Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand

Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, published in 1984, is a science fiction novel by Samuel R. Delany. Delany described it as the first half of a planned diptych; the second volume, The Splendor and Misery of Bodies, of Cities, was never completed.

Setting

The story unfolds across a far-future setting where humanity occupies roughly six thousand planets, many of which are also home to intelligent alien species. Only one nonhuman race, the enigmatic Xlv, has developed faster-than-light travel. To guard against a phenomenon called Cultural Fugue—a catastrophic collapse in which socioeconomic pressures trigger the total annihilation of all life on a planet—many human worlds align with one of two factions: the Sygn, which celebrates social diversity, or the Family, which enforces an idealized norm based on the nuclear family.

Prologue: A World Apart

The novel begins with a prologue on the planet Rhyonon. A tall, unattractive misfit named Korga undergoes the Radical Anxiety Termination (RAT) procedure, a form of psychosurgery that leaves him a slave but content. Renamed Rat Korga, he serves several masters until a conflagration destroys all life on Rhyonon’s surface.

Monologues: Visible and Invisible Persons Distributed in Space

It remains unclear whether the disaster was Cultural Fugue or the work of Xlv spacecraft present in the system at the time. Rat Korga survives because he was deep underground in a refrigerated room, though badly injured; he becomes the only known survivor of a world’s destruction and possible Cultural Fugue. According to critic Reid-Pharr, Rat Korga embodies the remnants of disaster, making him a potent symbol of planetary annihilation—a quality that later makes him intensely appealing to the inhabitants of Velm.

The action shifts to Velm, a Sygn-aligned world shared with the evelm, a native three-sexed intelligent species. Here, sexual relationships are diverse, including monogamous, promiscuous, anonymous, and interspecies forms.

The protagonist, Marq Dyeth, works as an industrial diplomat, managing technology transfers between societies. An associate in the powerful Web—an organization that controls information flow between worlds—informs Marq that Rat Korga is his perfect sexual match. The Web equips Rat with a prosthetic device, the rings of Vondramach Okk (a former tyrant who ruled ten planets and once employed one of Marq’s ancestors), which restores the initiative lost to the RAT procedure.