like there were a lot of very intense experiences in his brain for those to displace, and the pleasure of reading those books is the closest he comes to an actual emotional experience after undergoing the RAT, so they must've made a pretty big mark (since strong emotions encoded learning more deeply) (I am sticking to my original assessment that Radical Anxiety Termination works by suppressing ALL emotions, not just "anxiety", because the explanation for how "anxiety" is jammed makes like, no sense XD).
(no subject)
Date: 2011-07-09 05:16 am (UTC)Did you get to the dragon hunt yet? I assumed from what transpired there that Korga remembers all the feminist stuff, possibly word for word.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-07-09 07:55 am (UTC)The dragon thing was the biggest trip in the entire book @______@ I'm still kind of WTF on WHY Delany wanted to write that, although I suspect he's trying to make a socio(economic) point that I have no desire to think about D (even with GI, you have to ask the right questions!)
(no subject)
Date: 2011-07-09 08:58 am (UTC)1) He tricked me again, thinking I understood what a "hunt" would be!
2) The scene is LITERALLY about immersion in an alien culture, in the most literal way, XD.
3) Exploring ideas of 3 genders, and how sex drives shape evolution and behavior, in this case by literally making sex be what causes the dragons to fly, as well being central to the evelmi dragon hunt ritual
4) Dragons are cool :D
(no subject)
Date: 2011-07-09 03:00 pm (UTC)I don't get why the dragons would ALLOW that, but maybe they don't feel it would be invasive and creepy as all hell XDDDDD the way that *I* do!!!
The gender thing was definitely interesting *g* but I think I figured out by page 50 that Delany was seriously interested in gender and sexuality. XD
(no subject)
Date: 2011-07-09 02:16 am (UTC)