The Trouble with Titan
1. “Saturn’s Titan had proved the hardest moon to colonize.”—Samuel R. Delany, Triton
2. Samuel R. Delany’s Triton is an “ambiguous heterotopia.”
3. Triton is the repressive side of Utopia.
4. Delany’s prosthetics of Triton—culminating in sex changes.
5. Triton is structurally a unique method for apprehending the present as future.
6. Utopia as a genre in our own time.
7. Triton is a socio-political sub-genre.
8. Triton is a Delany/Bakhtinian polyphony-text.
9. Triton is a scientific research station.
10. Beyond android cognito—android eros.
Notes:
1. “Saturn’s Titan had proved the hardest moon to colonize. Bigger than Neptune’s Triton, smaller than Jupiter’s Ganymede, it had seemed the ideal moon for humanity. Today, there were only research stations, the odd propane-mine, and Lux—whose major claim was that it bore the same as the far larger city on far smaller Iapetus. The deployment of humanity’s artifacts across Titan’s surface more resembled the deployment across one of the gas giants’ “captured moons”—the under-six-hundred kilometer hunks of rock and ice (like Saturn’s Phoebe, Neptune’s Neriad, or a half-dozen-plus of Jupiter’s smaller orbs) that one theory held to have drifted out from the asteroid belt before being caught in their present orbits. Titan! Its orangeish atmosphere was denser (and colder) than Mars’—though nowhere near as dense as Earth’s. Its surface was marred with pits, rivers, an seas of methane and ammonia sludge.”—Samuel R. Delany, Triton, New York: Bantam, 1976, 342
2. “Meanwhile, the “ambiguous Utopia of Ursula Le Guin’s Dispossessed (1974) was famously challenged by the “ambiguous heterotopia” of Samuel Delany’s Trouble on Tritan (1976), presumably on the grounds that Le Guin’s Marxist view of the modes of production did not, despite its allusions to a revised position on homosexuality in the communist world, sufficiently address the countercultural issues that arose in the “new social movements” of the 1960s and 1970s.”—Fredrik Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, London: Verso, 2005, 144
3. “But caught up in perpetual warfare and organized around total informational surveillance, Triton is the repressive side of Utopia, into which, as a rectification and a kind of supplement of freedom, the unlicensed zone had been introduced: something like the Sade Utopia (“Françoise, encore un effort”), where anything goes and indeed the law requires everything to be permissible (under pain of death); except that here the “anything” is carefully limited, thereby replicating and reproducing that peculiar phenomenon of the boundary and the limit which inaugurates Utopian closure in the first place…”
1. “Saturn’s Titan had proved the hardest moon to colonize.”—Samuel R. Delany, Triton
