Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand [J0361]

2004 PB reprint of 1984 original, in nice clean condition. In this far-future classic, sexual attraction is a science, gender is a whole new construct, and information is both precious and perilous . . . With a burst of radiation to the brain, an angry young man is transformed into a dim-witted slave—suitable only for the most brutal work. But the tragedy of Rat Korga is the prologue to the story of Marq Dyeth, an "industrial diplomat," who travels from world to world in this exciting, sprawling future, solving problems that come with the spread of "General Information." The greatest fear in this future is Cultural Fugue, a critical mass of shared knowledge that can destroy life over the surface of an entire world in hours. In this dizzyingly original novel, information is perilous, but without it a human is only a rat in a cage. Campbell Award winner Jo Walton described this science fiction landmark as being "like pop rocks for the brain. . . . Things sparkle and explode all over, and it's not entirely comfortable but it is quite wonderful." This classic read predicted the Internet and is packed with themes that still resonate today.

From recent Amazon/GoodReads reviews: "A dense, beautiful, provocative novel. Humanity colonises six thousand planets, and some of them are succumbing to apocalypses known as "cultural fugue". Against this backdrop, we have a brain-altering procedure that turns people into slaves, an interstellar diplomat seeking to understand the miniscule differences between cultures and species, and a story about sexuality and desire and power and knowledge and heritage, and yeah. It's a lot, and it's Delany firing on all cylinders."; "This book is a sand castle, detail to every fleck of sand to create something beautiful, challenging and at times insufferable."; "Pretty out-of-the-box storytelling and fantastic prose! There's an incredibly weird scene of a dragon hunt where very unexpected things happen, and it's probably the most poetic part of the whole novel."