Adam
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afcbrodie.bsky.social
Adam
@afcbrodie.bsky.social
76 followers 630 following 360 posts
Blog here: https://afcbrodie.mataroa.blog/. I write about TTRPGs and history and probably other things.
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afcbrodie.bsky.social
But in terms of whether he is redeemable or not, whether he might someday be able to pass muster as a human being, I wanted to have all the elements on a balance—and I wanted to maintain that balance up to the novel's last sentence.
October 25, 2025 at 2:00 PM
afcbrodie.bsky.social
And in a way, here, before you, I'm just a bit like Bron: what I'm much more likely to do here, under the local pressure of your questions, is to speak of the book I wish I'd written rather than the text you—or you, or you—just read.
October 25, 2025 at 2:00 PM
afcbrodie.bsky.social
This is I think one of the key points of comparison of Triton with Dispossessed. Dispossessed focuses on the horror of militaries. Triton, the awfulness of their absence.
SRD: The war in Triton, however, is a purely technological war: a war that consists of years of diplomacy—followed by 45 unthinkable minutes. During those minutes, technicians merely push buttons. That doesn't involve soldiers.
October 25, 2025 at 2:00 PM
afcbrodie.bsky.social
Oops
October 25, 2025 at 2:00 PM
afcbrodie.bsky.social
I love Delany. "I expect my readership to be totally conversant with science books, but only those written for children." Like fair! And also, such a puncture to any pretension.
But in general I don't think the science per se should go too far beyond what you'd get in most popular science books—most of them by Isaac Asimov and written for bright 14 year olds.
October 25, 2025 at 2:00 PM
afcbrodie.bsky.social
I feel the need to listen to an academic talk about the shifting sociology of the SF fanbase.

