82 pages
Published 1967
Read from June 5 to June 6
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
An especially brief novella I found reprinted in a line of doubles Tor ran in the 1980s. It doesn’t even appear as a novel on Delany’s Wikipedia bibliography; it’s listed as a short story. Nonetheless, it deserves a slow, appreciative reading.
Delany’s careful poetry shapes a picture of space dreadful and vast and tragic and beautiful, seen from a blue collar perspective that’s become common only in recent years. It also features normalized pansexual group marriage.
I enjoyed the story’s worldbuilding conceit that reality breaks down in the empty space beyond the galaxy, inflicting psychological damage on brains exposed to it; it makes the cosmos strange and threatening in a way rarely seen in classic sci-fi.
The story’s second worldbuilding prop, the golden, are people too sociopathic or unthinking to be affected by the shift in reality. Presaging Gateway ten years later, the economy of humanity is reliant on what the golden bring back from beyond the galaxy. Sociopaths and dumbasses lording over everyone else, controlling new technology and the economy, having free rein to travel where they will, while working class folk get stuck in dead-end spirals on hell-hole industrial worlds? It feels oddly prescient here in 2025.
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