Trouble on Triton

In this novel by a Nebula Award–winning author, a man looks for love in a society where you can be anyone you want, on a moon at war with Earth.

In a story as exciting as any science fiction adventure written, Samuel R. Delany’s 1976 SF novel, originally published as Triton, takes us on a tour of a utopian society at war with . . . our own Earth! High wit in this future comedy of manners allows Delany to question gender roles and sexual expectations at a level that, twenty years after it was written, still make it a coruscating portrait of “the happily reasonable man,” Bron Helstrom—an immigrant to the embattled world of Triton, whose troubles become more and more complex, till there is nothing left for him to do but become a woman. Against a background of high adventure, this minuet of a novel dances from the farthest limits of the solar system to Earth’s own Outer Mongolia. Alternately funny and moving, it is a wide-ranging tale in which character after character turns out not to be what he—or she—seems.

“Delany’s most controlled, and therefore his most successful, experiment to date. . . . Triton is a novel of manners––those of a rich and complex society in which the avowed highest good is the free expression of each individual’s personality.” —Gerald Jonas, New York Times Book Review

“Delany has been the cutting edge of the SF revolution for more than ten years. . . . [He] may turn out to be as important a writer as Pynchon.” —Mother Jones

“This is classic Delany that maintains a cutting edge of sheer platinum. Delany sets his interrogation of the myth and politics of a central culture within an infinitely richer galaxy of interwoven margins. The dazzle always illuminates: the novel offers vision-altering thrills on the order of paradigm shifts or sex at its most rapturously cataclysmic.” —Earl Jackson, Jr., author of Fantastic Living: The Speculative Autobiographies of Samuel R. Delany

“An excellent novel. The author has created an innovative and fascinating culture.” —Orca