It’s not all just proximity, or Kalp needing tenderness and caring after his mates had died it’s that Pierson and Grey are the right people for him, just as he was perhaps the only person who could actually add something to their twosome rather than take it away. We see him getting to know Pierson and Grey as people, and falling for them both as they also fall for him - and there are logical reasons as to why this happens. We see him live in an “alien barracks,’ and the two heroes, Pierson and Grey, taking him out of there. We see him trying to assimilate into our culture. The next section is Kalp’s section in his own point of view. And mostly, the time travel tells them much more about themselves than they’d ever expected, even though it does give them an answer as to who killed Kalp, and why. Time travel is only one of the conceits, here that we’re back in time into the early 1980s means that Pierson and Grey feel nearly as alien compared to the humans they meet back then as Kalp feels in 2011-2.

TRIPTYCH starts off with Kalp dead and Pierson and Grey having gone into the past to find out why he’s been killed. See, Kalp is a keen observer and understands that Pierson and Grey have a long-term relationship going on - but he doesn’t see why he can’t be part of that, because he really doesn’t understand why human relationships should always stay “just” as twosomes, because in his own culture, marriages come in threes. As the sole survivor of his marriage, he feels completely adrift this, perhaps, is why he resonates so strongly to Pierson and Grey when he meets them. Kalp is an extremely sympathetic figure he lost his mates in the scramble to get off-world (a terrible disaster occurred, and only a single spaceship managed to get off-planet before the world was destroyed). “We all want sex,” so goes this treatment - “even aliens.

He is innocent in a way that’s hard to describe, but easy to spot - and it’s an innocence that treats sex and sexuality in a clean, matter-of-fact way.

Heinlein’s STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND - except that he’s an alien, Kalp has many of the same characteristics as RAH’s character. It’s easiest to describe Kalp, who you might want to think of as similar to Valentine Michael Smith in Robert A. Basil Grey, and from the perspective of the alien Kalp - and all work. Frey’s TRIPTYCH does the nearly impossible - it’s a love story with remarkable depth, it’s a debut novel written with the assurance of a master, and it describes humanity in three different ways: from the perspective of scientist heroine Gwen Pierson, from the perspective of engineer hero Dr.

Triptych by J.M. Frey