
Trouble on Triton

(Unlicensed sector people, Bron reflected, went on about the families they’d come from. Licensed sector people went on about the families they had.
Samuel R. Delany • Trouble on Triton
Language is parametal, not perimetal.
Samuel R. Delany • Trouble on Triton
Either way it's "metal"!
Ten years ago a statute was passed that any citizen had the right to demand a review of all government information on him or her. Some other public channeler had made a stir about getting the government simply to stop collecting such information; but such systems, once begun, insinuate themselves into the greater system in overdetermined ways: Jobs
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I wonder how many times the opposition voted to repeal?
We have the technology—downstairs, in the west wing—to produce illusions, involving both belief and knowledge of those beliefs as true, far more complicated than either, by working directly on the brain. What are your social responsibilities when you have a technology like that available?
Samuel R. Delany • Trouble on Triton
If Sam had any strong sexual identifications, straight or gay, there would have been a dozen co-ops delighted to have him. The fact that Sam chose to live in an all-male nonspecific probably meant that, underneath the friendliness, the intelligence, the power, he was probably rotten with neurosis; behind him would be a string of shattered communal
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He turned away to listen to an intense, polysyllabic discussion of the vast difficulty of performing pre-twentieth-century theatrical works for a twenty-second-century audience: “You mean because of the length?” “There’s that. Primarily, though, it results from the peripetia’s invariably pivoting on sexual jealousy; that’s just so hard for a contem
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This actually seems to be one of the central designs of the book. The world as a whole is highly tolerant of any sexual orientation or proclivity, but Bron ultimately longs for a possessiveness, reminiscent of 20th century relationships, that nobody is willing to give him.
He thought: If you reach a conclusion validly, you don’t store all the work notes and doodles you’ve amassed on the way. Those are just the things conclusions are there to dispense with! (He crumpled a piece of paper that, looking at its gray, graphed corner sticking from the black-gloved knot, he realized he probably would need again.) She doesn’t
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After complaining that Sam was likely to be a bundle of neuroses, it's really Bron that is led by his passions and who irrationally applies logic and metalogic to justify his own desires. He may not be insightful, be he makes up for it by being brash and hurting the people around him.
Let me tell you a secret. There is a difference between men and women, a little, tiny one that, I’m afraid, has probably made most of your adult life miserable and will probably continue to make it so till you die. The difference is simply that women have only really been treated, by that bizarre, Durkheimian abstraction, ‘society,’ as human beings
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I had to leave. No logic or metalogic could have made me stay. It was all perfect, beautiful, without a crack or a seam. Any blow you struck was absorbed and became one with the structure.