interesting guy....black and gay. he last sf novel was in 1993. he writes some shitty gay novels afterwords.
Originally Posted by dilbert firestorm
which should make him a woke icon today. of the far left gays that is. his later "gay" novels are (forbidden topic) porn. and to think that man wrote Nova. and Dhalgren and Triton.
The city of Bellona is severely damaged; radio, television, and telephones do not reach it. People enter and leave by crossing a bridge on foot.
Inexplicable events punctuate the novel: One night the perpetual cloud cover parts to reveal two moons in the sky. One day a red sun swollen to hundreds of times its normal size rises to terrify the populace, then retreats across the sky to set on the same horizon. Street signs and landmarks shift constantly, while time appears to contract and dilate. Buildings burn for days, but are never consumed, while others burn and later show no signs of damage. Gangs roam the nighttime streets, their members hidden within holographic projections of gigantic insects or mythological creatures. The few people left in Bellona struggle with survival, boredom, and each other.
The novel's protagonist is “the Kid” (sometimes "Kidd"), a drifter who suffers from partial amnesia: he can't remember either his own name or those of his parents, though he knows his mother was an American Indian. He wears only one sandal, shoe, or boot, as do characters in two other Delany novels and one short story: Mouse in
Nova (1968), Hogg in
Hogg (1995), and
Roger in "We, in Some Strange Power's Employ Move on a Rigorous Line" (1967). Possibly he is intermittently
schizophrenic: the novel’s narrative is intermittently incoherent (particularly at its end), the protagonist has memories of a stay in a mental hospital, and his perception of reality and the passages of time sometimes differ from those of other characters. Over the course of the story he also suffers from significant memory loss. In addition, he is
dyslexic, confusing left and right and often taking wrong turns at street corners and getting lost in the city. It is therefore unclear to what extent the events in the story are the product of an
unreliable narrator.
As the subtitle implies, the novel offers several conflicting perspectives on the concept of
utopia.
Utopia literally means "good place" or "no place". Delany takes the term
heterotopia from the writings of philosopher
Michel Foucault.
[2] Literally, heterotopia means "other place" or "a place of differences". Foucault uses the term to designate spaces outside everyday fixed institutional and social spaces, for example trains, motels and cemeteries. In the novel's future
solar system,
Neptune's moon
Triton supports one of several human societies independent from
Earth, which has developed along radically
libertarian lines in some ways: though a representative government exists, it has virtually no power to regulate private behavior, and citizens may choose to live in an area where no laws apply at all. Technology provides for a high degree of self-modification, so that one can change one's physical appearance,
gender,
sexual orientation, and even specific patterns of likes and dislikes.
now .. (forbidden topic) porn ..
Originally Posted by The_Waco_Kid
Originally Posted by The_Waco_Kid
