Samuel R. Delany’s Triton, later renamed Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia reprises the traditional science fiction utopia. However, the novel borrows the term “heterotopia” to refer to an unconventional place: his utopia is full of difference and exists beyond the scope of expectation. Triton, the moon of Neptune where the story takes place, is indeed one such heterotopia, for it is a high-tech, futuristic society that has evolved without limits and shed the bounds of conventional governance to discard archaic gender and sexual expectations. Tritonians live with lax governments that allow them to explore themselves without restriction. As such, their lives are constantly evolving, crisscrossing the lines of gender and sexuality with ease. The novel follows a narrator much opposed to this lifestyle: Bron Helstrom, a former male prostitute from Mars now living on Triton in search of happiness and fulfillment. Delany’s choice of narrator is interesting, for Bron is everything Triton is not; he is an egocentric twentieth-century man clinging tightly to his masculinity and heterosexuality who abhors all he does not understand.

Writing in a limited third-person perspective and exclusively following Bron’s thoughts and actions, Delany situates the story’s tolerant otherness in the interiority of a man on the outside. At every turn, his narrator rejects the world Delany has built for him, so the novel environment of Triton is revealed to the reader through the perspective of a skeptical, disillusioned outsider. In this heterotopia, where people flit between gender expression and sexuality identifications at will, Bron’s displeasure is unexpected. He feels his environment is bizarre and focuses purely on physical appearance in all his interactions, alluding to his sexuality and history as a prostitute. Bron begins to feel confused about himself and tries to twist and manipulate his being to become someone else, eventually transitioning to a woman. However, this causes him to struggle even more deeply with his identity, so he reverses the operation. The novel follows Bron as he reconciles his masculinity and heterosexuality and wrestles with lives he does not understand. Though Bron cannot escape who he is, he struggles to understand the diversity of experiences around him, and, as the novel progresses, he makes a token effort to better himself as a person.

Triton, as with much of Delany’s writing, utilizes the science fiction genre as a tool for social critique and heavily thematic arguments. As such, his work tends to avoid hard science fiction conventions that demand scientific plausibility, and Triton is no different. The settlement of Mars, Neptune’s moons, and other far-off regions have little context, and the technology mentioned is granted little explanation or rationalization. This is not a demerit, for Delany’s work explores sociocultural “what-if” speculations rather than scientific ones. The prose, too, is short, jolting, and almost staccato. Each sentence is relatively brief, jumping from point to point without any extravagance. This illuminates the future state in which the world is kept passive by the easy entertainment and stimulation available at every turn. In this society, anyone can receive pleasure or gratification immediately, which is shown in the almost attention-deficit nature of Delany's writing. The characters are accustomed to changing their identity at will if they so choose, so they know that reality is theirs to mold. Because of this, they do not need to wait for gratification, and their attention spans have become greatly limited.