Trouble on Triton by Samuel R. Delany (1976)

As always: if you’re thinking about reading this book, do so before reading this article. TLDR; It’s great.

This book is usually published these days with the title Triton, but I’m going with the longer one, Trouble on Triton, which I believe was Delany’s preferred title, and is my preference too.

The last (and first) Delany I read was Nova, which I reviewed here. That book was written around eight years before Trouble on Triton, and the latter’s prose is noticeably more impressive and controlled: just as odd, but more obviously deliberate. The most striking oddity is the intentional over-use of parentheses. It doesn’t feel like an exaggeration (although it might be) to say that every other sentence has parentheses. This makes for a jarring, constantly interrupted reading experience, similar to reading David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, with its 388 endnotes. I often had to go back to the beginning of a sentence when I had carelessly charged into a parenthetical section that turned out to be longer or more complex than I expected. The prime example is the very last sentence, which I had to read a few times.

But that might be the point: to make the reader slow down. Maybe Delany wants us to pay attention more than we normally would with an SF novel, to take our time over details rather than chasing after the plot. As I said in my review of Nova, Delany wants to be literary despite the popular genre trappings. I’m now inclined to put a different spin on it: he is trying, not just to be literary, but to critique social conventions and explore alternative ways of living, especially in the arena of sex and gender. It was not so easy to do this openly in fiction back in the sixties; the speculative nature of SF made it the perfect medium.

Is his use of parentheses, then, patronizing? I don’t think so. So far what I’m getting from Delany’s work is wild enthusiasm and energy rather than didacticism or polemic, self-indulgence and enjoyment more than pretention and solemnity.

As it happens, Delany talked about the parentheses in an interview:

Q: Your style of parentheses in parentheses almost has the same effect. Very daunting. What were you trying to do here?

SRD: That’s a different matter. Probably I was trying to say too much at once.

Q: I liked the parentheses. I found that the device really helped me understand the way someone like Bron would think, because he’s so defensive and he rationalizes everything. He works a thought through before he thinks of some defensive way of worming his way out of the situation. Or justifying the way he thinks or perceives…

SRD: That’s kind of what I was trying for. But I know—simply because I’ve talked to enough people—that for some readers it doesn’t work. The parentheses only get in the way. Well, they do ask a lot of you. Perhaps too much. I write with far fewer parentheses today. But it was my choice at the time—and it may have been the wrong one. Still, some people seem to be able to get with it. When you make a stylistic choice like that, this is the chance you take: some people are just going to find it tedious and balk. Well, they have every right to.

— Interview with Samuel R. Delany

I think I’m one of the readers who can get with it. Interrupting a sentence with parentheses, when employed from a close third-person point of view, conveys something of what it’s like to be thinking all the time, to be second-guessing and qualifying as you go along, so that the writing achieves a stream of consciousness effect without using the technique traditionally (despite everything it’s still a pretty normal third-person narrative). And being in the head of Bron, the main character, makes the reader somewhat complicit in his behaviour. And the thing is, if you’re anything like me you’re personally primed to identify with Bron, particularly as a not-young and not-old white heterosexual man. The effect of intitially sympathizing or identifying with Bron comes back to bite you later on, as his character is gradually revealed.

Incidentally, maybe we can see Delany’s comment that “probably I was trying to say too much at once,” as a key to understanding his work in general. Having only read two of his books, I can’t be sure about it, but it describes those two pretty well. I’m okay with that. I have a lot of time for maximalism, so it doesn’t really bother me when ideas, references, and digressions spill out from the pages or overwhelm the plot.

In this case, Delany has the following things in play:

Gender, sexuality, and épistémè
Utopias and heterotopias
Metalogic and metafiction
Innovative science fiction world-building (the game of Vlet, future theatre, political economy, clothing)

I’ll try to say a few things about some of those. First, a quick overview: Trouble on Triton is set in the year 2112 and it’s about a man called Bron Helstrom, an immigrant living in the city of Tethys on Neptune’s moon Triton, who is employed as a practitioner of an applied logical science called metalogic. Bron begins the novel thinking he is a “reasonably happy man,” but he’s vaguely dissatisfied with life, and that dissatisfaction grows after a short liaison with a woman named The Spike, whom he imagines he is in love with.

