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Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia

Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia

List Price: $19.95
Your Price: $13.57
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 5 stars
Summary: A different view.
Review: A book is a machine to generate interpretations, as Eco wrote. Thus, not one interpretation can be the correct one, and all we can do is to add to what other people have experienced at some point while reading a book.

Due to my own life experience, I perceive, perhaps, several more levels to this novel. The first time I read it, about 20 years ago, I was 10 and didn't understand many of the subtleties. However, the fact that the main character was so out of touch with the reality around him and that he had failed miserably to adapt to his changing surroundings, and, in the end, finds a "way out" for all the wrong reasons, made me think.

And think hard.

This book forced me to re-examine my own motivations several years later, because, besides the humour (sometimes even mockery) of our current socio-political systems, the book has a point. Bron Helmstron, the main character, becomes a woman not because he feels he's one, but because he wants to please the image of women she had as a man. He becomes a woman created from an intellectual male psyche.

Of course the issue of gender is at the core of the novel. Adaptation, sexism (Bron is perhaps the last old-mindset sexist in this heterotopic future) and monosexism -that is, the loving yourself as a projection but in a different gender role.

I asked myself many questions after re-reading this book at 22 (I'm a male-to-female transsexual): what are my motivations? I'm doing this as a rebellion against the rigidity of gender in our society? Am I doing this because I'm so selfish I've fallen in love with my own image in a different gender-role? Am I doing this out of selfishness, or because I've failed adapting myself to the world? Or because I'm so utterly sexist that, by adhering to the stereotype of what femineity should be, I am trying to put order to my own world?

This is one of my "top ten" books of all times. It made me grow as a person, and discover in myself that, unlike Bron, I was going through this route because I wanted to be honest with myself, not out of selfishness or emotional laziness.

Highly recommended if you don't mind some pretentiousness and have an open mind -and some background on feminist theory wouldn't hurt.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Triton is a thought-provoking, yet also irritating, book.
Review: Dating from the mid-70s, Triton still provides much food for thought. As you can also see, the novel can still provoke some homophobic hostility. So a couple of decades on, we're not out of the woods yet - this ain't no heterotopia. Triton's strength is that it manages to turn our preconceptions upside down, especially concerning gender. Its weaknesses, I suppose, lie in the plot and in the character of Bron; yes, he is complex and not two-dimensional, but he is also intensely irritating and thoroughly difficult to identify with. I also found all that communal living claustrophobic in the extreme - if this is the future, it is surely a dystopian one. A mixed reaction, then, but I would recommend reading this novel, if only to confront one's prejudices.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: another masterpiece by SRD
Review: In reading all the customer reviews of Trouble On Triton, both negative and positive, what I found most lacking was any mention of humor. This book is a wonderful, and yes, hilarious, satire of hetero-centricism (if there is such a word). It is a must read for anyone interested in any of the following topics: art and criticism, sex and gender, science fiction. Delany is very good at facing us with our own closed minds. He stands out as one of the most talented writers in English today.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: today the world trade center fell. Delaney showed how
Review: In the light of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center
today, I was immediatley reminded of "Triton", and the way the
war was fought in that book. The attack on the gravity
generators on Triton was similar in many ways to what happened
today in New York City. I have not identified the here and now
with a Sci Fi novel so strongly since Chernople blew up and I was
reminded of Lester Del Rey's "Nerves"! ...

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: today the world trade center fell. Delaney showed how
Review: In the light of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center
today, I was immediatley reminded of "Triton", and the way the
war was fought in that book. The attack on the gravity
generators on Triton was similar in many ways to what happened
today in New York City. I have not identified the here and now
with a Sci Fi novel so strongly since Chernople blew up and I was
reminded of Lester Del Rey's "Nerves"! ...

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Brilliant intellectual satire in SF guise
Review: It seems with Delany that you either understand him, and he becomes your favorite author, or you completely don't get it and are repulsed by all of his works. This was the first book I read by Delany -- since them I've read Dhalgren (what an awesome book) and the Neveryona series, and a bunch of his earlier works. The setting, Triton, was both believable and extremely surreal. The main character, though somewhat shallow... is absolutely fascinating and fascinatingly dense. This book is full of political, social, sexual and scientific commentary (as with all his later works)... I don't know what it was about it, but I personally couldn't put it down and stayed up all night reading it, and can't wait to re-read it. This is a beautiful and fascinating work, but not for everyone.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: My first intro to Delany - loved it, and will re-read.
Review: It seems with Delany that you either understand him, and he becomes your favorite author, or you completely don't get it and are repulsed by all of his works. This was the first book I read by Delany -- since them I've read Dhalgren (what an awesome book) and the Neveryona series, and a bunch of his earlier works. The setting, Triton, was both believable and extremely surreal. The main character, though somewhat shallow... is absolutely fascinating and fascinatingly dense. This book is full of political, social, sexual and scientific commentary (as with all his later works)... I don't know what it was about it, but I personally couldn't put it down and stayed up all night reading it, and can't wait to re-read it. This is a beautiful and fascinating work, but not for everyone.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Delany Loses It
Review: It was with this book that Delany systematically began to dash the hopes of fans who had breathlessly awaited every new book up through "Nova". The writing skill is still there, no question. But Delany's pornographical and intellectual self-indulgence begin their corrosive process on his work. How sad. All that imagination and storytelling skill undermined by meaningless (and often tasteless) philosophical and sexual noodlings. In a parallel universe, Delany kept writing appealing and entertaining books in the vein of his early science fiction. Too bad we don't live in that universe.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Can a book be worse than this?
Review: Maybe I just missed the boat on the whole Delany thing. The guy won back-to-back Nebulas in the late 60s, but everything I've read by him is just bizarre. I read Dhalgren, and that was pretty pornographic, but the book had a real message to it, which almost outweighed the graphic sex. Trouble on Triton though, ugh. They don't come worse than this. First of all, the book is completely lacking in plot. Second of all it has nothing enjoyable about it. To summarize: strange man tries to find love, but ends up hanging out with 74 year old homosexuals who don't wear clothes playing calculus games. I found the stuff that wasn't disgusting to be stupid, and what wasn't stupid was disgusting. Avoid this book at all costs.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: An ambiguous review.
Review: Samuel Delaney's Trouble on Triton is a somewhat disturbing book from the mid-70's. The Solar System has been colonized, and the various and many moons are in a war with the two colonized planets, Earth and Mars. In Delaney's heterotopia, anyone can find their pleasure by outwardly declaring their sexual preference (or lack thereof), by having said preference adjusted for them, and by switching genders at will. Hunger, homelessness, and lack of anything are pretty much eliminated.

In this strange paradise, we meet Bron, a cringingly un-self-aware man who is completely unable to be happy. The book chronicles his wanderings and his pursuit of the object of his alleged love, a performance artist named The Spike.

Interesting, well-written, yet also somehow forgettable, I don't think I'd recommend this one unless you're really bored.


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