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1984 novel by Samuel R. Delany

Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (1984) is a science fiction novel by Samuel R. Delany. It is part of what would have been a "diptych", in Delany's description, of which the second half, The Splendor and Misery of Bodies, of Cities, remains unfinished.

The novel takes place in a distant future in which diverse human societies have developed on some 6,000 planets. Many of these worlds are shared with intelligent nonhumans, although only one alien species (the mysterious Xlv) also possesses faster than light travel. In an attempt to find a stable defense against the phenomenon known as Cultural Fugue (a process where "socioeconomic pressures [reach] a point of technological recomplication and perturbation where the population completely destroys all life across the planetary surface"), many human worlds have aligned themselves with one of two broad factions: the Sygn, which promotes and celebrates social diversity, and the Family, which promotes adherence to an idealized norm of human relations modeled on the nuclear family.

The novel opens with a prologue set on the planet Rhyonon. Korga, a tall, "ugly", misfit youth, undergoes the Radical Anxiety Termination, or RAT, procedure, a form of psychosurgery, after which he "will be a slave" "but [he] will be happy".

Marq contemplates his loss of Rat Korga. She learns from Japril, a friend of hers in the Web who set up her initial meeting with Korga, that their "experiment didn't work" and that it was "too dangerous" to leave Korga on Velm, due to the threat of Cultural Fugue. The reader learns more about the nuances of Marq's sexual attraction and her desire for Korga. According to Avilez, Marq's desire for Korga disrupts the power held by the Web. Quoting directly from the novel, Foster claims that "[t]he utopian project of this novel resides in its attempt to imagine a future setting in which 'the 'fragmented subject' is at its healthiest, happiest, and most creative because society and economics contrive to make questions of unity and centerness irrelevant'" This theme of fractured identity is part of Delany's own postmodern critique of identity that treats social categories like race, sexuality, gender, and class as absolute and static.

In his essay Clean, Robert F. Reid Pharr argues that what Delany achieves in Stars "is a thematization of the complex ways the spectacle of gay male identity is established through a set of essentially ritualistic practices wherein the gay man is figured clean or more precisely cleansing." The character of Korga, and his movement through RAT procedures into liberation and then to corporate slavery exemplifies this process in Stars, and Reid Pharr also suggests a connection in this method of identity construction between the gay male subject and the subject position of the African American slave. Delany explores issues related to miscegenation through his employment of the Thant family in the novel. The Thants do not approve of the mixed family status of Dyeth family, which is an adoptive family including both humans and evelmi, six legged, many tongued, three sexed beings that are the original inhabitants of their planet, Velm. Delany also broaches the question of consent, as it relates to one's enslavement, by depicting characters, such as Rat Korga, having the option to choose to go into slavery. In fact, one cannot be enslaved in the novel, without explicit consent. This is exemplified in beginning of the novel, when Rat Korga is asked to verbally consent by another character who is handling the enslavement process. "Say 'yes.' We need a voiceprint of the actual word; this is being recorded. Otherwise it isn't legal."

Dr. Paivi Väätänen argues that Delany changes the logic of gender, sexuality, and language, confusing the reader, but perpetuating a liberal rejection of heteronormativity. Sexual identity is extremely liberal in Morgre due to the South of Velm's political alignment with the Sygn. Although, homosexuality is not overly prevalent, it is accepted, normalised, and spoken about freely amongst the people there. Marq discusses how in the city in Morgre there are “more varied kinds of sex” However, humans are referred to as male or female, depending on their sex organs, even though most of the time, the reader is left without an explanation of whether a human is male or female. The reader is told that evelmi can be male, female or neuter (all of which can become pregnant) but particular evelmi are never identified as such. This sexual and gender ambiguity and fluidity deconstructs binary structures of identity. While Stars in My Pocket like Grains of Sand provides an alternative and unconventional relationship between humanity and the natural world, Delany reminds the reader to be critical about the extent in which the social distortions in the novel are actually “distant” from the current social order. As a result, Stars in My Pocket like Grains of Sand critiques and disrupts contemporary understandings of the world. These ruptures occur in from Delany’s use of third person gender pronouns, to the redefinition of family and kinship, to the concept of technicity (technologically driven modes of social differentiation and belonging). By forcing the reader to constantly go through these breaks and fissures in their social understandings, Delany reveals "the arbitrariness of these signifiers, their contingency and openness to recontextualization as they move across worlds, literally and figuratively."