For most of the novel there are rumblings of war between Earth and the allied moons, but even though the war does break out in the end, and even though the plot hinges on this event, it remains in the background, and we never really discover what the fighting was all about. The book really is about one man’s struggle to fit in. What makes this not as boring as it sounds is that Delany brings out the way that this struggle stands at the intersection of the individual and society, allowing for a dazzling, and rather confusing, exploration of both the personal and the political. And it is realized with penetrating psychological realism and some really remarkable world-building and conceptual invention, all done with humour and style.

1. Gender, sexuality, and épistémè

NOTE: I’m using the French orthography in épistémè, not out of pretentiousness but to distinguish the term from the more general philosophical use of the word that goes back to Plato and Aristotle.

The society on Triton, and in the wider culture of the other populated outer moons of the solar system, enjoys complete sexual liberation. Anyone can change gender quickly and easily (even changing biological sex is just about possible), anyone can have their sexual preferences re-aligned, and men can give birth. There is no systemic oppression according to gender or sexual identity, nor even any expectations with regard to careers, relationships, or having children.

But Bron, who comes from a Mars that seems to be half-way between conservative Earth and the progressive moons, yearns for something else in his life, maybe something more along the lines of a traditional romantic relationship in which the dynamic male takes the lead and the grateful and submissive female surrenders to him — although it is only gradually that we see this expectation develop.

So at the centre of the book is a conflict: not, as in Nova, between two men, but between a man and the society he lives in. Bron is unhappy because he thinks differently from everyone else. He is a dinosaur. Or to put it in the terms of the philosopher Foucault — a significant intellectual inspiration for Delany and this book in particular — Bron’s épistémè and that of Triton society are in conflict, and even incommensurable. Tellingly, for example, it is only Bron who uses homophobic slurs.

An épistémè is a system of thought particular to a society and to an epoch. It determines what can be thought, stated, and learned. It is the bounded field of your social milieu in which concepts, opinions, attitudes, and philosophical questions (and their answers), make sense. As a migrant, Bron carries his épistémè with him, and the tragedy is that he does not succeed in adjusting to that of his adopted home.

Bron feels close to the reader, because despite his former career on Mars as a prostitute catering mostly to wealthy women (which it seems is not something to be ashamed of anywhere in the world of the novel except to some extent on Earth, where male prostitution remains illegal) — despite this he espouses sexist and patriarchal notions about women and relationships that are familiar to us in the present day. This puts the reader in a difficult position, siding with the bad guy: since Bron is a reader surrogate, our own attitudes are challenged. I imagine this would have been even more effective for the relatively unwoke readers of SF back in the seventies.

In saying that Bron is a reader surrogate and that I identified with him, I’m sure I’m not speaking for everyone, and it’s a risky admission, because the fact is that Bron is a lying, selfish prick. But the point is that he is a lying, selfish prick in a very recognizable, ordinary way. We all know people like Bron, and some of us uncomfortably recognize aspects of him in ourselves.

2. Utopias and heterotopias

It’s said all over the place that Trouble on Triton was written as a response to Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, but according to Delany himself, that’s not quite true. He had already finished the first draft when he read The Dispossessed, and it was only at that point that he felt the two books were interestingly in dialogue with each other, so he tweaked a few things and added the subtitle: An Ambiguous Heterotopia, corresponding to Le Guin’s subtitle, An Ambiguous Utopia.

I’m guessing that Triton represents one of the best societies that Delany believes humans could ever achieve, making it a kind of Utopia despite what he says. But according to the subtitle it’s more complex than that: he doesn’t want us to think too highly of Triton society. He wants to emphasize that it’s not perfect, because people are not perfect, and never will be. Delany is instinctively postmodern and pluralistic, suspicious of Utopias, grand narratives, the “perfectability of man,” and one-size-fits-all templates for living.

For example, racism still exists on Triton. I mentioned above that only Bron uses homophobic slurs; well he is not the only one to use racist slurs — there is language in the dialogue that would not be acceptable today and that Delany, writing in the seventies, obviously didn’t anticipate would be eradicated from everyday conversation in only a few decades.

Delany also spends some time detailing the social hierarchy of Triton, which, though quite innocuous and entirely optional, is firmly entrenched.

