Style
Stars employs many stylistic tropes that reinforce the differences between contemporary thinking and the thinking of the novel's far-future setting.
- As mentioned above, the Velm sections of the novel assign an alternate meaning to the pronouns "he" and "she" not related to physical gender. All characters, whether they are human males or females or evelm males, females, or neuters, are referred to as "she" in most contexts, and "woman" and "womankind" are used as generic terms for humans. The normally male pronouns such as "he" or "him" are used to denote sexual interest in the subject by the speaker.
- Words relating to work and occupations are subscripted (for example, job1, job2, job3) to indicate whether the work involved is one's central "life's work", a different work that one still habitually performs, or an occupation taken up temporarily. Marq Dyeth is consistently called an industrial diplomat1, as that is his job1, but at home he works2 as a docent2 for visitors to his famous residence; in his youth, he worked3 for a time as a tracer3, a Velmian occupation tracking the flow of resources through the economy. This usage derives from Alfred Korzybski's general semantics.
- Unusual terms are used for what seem to be familiar concepts; for example, "geosector" is used consistently instead of "nation" or "country", and "nurture stream" in the Velm sections instead of "family" (when referring to the Velmian version of a family; the "Family," the galactic faction, is referred to by that term). Also, familiar terms, such as "room", "hunt," and "dinner party," refer to things very much unlike what they refer to in our world.
- Residents of Velm use five cardinal directions instead of four: north, east, south, oest, and west.
- The central sense of the evelm is taste, rather than sight, and both evelm and Velmian humans (including Marq) use many phrases and metaphors relating to taste and the tongue where English speakers would use a visual metaphor (saying something "tastes good" instead of "looks good," for example). In fact, the evelm have multiple tongues and can use them to speak multiple things simultaneously, something that is shown typographically in the novel.
- Delany makes notable use of common American colloquialisms. Examples include the phrases "baker's dozen", "fiddle" (verb form), "super-handy-dandy", and "have the dope on", to name a few. These words and phrases jar with the futuristic alien landscape of the novel, and the strange, technological vocabulary employed throughout.
Read more about this topic: Stars In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand
Famous quotes containing the word style:
“The authoritarian child-rearing style so often found in working-class families stems in part from the fact that parents see around them so many young people whose lives are touched by the pain and delinquency that so often accompanies a life of poverty. Therefore, these parents live in fear for their children’s future—fear that they’ll lose control, that the children will wind up on the streets or, worse yet, in jail.”
—Lillian Breslow Rubin (20th century)
“A style does not go out of style as long as it adapts itself to its period. When there is an incompatibility between the style and a certain state of mind, it is never the style that triumphs.”
—Coco Chanel (1883–1971)
“Where there is no style, there is in effect no point of view. There is, essentially, no anger, no conviction, no self. Style is opinion, hung washing, the calibre of a bullet, teething beads.... One’s style holds one, thankfully, at bay from the enemies of it but not from the stupid crucifixions by those who must willfully misunderstand it.”
—Alexander Theroux (b. 1940)