Stars in my pocket like grains of sand
Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand is a science fiction masterpiece, an essay on the inexplicability of sexual attractiveness, and an examination of interstellar politics among far-flung worlds. First published in 1984, the novel's central issues--technology, globalization, gender, sexuality, and multiculturalism--have only become more pressing with the passage of time. The novel's topic is information itself: What are the repercussions, once it has been made public, that two individuals have been found to be each other's perfect erotic object out to "point nine-nine-nine and several nines percent more"? What will it do to the individuals involved, to the city they inhabit, to their geosector, to their entire world society, especially when one is an illiterate worker, the sole survivor of a world destroyed by "cultural fugue," and the other is--you!
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3recommend
7mentions
5people
2012–2023years
57% recommend43% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Yes, most books are crap. But Sturgeon's Law is a thing, so that should not be surprising. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law
It took me years to get past the first 100 pages of both Dune and Stars in my Pocket like Grains of Sand but once I did, both turned out to be excellent. The only reason I kept trying is that I'd heard they were both good and I couldn't figure out what I was missing until I found it.
IME, the only way to know if you're likely to enjoy a book is if it's recommended by someone who knows your taste very well. Or if you have a favorite author. Other than that, it's a crapshoot. Sometimes you get lucky, sometimes you waste a few hours.
One of the nice things about brick & mortar bookstores and libraries is being able to browse around until you find something good.
- When I saw (actually, misread) the title I was hoping it would be about Samuel R Delany's "Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand" which is a complete knock-out SF book and probably the best thing Delany ever did. Oh well.
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Stars_in_My_Pocket_Like_Grains_o...
- "Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand" really messed me up as a young lad, I had no business reading that at that age. As an adult I went back and read most of his stuff, it aged really well, Star Pit and Einstein Intersection are two favorites of mine. His work really had no contemporaries in that era. At least not that I ever read.
- I think it's a personality thing. I started Njal's Saga years ago (my frame of reference is that I heard of it on Slashdot) and I'm about 3/4 of the way through. I haven't picked it up in years (I think it's under the bed) but someday I will, whenever I get around to it. It just doesn't matter when/if I finish it.
Contrast that with an old roommate of mine who thought of this stuff a lot more like Scott does. He would feel really, really guilty about starting a book and not finishing it in a reasonable time or at all. He felt he "owed" it to the author to finish it if started.
I just can't think that way. It took me three tries to get past page 100 of Dune but once I did, I absolutely loved the book. Same goes for Stars in my pocket like grains of sand: I took over five years to finish that book and it was really good.
Feel "guilty?" No, guilt is reserved for when you hurt someone.
- "Lay ordinate and abscissa on the century. Now cut me a quadrant: third quadrant if you please, I was born in sixty-five."*
Now that I got that out of my system, yea. The 80's were nothing special and kinda sucked in retrospect. Cars were crap, everyone thought we were months away from WW III, if you wanted to learn something, you had to head over to the library and hope the books you wanted were still there. Wikipedia, etc., simply did not exist. Google was not a thing. People made sure they always had change on their person in case they needed to make a phone call (girls I knew would have a dime sewn into their bra for emergencies). I lived in NYC at the time, Times Square was a shithole (no, it wasn't "gritty," it was flat-out nasty).
* OTOH, I think Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones came out in the 80's. And so did Neuromancer and we ended it with "Sex, Lies and Videotape" and the fall of the Soviet Union, so it wasn't all bad.
[edit] just googled it and Time Considered was written shortly after I was born. So much for that!
[second edit]Yeah, I'm old. The book I was thinking of was actually Stars in my pocket like grains of sand which was actually published in the 80's. So win one, lose one :-)
- I think there’s a reasonably amount of science fiction that predicted that ideas might go viral and spread, but what is lacking is the idea of things like Wikipedia where there is an overall level of trust, but that certain subject areas will be much less reliable. The closest I can think of is Delany’s Stars In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand where some subject areas of General Information (a system run by the Web) are notoriously out of date, but were probably accurate when written. I have often wondered if Tim Berbers-Lee read that book.
