140 pages
Published 1964
Read from April 29 to May 1
Rating: 2.5 out of 5
One of the local book barns had its season opening recently. For once, they had a pile of old pulpy sci-fi novels, including a few boxes of Ace Doubles. No way I could pass up a Delany novel in an Ace Double for $2, even if it is a Delany novel I’ve literally never heard of. On researching it, I learned that it’s a sequel to another Ace Double book, Captives of the Flame, which explains the density of world-building and backstory in its early pages.
Fifteen hundred years in the future, on an irradiated Earth largely inimical to human life outside certain oases protected by radiation barriers, an isolated kingdom develops teleportation technology. They use this to wage war on the other surviving terrestrial enclaves, but they also discover that the universe is home to two other teleporting races, both of them psychic collective consciousnesses, one benevolent, one amoral. The story also features telepathic giants and neo-Neanderthals. A bunch of characters can turn invisible when the lighting is right. There are lightsabers and a circus and a man with a half-mechanical face.
At its heart, Toron is about war and how the powerful utilize it as a tool for distraction and control. At times, the book gets lost in the weeds of Delany’s worldbuilding; I probably should have waited to get my hands on Captives and read that first, but I’m not convinced it would have helped. That said, even in its half-baked condition, this is undeniably a Delany novel. Its richness of creativity, its dissection of propaganda and the dehumanization of colonialism, the occasional breathtaking prose (including the most poetic description of someone’s death by disintegration I’ve ever read), all of it is solidly Delany, even if the book as a whole feels somewhat lacking. The ending alone makes it worth the read.
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