y A.D. 2112, humankind has spread throughout the solar system, colonizing planets and satellites as distant as the moon of Pluto. The Neptunian moon Triton is a peaceful, well-off world and comfortable with the broad range of human behavior. Here, a family may have a single parent or a dozen, and 30 percent of babies are birthed by men. People may join or create any religion, and they may dress
however they want, from S&M collars to rags and blindfolds to veils that cover them completely, or they may go nude everywhere. A sex change, complete to the genetic level, takes six hours; sexual orientation can be changed in 17 minutes; and people can have whatever sort of sex they'd like with as many or as few partners as they wish, or no partners (or no sex at all). If you find Triton's few restrictions too confining, you can live in Triton's lawless, legally created "unlicensed sector." And though war is brewing between Earth and most of the "Outer Satellites," Triton has kept out of it.
Bron Helstrom is a handsome young man, a designer of computer metalogics, content with his world and place in it; in his own words, he is "reasonably happy." Then, one evening, he takes a shortcut through the unlicensed sector. When he helps a woman assaulted by a bestial cult member, she leads him into a unique piece of "micro-theater," created and performed one time only, for an audience of one. The emotionally powerful piece and its attractive creator—the woman he helped—change Bron's life.
But all does not go smoothly in love, and Bron travels to Earth in an attempt to forget. There he is imprisoned and abused, for no reason he can imagine, save that he is from the Outer Satellites. When he regains freedom and returns to Triton, the war follows, with devastating quickness. And Bron finds himself changing in ways he once would never have imagined.
Poignant portrait of a reluctant hero
Many readers coming to SF since the 1980s haven't read, or sometimes even heard of, Samuel R. Delany, which is an embarrassment. Delany is one of science fiction's greatest and most influential authors. He is, with Harlan Ellison, Norman Spinrad and Roger Zelazny, one of giants of the American New Wave, and with James Tiptree, Jr., he is a progenitor of cyberpunk. He is also a professor of comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts, as well as a perceptive critic of SF and other literatures. His first SF work, the novel The Jewels of Aptor (1962), was published when he was 20. Seventeen of his subsequent novels and stories were nominated for the Hugo Award or the Nebula Award (sometimes both); and he has received four Nebulas and two Hugos (one of the latter for his memoir The Motion of Light in Water), as well as a Pilgrim Award.
Delany's best-known book is the experimental, controversial Nebula Award nominee Dhalgren (1975), one of the best-selling novels of the 1970s. In comparison, Delany's next novel, the Nebula-nominated Triton (1976), is clear, slim and traditionally structured. However, in its incisive understanding of human psychology, Triton is Dhalgren's equal.
Describing the plot of Triton is misleading, for the subject is not war, or love, or sex, or interplanetary colonization, or human society. The subject is Bron Helstrom. The novel is a portrait of a man with far less understanding of himself than he believes, who as a result causes considerable unhappiness to others and (especially) himself. With its complexity of detail and its depth of insight, Triton is one of the most intricate and masterful portraits of an individual ever created in fiction.