Other ways that Delany steers us away from the idea of a hippie paradise are the revelation that everyone is under constant surveillance; and the culmination of those rumblings of war that I mentioned in the massacre by the allies of “sixty to seventy-five percent of the Earth’s population.” Even enlightened, progressive, liberated Triton is willing to participate in an unfathomable moral outrage.

So here’s how I think it breaks down, how the concepts of ambiguity and heterotopia work in Triton:

Ambiguity: Racism, surveillance by the government, social classes, and war still exist.
Heterotopia: (another term from Foucault) The society is pluralist: there are religious cults out in the open, there are parts of the city where the law does not apply, and there is no conventional lifestyle common to most people. The government is merely technical and administrative; neutrally efficient rather than intrusive, ideological or authoritarian. There is no overarching set of principles — e.g., freedom, democracy, the nation — that all the citizens subscribe to. There is an implicit pluralistic, progressive, and libertarian épistémè, not an explicit belief system.

As an outsider, Bron is the perfect main character for exploring all this.

3. Metalogic and metafiction

Delany’s fictitious version of metalogic doesn’t quite coincide with metalogic as it exists today, viz. the study of the properties of formal systems, where formal systems are classical logics such as propositional logic or first order predicate logic. Maybe we could think of it as a highly developed combination of probablity and fuzzy logic. Currently, fuzzy logic is used in automated systems in electronic appliances, transport, and industry; to imagine the metalogic of Triton we could think of a fuzzy logic applied to complex decision-making in business and government.

It might be worth breaking that down a bit. Delaney’s concept begins with the pretty widespread observation that classical, deductive logic, which has been thought by philosophers since Aristotle to be the pinnacle or model of rationality, actually works for only a very restricted set of simple problems. Human reality is more messy and complex, requiring informal deductive and abductive reasoning. Delany’s metalogic comes in at this point to deal with the messy reality with the practical application of a new non-classical formal system to produce better results than our current informal methods.

Delany explained it in the interview:

In Triton, metalogic, with its mathematical superstructure (the Modular Calculus), is just general, inductive reasoning given a fictive mathematical expression. In Triton it “solves” problems I’m perfectly aware general reasoning can’t solve.

Individual metalogics are designed for different situations. The kinds of problems they solve in Triton (always off stage and of a complexity that makes the solution really too hard to follow) are analogous to the following. You’re in a room with a door leading to another room. Through the door, someone comes in from the other room, bringing a collection of four or five objects. From a consideration of those four or five objects alone, you now reason out—rigorously and with certainty—what all the remaining objects in the other room must be. Intuitively, we recognize there is no way to find a general solution for such a problem, rigorously and for all cases. The pseudo scientific rationale (in Triton), however, is simply that if we had a mathematical reduction whose mathematics was “strong” enough, we just might be able to come up with a general case solution.

— Interview with Samuel R. Delany

I’m wary when authors include explicit philosophy or philosophy-adjacent subjects in their fiction, but Delany won me over. One of the most interesting ways in which Triton society in the novel is more advanced than ours is in the way that thinking, making decisions, expressing opinions, and so on — mostly informal things today — have either been formalized, as with metalogic, or have become more habitually thorough, even just in everyday conversation. Presumably owing to advances in knowledge and education, necessary for maintaining societies on the inhospitable outer moons, the people of Triton are able to express themselves without any friction between thought and speech, as The Spike alludes to:

A few times, at home, I’ve met earthies, even become pretty friendly with a few, especially before the war: they always struck me as a little strange. But I racked it up to the fact that they were in a strange and unfamiliar place. I think the oddest thing I’ve noticed, in the two days I’ve been here, is that they’re all so much like all the earthies I’ve known before! They pick up an object, and somehow they never seem to really touch it. They say something, and their words never completely wrap around their ideas. Do you know what I mean?

Notably, as with sex and gender, earthies are functioning here to stand for people today (not in a crude allegorical way but as a layer of meaning). They are intellectually primitive, politically reactionary, and emotionally stunted. The moonies thus represent the Utopianism inherent in Delany’s heterotopia. Incidentally, the idea that people in a few hundred years or in radically different circumstances might think differently from us is, to me, a basic requirement for good science fiction, but it’s quite unusual in the genre (as it is in genre fiction generally).

