Samuel Delany has been the cutting edge of the SF revolution for more than ten years. He works within the traditional SF iconography (i.e., spaceships and cyborgs), but his characters come straight from Desolation Row.

Triton is set in a sort of sexual utopia, where every form of sexual behavior is accepted, and sex-change operations (not to mention "refixations," to alter sexual preference) are common. But Bron, Delany's anti-hero (who becomes, for the last quarter of the novel, an anti-heroine) doesn't know what he wants. All he knows is that he's miserable. When his lover tells him, "Your confusion hurts people," Bron replies, "Then people like me should be exterminated."

Bron's downhill drift is underscored by carefully fragmented syntax, the withholding of crucial bits of information, and a series of deliciously self-conscious set-pieces. In one, Bron enters a booth on which a sign reads: "Know Your Place...