Samuel R. Delany's Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (1984) is the first half of an unfinished diptych. The novel imagines a galactic civilization of 6,000 worlds in which the pronoun 'she' is used for all people regardless of gender, and 'he' is used only for those one finds sexually attractive. The novel's protagonist, Rat Korga, is a man who has been enslaved through a procedure that removes his will, and who becomes the sole survivor of his planet's destruction. His love affair with the diplomat Marq Dyeth is the novel's center, but around it Delany builds a meditation on how language shapes desire, how cultural difference creates and destroys connection, and how love persists across the most radical difference. This episode examines the novel's pronoun system as a thought experiment about gender and desire, and its place in Delany's extraordinary body of work.
SPOILERS! Please note that due to the nature of this podcast, each episode describes a novel in detail, including plot spoilers.
Podden och tillhörande omslagsbild på den här sidan tillhör
Atween Studios. Innehållet i podden är skapat av Atween Studios och inte av,
eller tillsammans med, Poddtoppen.
