Resident Marq Dyeth, an 'industrial diplomat' who helps manage the transfer of technology between different societies, is informed that Rat Korga is her perfect sexual match by an associate in the powerful and mysterious Web, an organization that manages information flows between worlds. The action then moves to Velm, a Sygn-aligned world that humanity shares with its native three-sexed intelligent species, the evelm, and where sexual relationships take many forms - monogamous, promiscuous, anonymous, and interspecies. Thus, he serves as a reminder of the possibility of Cultural Fugue and the destruction of a planet, which is part of what makes him so appealing to the inhabitants of Velm.

According to Reid-Pharr, Rat Korga represents the remnants of disaster. At the time of the disaster, Rat Korga was deep underground inside a refrigerated room, allowing him to survive (though badly injured), and making him the only known being to survive his world's destruction, and possibly Cultural Fugue. It is left up to debate whether Rat's world was destroyed by 'Cultural Fugue' or by the mysterious Xlv spacecraft who were present in the Rhyonon system when the disaster occurred. Monologues: Visible and Invisible Persons Distributed in Space After he has lived under a number of masters, all life on the surface of Rat Korga's world is destroyed by a conflagration. From then on he will be known as Rat Korga. 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 will be happy'. The novel opens with a prologue set on the planet Rhyonon. In an attempt to find a stable defense against the phenomenon known as Cultural Fugue (a process where 'socioeconomic pressures 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.

Many of these worlds are shared with intelligent nonhumans, although only one alien species (the mysterious Xlv) also possesses faster-than-light travel. The novel takes place in a distant future in which diverse human societies have developed on some 6,000 planets.

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. Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (1984) is a science fiction novel by Samuel R. The Splendor and Misery of Bodies, of Cities (unfinished)

Triton samuel delany