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Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 15 hrs and 33 mins
- Categories: LGBTQ+, Science Fiction & Fantasy
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Summary
The story of a truly galactic civilization with more than 6,000 inhabited worlds.
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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What listeners say about Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand
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- G. Benett
- 14-04-20
Masterwork of postmodern fiction
This, my introduction to Delaney, is a mind-expanding, category-shattering novel rich in characters both familar and unfathomably Other. As prescient as William Gibson's cyberpunk (both the Web and a kind of universal Wikipedia are present) and as ethnographically subtle as Ursula Le Guin's Hainish books, with sophisticated flavors from queer theory and Sapir-Whorf throughout, "Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand" is both ingenious sci-fi narrative and an experiment in literary cultural criticism. Two formal comments. One, the reading is excellent but bassy, such that it works better in a room than a car. Driving, I had to continually adjust the volume or repeat passages. Two, this is a work so inventive that many of the words and some of the ideas (such as contrapuntal speech by multiple tongues) are better seen than heard. I picked up a used copy of the text and found it added greatly to my sense of the book. A wonderful, sophisticated read, highly recommended.
4 people found this helpful
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Overall

- Jarod
- 27-06-19
3 hours in and still no plot.
I gave up - it was to the point where I couldn't tell if I'd been listening to the same chapter over and over. I could not make myself focus on listening to this book.
3 people found this helpful