Rating: 
Summary: Great novel!
Review: This is a hell of a good book. Reading it a second time through, I was most impressed by Delaney's subtle irony--Triton is an itnensely comic novel. But it's also a profound interrogation of gender. Delaney's important, and Triton is a great read.
Rating:
Summary: Great novel!
Review: This is a hell of a good book. Reading it a second time through, I was most impressed by Delaney's subtle irony--Triton is an itnensely comic novel. But it's also a profound interrogation of gender. Delaney's important, and Triton is a great read.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant intellectual satire in SF guise
Review: Trouble on Triton (as it is now retitled--the publisher just called the first edition "Triton,") is one of the finest SF novels ever written. It is also one of the best books on the 1960s ever written, though it is supposedly set much later. Delany uses the semi-utopian setting to convey much of the spirit of the East Village in New York during the sixties, when he played with a band, lived in a commune, had much experimental sex and generally found himself. See Heavenly Breakfast or The Motion of Light in Water to understand the autobiographical background to Trouble on Triton. He creates an extremely unsympathetic protagonist who is ill at ease in a libertarian utopia because he is by natural instinct an uptight conservative who's at a loss in a world where self-definitions vary wildly.This is also from the period when Delany was first becoming profoundly influenced by modern poststructuralist philosophy, and he tries to weave certain ideas (not entirely successfully) into the novel. This is a very, very intellectual book--not at all an easy read. But if you can enjoy a satire on white male piggishness written by a gay black genius, you'll enjoy this book. It's never gotten the audience it deserves because its ideal readers tend to be people who scorn to pick up an SF novel,particularly one with such a deliberately (and mockinglly) cheesy title as Trouble on Triton.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant intellectual satire in SF guise
Review: Trouble on Triton (as it is now retitled--the publisher just called the first edition "Triton,") is one of the finest SF novels ever written. It is also one of the best books on the 1960s ever written, though it is supposedly set much later. Delany uses the semi-utopian setting to convey much of the spirit of the East Village in New York during the sixties, when he played with a band, lived in a commune, had much experimental sex and generally found himself. See Heavenly Breakfast or The Motion of Light in Water to understand the autobiographical background to Trouble on Triton. He creates an extremely unsympathetic protagonist who is ill at ease in a libertarian utopia because he is by natural instinct an uptight conservative who's at a loss in a world where self-definitions vary wildly. This is also from the period when Delany was first becoming profoundly influenced by modern poststructuralist philosophy, and he tries to weave certain ideas (not entirely successfully) into the novel. This is a very, very intellectual book--not at all an easy read. But if you can enjoy a satire on white male piggishness written by a gay black genius, you'll enjoy this book. It's never gotten the audience it deserves because its ideal readers tend to be people who scorn to pick up an SF novel,particularly one with such a deliberately (and mockinglly) cheesy title as Trouble on Triton.
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