Though hey, rationalists always seem to be doing both sci fi and pop sci in their blogs simultaneously...
October 25, 2025 at 2:00 PM
afcbrodie.bsky.social
We've got here, of course, the old bricolage/engineering dichotomy, first raised in the early days of structuralist criticism. (Critically too, as I've already suggested, we live in Junk City—and it's a very rich town.) The difference between the bricoleur and the engineer is not just a difference in scale and style. There's also a difference in the movement of the thinking. The bricoleur starts with a local problem, then looks around among existing materials for things to fix it with, moving on to more complex solutions only when the simplest ones are clearly not working as well as they should. The engineer doesn't really feel she's started to work, however, until she's got an overarching principle to apply to the solution of the problem, which she then implements as carefully and accurately as possible by precise technical means, moving in to take care of finer and finer problematic details—until, hopefully, principle wholly absorbs problem. As each moves towards her or his separate solution, the bricoleur and the engineer are both looking, here, forward, there, backward. There's always some conceptual movement in both directions with each. But the fundamental movements are, overall, different. And that difference in movement is very much the difference I've noted between the way the SF writer works and the way the utopianist works.
October 25, 2025 at 2:00 PM
afcbrodie.bsky.social
Fascinating to me how much I like Triton and how little interested I am in playing with it the way Delany thought I would want to
I can probably extrapolate two or three layers beyond what I've directly described—frankly, I'd hope any reader really interested in the novel would do some extrapolating on her or his own as a matter of course. People often criticize the book by saying, "Well, you haven't told us how the government actually works!"True! I wouldn't presume to tell you such a thing. But I hope I've suggested a lot about the ways in which it has to function.
October 25, 2025 at 2:00 PM
afcbrodie.bsky.social
But, again, to look for any critique in the book in utopian/dystopian terms will, I suspect, doom you to disappointment and/or distortion. I simply couldn't tell you how Triton, as a detailed political system, functions. But its functioning can be thought about. Its functioning can be interrogated by interrogating—and by manipulating—the text. (Eric Rabkin has pointed out that a fundamental difference between SF and literature is that SF is always inviting the reader to manipulate the text: "Suppose it was different? Suppose it didn't happen that way but this? What if..." Whereas literature—especially Great Literature—all but demands to be left inviolate. Well, I want readers to play with my text in that way.)
October 25, 2025 at 2:00 PM
afcbrodie.bsky.social
Let me state, by the bye, that though I've criticized it at great (even excessive) length, The Dispossessed is a rich and wondrous tale. It's a boy's book: a book to make boys begin to think and think seriously about a whole range of questions, from the structure of society to the workings of their own sexuality.
October 25, 2025 at 2:00 PM
afcbrodie.bsky.social
SRD: Not really. A problem Ursula makes all but vanish by setting her "anarchistic utopia" in an extreme scarcity environment (and I'm sure it was what she wanted) is the problem of surveillance et punir. When the landscape is as harsh and ungiving as Annares' and your laws are set up in ecological accord with it, you don't have to worry too much about individuals—or groups—deviating too far from these laws. Those who deviate, the landscape itself punishes—if not obliterates. In scarcity societies, you just don't have the same sort—or frequency —of discipline problems as you do in an affluent society. In a scarcity society the landscape itself becomes your spy, your SS, and your jailer, all in one.
October 25, 2025 at 2:00 PM
afcbrodie.bsky.social
I do feel like this messes slightly with the narrative of Triton being part of Delany's ticked-off response to LeGuin.
SRD: "To Read The Dispossessed" was written much later—a year or more after I finished writing Triton. That essay is dated April 1976. By the time I began it (and it only took me three weeks or so to write), I'd already returned to the US from London, taught for a term at SUNY Buffalo, then moved back to New York City. Triton was not only written but had already been published—two months before, in February.
October 25, 2025 at 2:00 PM
afcbrodie.bsky.social
Before writing Triton, had you read Le Guin's Dispossessed—which carries the subtitle "an ambiguous utopia" and was published in the US in the Summer of '74? SRD: Not before writing the first draft. I believe I read The Dispossessed somewhere either between the first draft of Triton and the second, or perhaps between the second and the third—so that Triton was basically finished before I became aware of Le Guin's novel. Having read The Dispossessed after I'd finished a first or second draft—was I halfway through the second when a copy of Le Guin's book from Harper & Row reached me in London by mail?—I thought I could probably make that dialogue more pointed by changing a few things here and there—or, better, by clarifying a few things here and there that Le Guin's book directed me to think about. When I first looked through The Dispossessed, it occurred to me that the two books generated an interesting dialogue with each other. My added subtitle was an attempt to put the two novels clearly into a dialogue I already felt was implied.
October 25, 2025 at 2:00 PM
afcbrodie.bsky.social
I'll assume you all have at least a passing familiarity with Lacan.
October 25, 2025 at 2:00 PM
afcbrodie.bsky.social
A thread of quotes from the online Samuel Delany interview on Triton that I found interesting, made ahead of book club.
The first thing actually written—before I was even sure I was going to write another SF novel— was, oddly, the kiss off letter that the Spike sends to Bron in chapter 5—or, at any rate, a version of it. I was sitting in Heathrow Airport, with my then wife, Marilyn Hacker. A couple of things were devilling my memory, including a recent dinner at a French restaurant not far from our flat in London, where I'd watched some people behave with what had struck me as unthinkable insensitivity to someone else at their table. Marilyn and I were waiting for a plane to Paris, where she was going to purchase some books on textiles and printing for her rare book business. The conversation between us had fallen off. Suddenly and impulsively, I opened my notebook to a fresh page and began writing this fictive letter a woman might write to tell a truly unpleasant boyfriend it was all over. That was the start of the book.
October 25, 2025 at 2:00 PM
afcbrodie.bsky.social
I have a blog waiting to be fully written about why Sean McTiernan is the world’s best podcaster, but perhaps I could save my time and just post this image he sent out on Patreon
October 23, 2025 at 12:01 PM
afcbrodie.bsky.social
Research projects I will never have time to do but wish I did: the sources and spread of the capitalist critique of imperial corporate government.
September 7, 2025 at 12:56 PM
afcbrodie.bsky.social
Well then, let’s see if this most miniscule of efforts is sustainable as a weekly blog
September 5, 2025 at 6:13 PM
afcbrodie.bsky.social
Nikita Khrushchev, the original Blue Labour
June 29, 2025 at 7:56 AM
afcbrodie.bsky.social
I'm designing a TTRPG
May 31, 2025 at 10:24 AM
afcbrodie.bsky.social
Really hit by this moment in Neuromancer where Maelcum delivers the big punch to Case’s cynicism. “Uhh no man, goodness exists? What are you talking about?”
March 22, 2025 at 10:00 AM
afcbrodie.bsky.social
Is this why some authors don’t describe the faces of romantic interests?

From Marie LeConte’s substack: youngvulgarian.substack.com/p/happy-birt...
March 21, 2025 at 12:30 PM
afcbrodie.bsky.social
Ascending to a new plane of writing Heart Fallouts.
Confirmation Bias (Major, Mind, Ongoing). Pick a belief your character has. You cannot be dissuaded from believing this thing. You must either interpret any information you encounter that appears to contradict that position in a way that shows it in fact supports your prior beliefs, or, simply refuse to believe it.
March 8, 2025 at 8:39 PM
afcbrodie.bsky.social
Love writing Heart adversaries on a Saturday morning
March 8, 2025 at 10:02 AM
afcbrodie.bsky.social
The idea this list raises, that seems at odds with many game design (thinking Drives in Beam Saber, or Heart Callings) is that player characters don't start the game with desires, but gain desires in reaction to the world and its problems.

gemroomgames.itch.io/the-gem-room...
1. The GM presents a Problem 2. The PCs attempt Solutions 3. The Solutions create Problems 4. The PCs forment Desires 5. The GM turns Desires into Problems 6. The Solutions solve Problems 7. The GM presents several Problems 8. The PCs go to step 2 9. The Problems that aren't getting solved create Problems
March 2, 2025 at 8:41 AM