Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand

Lore & Background

The novel opens with a prologue on the planet Rhyonon, where Korga undergoes Radical Anxiety Termination (RAT) psychosurgery, becoming a happy slave known as Rat Korga. After serving multiple masters, all life on Rhyonon's surface is destroyed by a conflagration, possibly Cultural Fugue or the mysterious Xlv spacecraft. Rat survives deep underground, becoming the only known survivor of his world's destruction. The story then moves to Velm, a Sygn-aligned world shared with the three-sexed evelm, where resident Marq Dyeth, an industrial diplomat, learns from the Web that Rat Korga is his perfect sexual match. The Web equips Rat with prostheses restoring his initiative and sends him to Velm under the guise of a student, where he and Marq begin a romantic and sexual affair. During their time together, they go dragon hunting, where Rat discovers that hitting a dragon with a bow lets him see through its eyes, and no dragons are killed. They attend a formal supper at Dyethshome honoring the Thants, a Family-aligned family from Zetzor, which becomes chaotic due to the Thants' derogatory comments and a crowd gathering to see Rat. Rat is eventually forced to leave Velm permanently, separated from Marq. In the epilogue, Marq learns from Web friend Japril that the experiment 'didn't work' and it was 'too dangerous' to leave Korga on Velm due to the threat of Cultural Fugue.

Reader's Guide

Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand is significant for its treatment of fractured subjectivity as a natural condition, representing nonnormative racial, sexual, and familial practices as normal within Marq's world. Thomas Foster argues the novel's utopian project imagines a setting where the fragmented subject is healthiest and most creative because society makes questions of unity irrelevant. Robert F. Reid-Pharr contends that Delany thematizes how gay male identity is established through ritualistic practices of cleansing, with Korga's journey exemplifying this process and connecting to the subject position of the African-American slave. Dr. Paivi Väätänen notes that Delany changes the logic of gender, sexuality, and language, confusing the reader while perpetuating a liberal rejection of heteronormativity. On Velm, everyone including evelmi is labeled a woman, with 'she/her' pronouns common, while 'he/him' is used for those sexually desirable. Humans are referred to as male or female based on sex organs, but evelmi can be male, female, or neuter, all capable of pregnancy, though particular evelmi are never identified as such. This ambiguity deconstructs binary identity structures. The novel reflects contemporary issues through its distant future setting, as Delany stated science fiction is in dialogue with the present, indulging in a significant distortion of the present.

Did You Know?

• The novel is part of an unfinished diptych; the second half, The Splendor and Misery of Bodies, of Cities, remains incomplete.
• Rat Korga is the only known survivor of his world's destruction, possibly by Cultural Fugue or the Xlv spacecraft.
• On Velm, every person including evelmi is labeled a woman, and the pronouns 'she/her' are most common; 'he/him' is used for those sexually desirable.
• The Web, an organization managing information flows between worlds, equipped Rat Korga with prostheses (the rings of Vondramach Okk) to restore his initiative lost due to the RAT procedure.