Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand by Samuel Delany

Rating - 2.5: parts of it are worth reading once (borrow it from a library)

Abandoned at 30%. Not interesting enough to compensate for the disorienting style, and not terribly promising in terms of plot anyway.

The main story involves an industrial diplomat who travels between worlds facilitating something unspecific in the galactic economy. It works towards a discussion of one's "ultimate erotic object," and an example thereof for our protagonist.

Instead, I am going to recommend not reading any of that. Instead, read the prologue as a short story. It runs just under 60 pages, and it is a rather good Shoot the Shaggy Dog story that makes great use of its disorienting style, rather than needing to compensate for it.

The shaggy dog lives in the main story. I think it's better if we pretend that does not happen.

The problem of disorienting style: the text makes up new words (fine), but also re-purposes existing words. This could also be fine, but amongst those words are all the gendered terms in the English language. Once you have re-defined pronouns, you have made things unnecessarily difficult. When one of them is re-defined to have an exclusively sexual denotation, you have re-cast the entire species and the way it speaks in a ridiculously sexually focused way. Seriously, all adults are "she," which oh yes goes beyond the human species, except when they are immediately sexually desired, in which case you refer to them as "he"? Oh, and some words get sub-scripted numbers, for reasons suggested but not explained before I gave up.

The disorientation does good things. The book mostly lets the characters exist in their world, rather than speaking to someone in our world. They do not explain things no one would ever explain. They do a little, which weakens it.

Largely, I am not on board for the book's central conceit. I blame the back text of the current edition in part, which is no fault of Samuel Delany's, for portraying the "perfect erotic object" as a universe-shattering revelation. That is, two people are really really compatible in bed. Because sex is Serious Business (world-shattering sex should not bring Yu-Gi-Oh jokes to mind (in a completely clean sense)). The book itself argues against the idea of how significant it is to be 99.9999999% compatible in a universe with 6000+ inhabited planets; with only billions of people on our one planet, one-in-a-million events happen thousands of times a day.

Then there is the sex itself, which smacks a bit too strongly of Author Appeal. And this is in sci fi, where we have already accepted the Heinlein/Clarke view of sex. There is a furtive, dirty sense of engaging the author's proclivities, as in Darwin's Radio. Part of that is my own heterosexual perspective, although I can respect the perfect recounting of the gay male gaze that remarks on the play of shadow on a vein in a scrotum. Not my thing, but if that is your thing, and you are not put off by his being mentally handicapped, this will have some really great imagery for you.

My apologies for that. Also for the number of TV Tropes links, but once the Serious Business page came to mind, everything in the book came through the TV Tropes prism.

For the right audience, what I have written is a very strong endorsement. If I thought of the book as limited to trying to appeal to a narrow audience, I could recommend it on that basis, even not being interested myself. As it is, I think it fails to speak as universally as it hopes to.

Amazon link