Satellite of Love: Delany Takes on Sex, Gender, and Social Upheaval on Neptune-Haunted Triton

Samuel R. Delany’s Triton comes on like a drug and fades away with the same sort of ambiguity and self-consciousness. Bron Helstrom, a metalogician, is followed throughout this sprawling novel, but it seems as though society itself is more the main character than he. The novel follows Helstrom through the co-ops and unlicensed sector of colonized Triton, past minute-long submersions into avante garde theatre pieces written by the elusive poet, the Spike, into the open spaces of Mongolia on war-torn Earth, past strategic holographic games embroidered upon with the wise commentary of perceptive company, through the midst of gravitational mishaps and the apocryphal stories of moonies that make appearances along the way. The end Helstrom meets is somehow shocking, satisfying, and lacking in any sort of closure at once. 

While a number of issues come up in Triton, sex and gender take the forefront. In this vision of the future, both physical sex characteristics and the gender-related facets of personality and desire can be changed on a whim: the terms ‘male’ and ‘female,’ or ‘straight’ and ‘gay,’ are completely mutable, giving rise to existential crisis in some characters’ cases, and empowerment in others’. The reader may not be forced to change her views, but she is absolutely required to consider perspectives that previously were not only unacknowledged, but perhaps totally unknown.

Now for my problem with the novel. 

I love books that I have to work for. I don’t mind having to consult a dictionary or encyclopedia regularly or cross-reference other books. But there were some passages in Triton—two in particular—that were just too dense. These are Helstrom’s lengthy explanation of the field of metalogics and Lawrence’s talk about the game of vlet. I wanted to understand these passages, and, at the risk of sounding like a dumb braggart, I think I could have understood them if I took them slowly. But they were so dense they became unbearably boring, even though the ideas at their core were incredibly interesting. In retrospect, I really do think these were the only passages to present that problem—the rest were accessible.

Triton closes with two appendices that I found to be especially rewarding. The first is a series of excerpts that did not make the novel’s final edit cuts, and they all take the field of science fiction as their subject. The second appendix is about Ashima Slade, a mathematician and philosopher that is credited with founding the study of metalogics. Neither of these are necessary to the plot of the novel, but they add a richness and depth the reader wouldn’t otherwise even know she was missing. The one lends insight into Delany’s thoughts on his field, and the other makes the backdrop of Triton more real and concrete in its history, more significant in the interrelationships that make that history so.