Although Bron is a talented metalogician, he has no interest in the foundations of the subject:

“Metalogics,” she said, saving him. “Are you reading Ashima Slade?” who was the Lux University mathematician/philosopher who, some twenty-five years ago, had first published (at some ridiculous age like nineteen) two very thick volumes outlining the mathematical foundations of the subject.

Bron laughed. “No. I’m afraid that’s a little over my head.”

Once in the office library, he had actually browsed in the second volume of Summa Metalogiae (volume one was out on loan); the notation was different and more complicated (and clumsy) than that in use now; it was filled with dense and vaguely poetic meditations on life and language; also some of it was just wrong.

“I’m in the purely practical end of the business.”

This unquestioning, incurious aspect of his character is important in determining his fate, in a way I’ll get into below.

As if all of that were not enough, Delany goes in for some formal tricks as well, and they’re intimately related to metalogic. The novel proper is actually entitled “Some Informal Remarks Toward the Modular Calculus, Part One,” as if it were a mere section of a larger academic work; and Appendix B is “Some Informal Remarks Toward the Modular Calculus, Part Two,” a fictional report about a lecture series given by the great metalogician Ashima Slade, in which we discover that Gene Trimbell, a.k.a. The Spike, was involved with Slade in a secretive commune that ended in disaster, a few years before the events of the novel.

If we take this playfulness seriously we have to ask how the first-person narrative about Bron Helstrom, in many ways an unremarkable man, functions as “remarks toward the modular calculus.” I think it goes back to Foucault’s épistémè. The story of Bron demonstrates that any application of metalogic, as with the formal logic that we use today, rests on a domain of discourse, a network of assumptions, unexamined truths, and available objects of thought — something along the lines of Wittgenstein’s hinge propositions or shifting riverbed. This is a lot like Foucault’s épistémè. Thus, so the story goes, metalogic cannot help you if your thinking is already on the wrong tracks. To fit into his society and become happy, Bron would have to alter his thinking, and to do that he would have to absorb and reproduce the épistémè of Triton, and escape from his own incompatible one.

So despite his skills and training, Bron cannot use metalogic to save himself from unhappiness and disaster, because for that he would need a meta-metalogic, a way of questioning and improving his épistémè and his entire personality. And since, as he specifically states, he has no interest in the foundations of the science that he practices, that way out is closed to him.

This interpretation seems to be in line with Appendix B, which describes some of Slade’s philosophy of logic:

What Slade is suggesting … is that even if we have discovered the form of a micro-flaw common to every element of our thinking, to think we have necessarily discovered the form of a macro-flaw in our larger mental structures—say our politics—is simply to fall victim to a micro-flaw again. This is not to say that macro-flaws may not relate to the micro-flaws—they usually do—but it is a mistake to assume that relation is direct and necessarily subsumed by the same verbal model.

So even if Bron were able to trace a thread of problematic assumptions in his thinking, that would not automatically provide him with the key to fixing himself more generally.

I went from being frustrated at the passages describing metalogic — I thought they were a nerdy distraction — to thinking, as I do now, that they work brilliantly as part of the world-building, and even have a thematic significance to the story. Delany dedicates six pages to what is basically an introductory lecture on metalogic by Bron, so we know it’s meant to be important. And yet I seldom see any of the reviews delving into it. For that, we have to go to academia…

D. Fox Harrell, a professor at MIT and author of a paper comparing Trouble on Triton with the ideas of computer scientist Joseph Goguen, has an interesting angle on the metalogic of Trouble on Triton. First, he brings out the significance of metalogic for ethnic identity: Bron is, to use a modern-sounding jargon, maximally intersectionally privileged (NOTE: my words, not Harrell’s). Not only is Bron an entitled male-chauvanist, but he is an entitled white man, and in his speech on metalogic he is lecturing a black woman. I had not picked up on the significance of race here, but it’s clear that Delany was going for maximum privelege and entitlement. But Harrell goes further and identifies an allegory of ethnic/racial identity in Bron’s example, which concerns the colour of the Taj Mahal. Again, I did not see this when reading, but it makes sense as a kind of bonus layer of meaning, in the way that symbolism in literature often consists of inessential Easter eggs — bonuses for the attentive reader (on the other hand, I’m probably insensitive to it because I’m not black).

