Susan Sontag, in a charmingly naive essay, has pointed out some of the structural similarities between pornography and science fiction. In the past decade a number of writers, with varying aesthetic success, have moved back and forth from one to the other (e.g., Philip José Farmer, Theodore Sturgeon, Glen Cook, Andrew Offutt, and Richard Geis). Delany’s primary dramatic purpose, sounded in the novel’s opening line, is to give a significant portrait, and ultimately a sympathetic one, of a monster—a laudable science fiction theme if there ever was one, dating from Frankenstein. But Delany has transferred his theme pornography: his monster is a sexual human.

We are romantically conditioned to extend—while we can remain at a safe distance—much sympathy to the human creature who errs into the monstrous. But once we have decided that the man or woman walking on two legs, with two hands, a brain and a mouth, really is a monster, we become monstrously cruel. Delany’s characters are monsters; they are not merely deluded or mistaken in their actions. They are psychotic, they are depraved, they are selfish and vicious, but they are not deluded: Even though the worst of Harkner’s crimes are committed in a psychotic half-trance, he can say, when the trance is past: “I don’t want anybody to feel sorry for me … I’d kill a mother-fucker for that.” Future crimes, as heinous as the ones already done, are by no means out of the question. And the reader must close the book aware of it. The job of sympathetic portraiture here is a huge one.