In an attempt to find a stable defense against the phenomenon known as Cultural Fugue (a process where "socioeconomic pressures [reach] a point of technological recomplication and perturbation where the population completely destroys all life across the planetary surface"), many human worlds have aligned themselves with one of two broad factions: the Sygn, which promotes and celebrates social diversity, and the Family, which promotes adherence to an idealized norm of human relations modeled on the nuclear family.

Korga, a tall, "ugly", misfit youth, undergoes the Radical Anxiety Termination, or RAT, procedure, a form of psychosurgery, after which he "will be a slave" "but [he] will be happy".

It is left up to debate whether Rat's world was destroyed by "Cultural Fugue" or by the mysterious Xlv spacecraft who were present in the Rhyonon system when the disaster occurred.

The action then moves to Velm, a Sygn-aligned world that humanity shares with its native three-sexed intelligent species, the evelm, and where sexual relationships take many forms — monogamous, promiscuous, anonymous, and interspecies.

Equipping him with a prosthesis (the rings of Vondramach Okk, a tyrant who once ruled ten planets and employed of one of Marq's ancestors) that restores the initiative he lost due to the RAT procedure, the Web sends Rat Korga to Velm under the pretext that he is a student, and he and Marq begin a romantic and sexual affair.

The dinner soon becomes chaotic due to the disruptive presence of the Thants and the ever-growing group gathering outside to show their interest in Rat Korga.

Marq overhears the Thants making derogatory comments toward the evelmi, and calling the people of the South of Velm "lizard-loving perverts".

According to Avilez, Rat represents the hidden secret of what happened to Rhyanon, a fact which has caused an upheaval of society and poses a threat to the Web.

[3] Thomas Foster argues that Stars in My Pocket treats "fractured subjectivity" as a natural condition by representing "nonnormative racial, sexual, and familiar formations and practices" as normal within Marq's world.

[4] Quoting directly from the novel, Foster claims that "[t]he utopian project of this novel resides in its attempt to imagine a future setting in which 'the 'fragmented subject' is at its healthiest, happiest, and most creative because society and economics contrive... to make questions of unity and centerness irrelevant'" [4][5] This theme of fractured identity is part of Delany's own postmodern critique of identity that treats social categories like race, sexuality, gender, and class as absolute and static.

Dr. Paivi Väätänen argues that Delany changes the logic of gender, sexuality, and language, confusing the reader, but perpetuating a liberal rejection of heteronormativity.

When Korga remarks that on Rhyanon, people spoke of both women and men, Marq replies, 'I know the word "man"...It's an archaic term.

These ruptures occur in from Delany’s use of third-person gender pronouns, to the redefinition of family and kinship, to the concept of technicity (technologically driven modes of social differentiation and belonging).

[10] By forcing the reader to constantly go through these breaks and fissures in their social understandings, Delany reveals "the arbitrariness of these signifiers, their contingency and openness to recontextualization…as they move across worlds, literally and figuratively.

Delany's works largely went out of print in the immediately following years, and he turned to academia for his living, taking up the first of his professorial posts in 1988, at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Dave Langford reviewed Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand for White Dwarf #81, and stated that "Neither mystery nor romance is resolved, all that being kept for Book Two – fearfully titled The Splendour and Misery of Bodies, of Cities.