Secondly, Harrell shows that Delany is presenting his own science fiction as a superior way of achieving what the modular calculus is meant to achieve. In reality, natural language provides what logic cannot: the functions of the modular calculus are in fact carried out by conversation, fiction and non-fiction. Bron even makes this point himself:

What makes ‘logical’ bounding so risky is that the assertion of the formal logician that a boundary can be placed around an area of significance space gives you, in such a cloudy situation, no way to say where to set the boundary, how to set it, or if, once set, it will turn out in the least useful. Nor does it allow any way for two people to be sure they have set their boundaries around the same area. Treating soft-edged interpenetrating clouds as though they were hard-edged bricks does not offer much help if you want to build a real discussion of how to build a real house. Ordinary, informal, nonrigorous language overcomes all these problems, however, with a bravura, panache and elegance that leave the formal logician panting and applauding.

This then is another answer to my question above, as to how the title of “Remarks Toward the Modular Calculus” can be justified, namely as a metafictional demonstration of the power of fiction.

Taking the metafiction even further, Appendix A contains literary criticism presented somewhat fictionally with the awkward conceit of a conversation between Bron and Sam, a character who is interested in twentieth century science fiction. It’s a spirited defence of SF in contrast to what Delany calls “mundane fiction,” but as of writing this I don’t really know what it’s doing here in the book — although we do get some clues:

“Ah,” Sam said (Was Sam drunk too … ?), “but the episteme was always the secondary hero of the s-f novel—in exactly the same way that the landscape was always the primary one. If you’d just been watching the proper public channels, you’d know.” But he had started laughing too.

A fish out of water

The novel is surprisingly funny. Its comedy is a darker and subtler version of the fish out of water trope: Bron is conceited, dishonest, and sexist, he blames others for his problems, and he is not genuinely interested in other people, in a world that has done away with those personal failings. The resulting cringe would have been unbearable had it not often been funny.

The scene where Bron’s deficiencies are confirmed beyond doubt — a kind of second-act climax that is perhaps the crucial scene of the novel — is the cringe comedy high point. While they’re in Outer Mongolia, he takes The Spike for dinner to a high-class retro-style restaurant, the Swan’s Craw, which uniquely maintains the rituals and paraphernalia of fancy restaurants today, like fawning service staff, payment in cash, tips, haute cuisine, and so on. At one point during the meal, while The Spike tells him about the only time she has been in love, we join Bron in his thoughts as he becomes bored and stops listening. Then at a crucial point in her story of heartbreak and unrequited love, Bron breaks in:

“Do you know,” he said “—excuse me—but do you know that out of all the customers I’ve seen here, there isn’t one wearing shoes!”

(This might have been a slightly more acceptable interruption had it not been quite normal in the world of the novel for people to go around in public with bare feet.)

This part of the novel is masterfully done. When they first meet in Mongolia, Bron is pathetically infatuated, while The Spike is dismissive, cool and in control, and we almost feel sorry for Bron. Later when he takes her to the restaurant, she is wide-eyed and overcome with delight, and we feel he might be regaining some dignity. But then he throws it all away, oblivious to his own stupidity and unable to enjoy the moment or treat The Spike with respect, ending the night — un-comedically, it has to be said — with unwanted sexual advances that are bad enough to require a physical response (she elbows him in the ribs and leaves).

Later when his failure is confirmed in her letter, the tragedy is laid bare: his personality is irremediably bad, it was bad the whole time, and his unhappiness is inevitable. Characteristically, though, he does not understand her criticisms, since he is fundamentally unable to criticize himself, and his own resentful conclusion is that he has to get a sex change, so that he can become the kind of woman that a guy like him would want, since there are far fewer such women than there are such men. This mad decision and its aftermath work together as a fascinatingly weird ending that represents Bron’s total downfall.

Conclusion

The novel is rich with ideas and bursting with energy, but it’s a bumpy ride. If I had tried to read it in my teens or twenties I might have struggled and given up. Its difficulty is both in the aforementioned parenthesis-littered prose, and also in the sheer profusion of ideas: Delany tries to put too much in, and we are not sure what to focus on. Should we be thinking about épistémès or is it more about metalogic? How do these fit together, if they do at all? Is there a point to all this? But this is part of its charm, and for me it works.

When I finished it I started it again immediately, so I ended up reading it twice consecutively, and I can imagine reading it again in a couple of years.

Notes

Links

https://www.csail.mit.edu/person/d-fox-harrell