2. Samuel R. Delany’s Triton is an “ambiguous heterotopia.”
3. Triton is the repressive side of Utopia.
4. Delany’s prosthetics of Triton—culminating in sex changes.
5. Triton is structurally a unique method for apprehending the present as future.
6. Utopia as a genre in our own time.
7. Triton is a socio-political sub-genre.
8. Triton is a Delany/Bakhtinian polyphony-text.
9. Triton is a scientific research station.
10. Beyond android cognito—android eros.
Notes:
1. “Saturn’s Titan had proved the hardest moon to colonize. Bigger than Neptune’s Triton, smaller than Jupiter’s Ganymede, it had seemed the ideal moon for humanity. Today, there were only research stations, the odd propane-mine, and Lux—whose major claim was that it bore the same as the far larger city on far smaller Iapetus. The deployment of humanity’s artifacts across Titan’s surface more resembled the deployment across one of the gas giants’ “captured moons”—the under-six-hundred kilometer hunks of rock and ice (like Saturn’s Phoebe, Neptune’s Neriad, or a half-dozen-plus of Jupiter’s smaller orbs) that one theory held to have drifted out from the asteroid belt before being caught in their present orbits. Titan! Its orangeish atmosphere was denser (and colder) than Mars’—though nowhere near as dense as Earth’s. Its surface was marred with pits, rivers, an seas of methane and ammonia sludge.”—Samuel R. Delany, Triton, New York: Bantam, 1976, 342
2. “Meanwhile, the “ambiguous Utopia of Ursula Le Guin’s Dispossessed (1974) was famously challenged by the “ambiguous heterotopia” of Samuel Delany’s Trouble on Tritan (1976), presumably on the grounds that Le Guin’s Marxist view of the modes of production did not, despite its allusions to a revised position on homosexuality in the communist world, sufficiently address the countercultural issues that arose in the “new social movements” of the 1960s and 1970s.”—Fredrik Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, London: Verso, 2005, 144
3. “But caught up in perpetual warfare and organized around total informational surveillance, Triton is the repressive side of Utopia, into which, as a rectification and a kind of supplement of freedom, the unlicensed zone had been introduced: something like the Sade Utopia (“Françoise, encore un effort”), where anything goes and indeed the law requires everything to be permissible (under pain of death); except that here the “anything” is carefully limited, thereby replicating and reproducing that peculiar phenomenon of the boundary and the limit which inaugurates Utopian closure in the first place…”
—Fredrik Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, London: Verso, 2005, 160
4. “While Delany’s prosthetics—the optional antlers and extra arms and organs of the earlier novels, culminating in the sex changes of Triton—are fundamental exhibits in the new post-human lifestyles designed to replace the older natural ones…”—Fredrik Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, London: Verso, 2005, 163
5. “SF is offered to us in the form of some future world’s remote past, as if posthumous and as though collectively remembered. Not only as an exercise in historical melancholy…of Chandler’s now historic Los Angeles, the burnt-out-center cities of small Midwestern towns, picture-postcard isolation of once characteristic North American “natural” splendor, along with the already cracked and crumbling futuristic architecture of newly built atomic power plants—all these things not seized, immobile forever, in some “end of history,” but moving steadily in time towards some unimaginable yet inevitable “real” future. SF thus enacts and enables a structurally unique “method” for apprehending the present as history…the imaginary future world which is the pretext for the defamiliarization.”—Fredrik Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, London: Verso, 2005, 388
6. “Marcuse has called the utopian imagination—the imagination of otherness and radical difference. It succeeds by failure, and serves as unwitting and even unwilling vehicles for a meditation, which, setting forth for the unknown, finds itself irrevocably mired in the all-to-familiar, and thereby becomes unexpectedly transformed into a contemplation of our own absolute limits. Utopia as a genre in our time. The overt utopian text or discourse has been seen as a sub-variety of SF in general.”—Fredrik Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, London: Verso, 2005, 389
7. “One is reminded of Deleuze’s celebration of the niches of life...the “new social movements” or micropolitics, the social experimentation, the frenzied baroque formations one finds, extensively, in Bruce Sterling’s Schismatrix, or, extensively, in Delany’s Trouble on Triton (Olaf Stapledon, the great precursor in this respect)…As for the economic, to turn our attention to it is at first to recall a certain initial bemusement at Darko Suvin’s language (in the generic definition that we have taken as motto): a “socio-political sub-genre”…but why not a socio-economic one?"—Fredrik Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, London: Verso, 2005, 414
8. “Any new formal solution will, then, need to take into account both the historic originalities of late capitalism—its cybernetic technology as well as its globalizing dynamics… If Utopias can correspond to this kind of multiplicity, then they will assuredly be Delanyian ones, a Bakhtinian polyphony run wild, as with that hyperactive DJ husband of Oedipa Maas of whom his friends say that when he comes through a door, ”the room is suddenly fully of people.” (Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (New York, 1967, 104)—Fredrik Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, London: Verso, 2005, 214
9. “When we first arrived, and for twenty years after that, Mars was like Antarctica but even purer. We were outside the world… That is utopia, especially for scientists. So a scientific research station is actually a little model of prehistoric utopia, carved out of the transnational money economy by clever primates who want to live well.”—Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars (New York, 1993), 309-310.
