It became a bestseller, however, and other critics saw it as his most successfully ambitious work to date. An anonymous youth, the Kid, comes to the violent, nihilist city of Belona, where order has fled and there are two moons in the sky, though the rest of the near-future USA is apparently normal. He becomes and artists, couples and fights, and writes a book that might be Dhalgren before leaving the city. The opening sentence completes the unfinished final sentence and an enigmatic circle. It is a book primarily about the possibilities and difficulties of a youth culture, and partly about being a writer.
Triton is more traditionally structured, but in some ways more sophisticated.
The book poses interesting questions about sexuality, and also about freedom of choice. Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand , the first volume of a projected diptych, is an exotic piece set in a galactic civilization. A complex narrative again asks questions about the arbitrary and parochial nature of our ethical expectations, using various forms of enjoyed degradation to make the point. It is probably SRD's more important work of the 1980s. SRD's treatment of the idea of bondage, for example, is infinitely more sophisticated, and somewhat more elusive, than that of, say, John Norman in the Gor books.