Trouble on Triton by Samuel R. Delany

I didn’t really understand the point of this book. Aside from being a speculative fiction concerned with creating a possible future (published in 1976), there’s some kind of point he’s making about gender roles, but I’ve really got no idea what that point is.

The blurb on the back says “…Bron Helstrom– an immigrant to the embattled world of Triton, whose troubles become more and more complex, till there is nothing left for him to do but become a woman.” It doesn’t make any more sense when you read it. Something about how he is a certain rare kind of man (as far as I can understand, a “jerk”), and that type of person is even more rare in women, and in order to save the human race he needs to change genders and find a man like himself in order to be happy. Or something like that. I dunno. Also, there’s some sort of war going on between Earth and the outer planets. And men and women are the same height because we stop discriminating in the 21st Century.

It’s not as big a deal to switch genders in this future because it takes about 3 and a half hours, including physical changes, changing your Y chromosome to X and reversing your sexual orientation (if desired).

I was tempted multiple times to abandon the book, but just about then I’d come into an interesting passage about genetics or something similar, and that’d give me some more momentum.

Like all Science Fiction of past decades, it’s amusing to see where the authors get it (likely) wrong and where they get it right. In the wrong case, he assumes that data is still stored on “tape” in 2112, on the other hand he predicts that the human genome will be sequenced in the early 21st century.

Of course, maybe they will store data on some sort of super-Tape in the future. What do I know?