Stars has a number of plot elements that are similar to certain elements in Triton. Most notable is the presence in both novels of the General Information service, although it is more sophisticated in Stars (one need merely think a question for GI to place the knowledge in one's mind, as opposed to Triton's GI which takes questions on machines similar to modern computers). Both novels also feature aboveground and institutionalized versions of gay male cruising spaces, although open to all genders and sexual preferences; in Triton the protagonist visits such a space in the form of an indoor club, while in Stars the protagonists visit one of their city's many parklike runs set aside for that purpose. Finally, the Family/Sygn conflict in Stars is similar to the conflict between the social systems of Earth and the Outer Satellites in Triton; a "Sygn" is present in Triton, but is a minor religious cult mentioned very briefly. Delany's short story "Omegahelm" (found in Aye, and Gomorrah, and other stories) is set in the same universe as Stars; it concerns Vondramach Okk (see above) and her one attempt to have a child. In a 2001 interview, Delany gave this brief summary:

"The book was conceived of as a city novel. For the bulk of it, the main characters, Rat and Marq, try to make their home in a city on the other side of the planet Velm from the one Marq was born and raised in. Then they have to journey back to Dyethshome, in an educational trip across Marq's world. In the course of it, a number of things that once looked pretty fair in volume one turn out not to be so pleasant in volume two." Splendor is unfinished, and is unlikely to ever be finished. Delany has stated two reasons for this in various writings and public appearances. First, much of the creative impetus for Stars came from his relationship with his then partner, Frank Romeo (to whom the novel is dedicated); this relationship ended soon after the novel was published, removing much of Delany's creative energy related to the project. Second, the novel was published just as AIDS was becoming an epidemic in the gay culture Delany was immersed in, changing it in a way that shifted Delany's writing priorities. In fact, Stars was the last of Delany's major science fiction projects until 2012's Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders. As seen in 1984: Selected Letters, at the time Stars was published his relationship with his publisher, Bantam, underwent a major rupture, with Bantam declining to print the final volume of the Return to Nevèrÿon series, Return to Nevèrÿon (eventually published by Arbor House as The Bridge of Lost Desire). Delany's works largely went out of print in the immediately following years, and he turned to academia for his living, taking up the first of his professorial posts in 1988, at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Dave Langford reviewed Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand for White Dwarf #81, and stated that "Neither mystery nor romance is resolved, all that being kept for Book Two – fearfully titled The Splendour and Misery of Bodies, of Cities. Book One is brilliant, uneven, insufferable, an important piece of SF." Carl Freedman referred to it as being "one of the most assured masterworks of modern American fiction."

The British musical group Opus III's first album, Mind Fruit, included the song "Stars in my Pocket", with lyrics referencing the novel. Referenced by Cam O'bi in the Noname song "Diddy Bop", from her Telefone mixtape. Hip hop group Clipping's second album is a science fiction concept album titled Splendor & Misery, and the lyrics include the continuation, "of bodies, of cities".

Bantam, 1984, 368 pp., hardcover. Bantam Spectra, 1985, 368 pp., paperback. QPB/Bantam, 1985, 368 pp., paperback. no ISBN
Grafton/Panther, 1986, 464 pp., paperback,
Bantam Spectra, 1990, 385 pp., paperback, , adds a 10 page afterword on postmodernism
Wesleyan University Press, 2004, 356 pp., paperback. , adds a foreword by Carl Freedman