10. “Blade Runner then signals the passage from the classic or exotic alien to the representation of the alien other as the same, namely the android, whose differentiation from the earlier robot secures a necessarily humanoid form. This reflexivity in the genre, in which our attention and preoccupation as readers turn inward, and meditate on the “android cognito,” which is to say on the gap or flaw in the self as such. But the moment of the android is also the moment of the emergence or intervention of a new narrative twist or fold, namely that of the love interest between human and alien. The SF plot veers into perversion, and sexual intercourse with the alien becoming a figure for everything non-normative or deviant or taboo in human society. This is perhaps the place to mention what is to my mind Samuel Delany’s finest novel, Stars in My Pockets Like Grains of Sand (1984), a unique compendium of distinct forms of otherness."—Fredrik Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, London: Verso, 2005, 141
4. “While Delany’s prosthetics—the optional antlers and extra arms and organs of the earlier novels, culminating in the sex changes of Triton—are fundamental exhibits in the new post-human lifestyles designed to replace the older natural ones…”—Fredrik Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, London: Verso, 2005, 163
5. “SF is offered to us in the form of some future world’s remote past, as if posthumous and as though collectively remembered. Not only as an exercise in historical melancholy…of Chandler’s now historic Los Angeles, the burnt-out-center cities of small Midwestern towns, picture-postcard isolation of once characteristic North American “natural” splendor, along with the already cracked and crumbling futuristic architecture of newly built atomic power plants—all these things not seized, immobile forever, in some “end of history,” but moving steadily in time towards some unimaginable yet inevitable “real” future. SF thus enacts and enables a structurally unique “method” for apprehending the present as history…the imaginary future world which is the pretext for the defamiliarization.”—Fredrik Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, London: Verso, 2005, 388
6. “Marcuse has called the utopian imagination—the imagination of otherness and radical difference. It succeeds by failure, and serves as unwitting and even unwilling vehicles for a meditation, which, setting forth for the unknown, finds itself irrevocably mired in the all-to-familiar, and thereby becomes unexpectedly transformed into a contemplation of our own absolute limits. Utopia as a genre in our time. The overt utopian text or discourse has been seen as a sub-variety of SF in general.”—Fredrik Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, London: Verso, 2005, 389
7. “One is reminded of Deleuze’s celebration of the niches of life...the “new social movements” or micropolitics, the social experimentation, the frenzied baroque formations one finds, extensively, in Bruce Sterling’s Schismatrix, or, extensively, in Delany’s Trouble on Triton (Olaf Stapledon, the great precursor in this respect)…As for the economic, to turn our attention to it is at first to recall a certain initial bemusement at Darko Suvin’s language (in the generic definition that we have taken as motto): a “socio-political sub-genre”…but why not a socio-economic one?"—Fredrik Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, London: Verso, 2005, 414
8. “Any new formal solution will, then, need to take into account both the historic originalities of late capitalism—its cybernetic technology as well as its globalizing dynamics… If Utopias can correspond to this kind of multiplicity, then they will assuredly be Delanyian ones, a Bakhtinian polyphony run wild, as with that hyperactive DJ husband of Oedipa Maas of whom his friends say that when he comes through a door, ”the room is suddenly fully of people.” (Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (New York, 1967, 104)—Fredrik Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, London: Verso, 2005, 214
9. “When we first arrived, and for twenty years after that, Mars was like Antarctica but even purer. We were outside the world… That is utopia, especially for scientists. So a scientific research station is actually a little model of prehistoric utopia, carved out of the transnational money economy by clever primates who want to live well.”—Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars (New York, 1993), 309-310.
10. “Blade Runner then signals the passage from the classic or exotic alien to the representation of the alien other as the same, namely the android, whose differentiation from the earlier robot secures a necessarily humanoid form. This reflexivity in the genre, in which our attention and preoccupation as readers turn inward, and meditate on the “android cognito,” which is to say on the gap or flaw in the self as such. But the moment of the android is also the moment of the emergence or intervention of a new narrative twist or fold, namely that of the love interest between human and alien. The SF plot veers into perversion, and sexual intercourse with the alien becoming a figure for everything non-normative or deviant or taboo in human society. This is perhaps the place to mention what is to my mind Samuel Delany’s finest novel, Stars in My Pockets Like Grains of Sand (1984), a unique compendium of distinct forms of otherness."—Fredrik Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, London: Verso, 2005, 141
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