Short Story Collection by Samuel R. Delaney.
Contents and Comments
- The Star Pit 1966 -- Although FTL travel is possible, travel outside the galaxy is impossible because men and machines break down. The Golden are the few people able to withstand the breakdown (by being insane already, in very specific ways). There is a neat running analogy with enclosed ecologies (similar to ant farms) and human society.
- Dog in a Fisherman's Net 1971
- Corona 1967 -- also published in another collection, Distant Stars
- Aye, and Gomorrah 1967 -- originally published in Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions, this is a world where neutered astronauts spend significant amounts of their off-time having some kind of never-specified sex with planetbound perverts called frelks.
- Driftglass 1967 -- the title story is the first in this collection that deals with power lines. Aquamen, modified water breathing humans, lay the lines across the ocean. The main character, crippled trying to lay a line in an offshore trench, watches from onshore as another tries to do the same thing years later, with less luck. The title comes from the lead character's collecting of seaglass.
- We, In Some Strange Power's Employ, Move In A Rigorous Line 1968 -- a variation on the theme, power crews circling the globe, tying us all into one people. But there are a few out of the way spots without power/communications. A crew of "line-devils" attempts to convert one such enclave, a group of high-flying Hell's Angels. Also collected in Distant Stars.
- Cage of Brass 1968 -- a prison break in a future pen where you spend 23 hours/day in a sensory deprivation coffin, prevented from harming yourself... A quiet story, entirely dialog between three prisoners except for the first and last two paragraphs.
- High Weir 1968 -- Discovery of the traces of a vanished Martian civilization. Did it drive the main character crazy or was he inevitably headed there anyway?
- Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones 1969 -- The tale of a criminal on his way up, in a world that I believe to be early in the future history that leads to Triton and from there to Stars In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand. Also published in Distant Stars and _World's Best Science Fiction: 1969_.
- Night and the Loves of Joe Dicostanzo 1970 -- I just don't get this story. Anyone who wants to explain it, or Dog in a Fisherman's Net, is welcome to try.