After being overwhelmed by the sophistication of Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, I approached this earlier novel by Samuel Delany with some trepidation. In retrospect, I needn’t have worried as it is a much shorter and simpler work. Though it is thematically rich with plentiful references to mythology, contemporary events at the time of the novel’s writing, art and much more, I think the plot is a little too straightforward and I’m not sure that its central theory on the relationship between people and the work they holds up well.

Far in the future, human civilization is spread out across hundreds of worlds and the most valuable commodity is Illyrion, a super-heavy element that is essential for interstellar travel. Lorq Von Ray, a scion of the Von Ray family that dominates the newer Pleiades Federation seeks to obtain enough Illyrion to break the power of the older Draco faction based on Earth. To do this, he intends to fly a cargo ship straight into and through a nova to collect the precious stuff. He collects a motley crew to help him, the two most significant characters being Mouse, a teenaged Gypsy from Earth who plays a sort of sensory instrument called a syrynx and Katin, an academically-inclined type who dreams of writing a novel, a long abandoned art form at this time. Lorq’s endeavor is opposed by the brother and sister pair of Prince and Ruby Red of the leading family on Earth.

This is pretty much it for the plot as all that happens is that the captain gathers his crew, finds out where a suitable nova is, have a few run-ins with the Reds, and heads for his goal. The prose is excellent and the pages fly past quickly. There’s no difficulty in understanding what’s going on and who everyone is. It’s easy however to overlook how much world-building takes place in the span of so few pages. There’s the requisite backstory of the generations-old feud between the Red and Von Ray families of course but there’s also deep musings about the nature of art, human culture and work. This novel is regarded as a precursor to the cyberpunk genre because almost everyone is equipped with cyborg studs that allow them to interface directly with all manner of machinery such that they can able to feel and control them as if they were extensions of their own bodies. The central theory of the novel in this regard is that this sense of immediacy resolves the alienation that workers feel in performing increasingly more sophisticated work. Another interesting bit is that human culture more or less fossilized during the 20th century just before spaceflight took off so that almost all art still references that period.

This novel’s ambition certainly can’t be overstated and one needs to keep in mind that it was written in 1968. This is heady stuff and makes for a great example of why more modern work feels so restrained in comparison. Still the various theories are interesting to read about but not really convincing especially in light of more recent studies. This week’s issue of The Economist for example has an article about one source of alienation at work being how people create pointless work for each other because it’s hard to judge how productive people really are. It’s hard to see how cyborging can alleviate that. A more fundamental error is that the novel seems to equate work with physical manufacturing when today we know that the most valuable work is intellectual in nature. Similarly the twist about how reading the Tarot is considered rational and the inhabitants of Old Earth are thought of as being superstitious and backward for being skeptics is novel. However it is hardly convincing as the novel claims that it isn’t predicting anything yet the characters themselves appear to use it for that purpose.

I also have issues with how the Von Rays and the Reds are supposedly among the richest people among the settled worlds and yet the scenes that are meant to reflect a life of excess and unimaginable luxury seem downright modest by modern standards. Lorq being able to scamper about the galaxy in his private racing yacht is meant to make him look ridiculously rich but his little ship feels like a mere toy next to the super-yachts of today’s billionaires. A complaint that is more pertinent to the plot is that I can’t understand why these super-rich characters go around with zero security measures. Every time Lorq has a confrontation with the Red siblings, there is a violent altercation and someone gets hurt. One would think that a single such fight would be enough to convince them not to meet without an entourage of bodyguards but they persist in doing so again and again. In fact none of them appear to have guards at all. Prince’s cybernetic arm is a serious threat to Lorq whenever they meet and yet he never thinks, “Maybe I ought to bring a long a gun when I meet him the next time, just in case.” I just find it very hard to take them seriously as super-rich elites when they are so blasé about their own safety.

Overall this is a novel that was far ahead of its time in ways that were difficult to appreciate when it was first published. Even as I was reading it I didn’t fully digest the diversity of the ethnicities of the characters until it was spelt out to me. Yet in other ways it has aged badly and Delany doesn’t seem to have realized how much greater inequality would have grown even now let alone another thousand years in the future with an economy that encompasses hundreds of planets. Even the central undertaking of the novel, to fly a starship into the heart of a nova, which Delany’s compares the quest for the Holy Grail and Jason’s search for the Golden Fleece, doesn’t feel quite epic enough these days. It’s a great novel and well worth reading even now but it does have its flaws and it’s markedly inferior to Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand.