SOURCE: “Jewels in Junk City: To Read Triton,” in Review of Contemporary Fiction, Vol. 16, No. 3, Fall, 1996, pp. 142-7.

In the following essay, Blackford examines various scientific and linguistic inconsistencies in Triton, which he identifies as symptomatic of Delany's fiction in general. According to Blackford, Delany's elaborate future worlds and linguistic constructs create “an overall effect,” rather than a seamless alternative reality.

Samuel R. Delany’s Triton is an experiment in radical utopian narrative. It depicts a miraculously hi-tech society, in this case set on the Neptunian moon Triton over a century hence. On Triton there are few conventional or physical restraints on the achievement of individual human desires. The novel appears to be a rigorous examination of how such a society might operate and how individual human folly, conflict, and even tragedy might nonetheless be located within it. Delany is apparently continuing such a project in an even...