James Tiptree Jr.Besprekingen

Beautifully produced book and an interesting collection but not a patch on Her Smoke Rose up Forever. Every story in the latter was a winner - this is much more of a mixed bag.

She's a bit savage and dark, but this book really delivered. I had only read one of these stories before, in an old anthology, but it had stuck with me--so it was nice to return to the accomplished style and craft of the woman behind the pseudonym.

The Only Neat Thing to Do: 5
Good Night, Sweethearts: 4
Collision: 3

Ce roman court de James Tiptree, pseudonyme d'Alice Sheldon, est un classique de la science-fiction. Paru en 1976, il met en scène trois astronautes américains dont le vaisseau s'est perdu dans l'espace et le temps. Ils sont secourus par un vaisseau venant de la Terre mais trois siècles plus tard. À cette période, la population de la Terre a été réduite à une portion congrue, une épidémie fulgurante n'ayant laissée que onze milles femmes survivantes et aucun homme. Le vaisseau qui récupère les trois astronautes n'est donc peuplé que de femmes. Ces dernières tentent de préserver les trois hommes en leur cachant la réalité. Mais l'un des trois hommes, le seul scientifique, découvre petit à petit la vérité. Puis il comprend que les femmes, vivant sans hommes depuis si longtemps, ne peuvent et ne veulent que leur société, dont elles sont pleinement satisfaites, réintègrent la masculinité. Les trois hommes sont alors assassinés par absorption d'une drogue mortelle.
Le roman est très bien construit et on comprend pourquoi il a obtenu de nombreux prix car il dénote vraiment de la production de l'époque où la masculinité était prépondérante et les voix féminines très peu nombreuses. Alors certes, par moment, le texte, dont la traduction a pourtant été actualisée en 2023, et les idées qu'il véhicule, semble un peu daté. Mais cela reste un tout petit point négatif qui ne gêne que très peu la lecture. Merci aux éditions Le Bélial' d'avoir réédité ce roman court qui a marqué une génération.

This trilogy of Tiptree short stories is held together by a framework that sets them as "historical" documents from the time when the human race was exploring their galaxy. Two of them touch briefly on how reproductive patterns of nonterrestrial races might differ from (and cause confusion or conflict with) human expectations. One deals with the curious social effects arising from the "coldsleep" that allowed humans to survive decades-long journeys in pre-FTL spacecraft. All are imbued with Tiptree's vividly-imagined future worlds.

Perhaps the best example of Tiptree's ability to go beyond space-opera here is the middle story, 'Goodnight, Sweethearts'. The basic plot is pretty straight-up adventure, wherein the loner protagonist (who runs a sort of roadside-assistance service, but in space) realizes the private liner he has just assisted has now blundered into the arms of the regional bad guys, and he's compelled, for various reasons, to attempt a rescue. His motivation is less altruistic than romantic -- one of the passengers is a woman with whom he has a romantic past.

Now, this sounds pretty much by-the-numbers, but Tiptree is also developing a strong undercurrent here of how futuristic technologies might impact everything from treatment for PTSD to what happens to personal relationships when lifespans can be extended into centuries by the suspended animation required for decades-long journeys through space. Ultimately, these factors lead the protagonist smack into a devastating moral choice -- but not necessarily the one readers might expect.

I enjoyed this short set of interconnected novellas set in the same universe as the Tiptree/Sheldon novel, Brightness Falls From the Air. The framing device here felt a bit clunky but the stories themselves are of the fun, pulpy variety. They are more about the characters and the situations in which they find themselves rather than about hard sci-fi, so readers will likely have a better time if they don't go into this expecting to find science and space travel ideas that conform to actual physics.

The first story, The Only Neat Thing To Do, starts off with a very 'James H. Schmitz' type of feel to it with a plucky young heroine zipping off to adventure in her new spaceship, (without her parent's permission). But the story takes a very non-Schmitz-like darker turn that leads to a rather poignant ending. Story #2, Good Night, Sweet Hearts is the weakest of the three, but still not bad. Time-dilation, clones, and space pirates! The third tale, Collision, is also the longest and centers around an exploratory mission across The Rift that stumbles upon a new alien species. Half the tale, similar to Asimov's The Gods Themselves, is told from the alien's perspective, which lends an extra dimension to what is, in the end, a fairly standard alien contact story. That said, the characterization is good and the aliens are nicely realized.

Overall, this is a decent entry in Tiptree's catalog. It is not her best work but is still worth checking out if you are already a fan.½

This is 3 short stories linked together by a brief framework of research being done by a librarian for a pair of students. The only thing the stories have in common is the setting of "the rift" a largely unexplored region of space.
It's a mixed lot of stories that do not really work well together.

The groundbreaking and fantastical tales of Alice B. Sheldon, written under the pen name James Tiptree Jr., are some of the best science fiction short stories of the twentieth century, depicting dystopian chases, alien sex, and the loneliness of the universe.
"What her writing offered to the genre was a blend of poetry and ingenuity, as if some poet had rewritten a number of deftly written science fiction standards and then passed them on to a psychiatrist," said one reviewer.

En los turbulentos campos de energía de un planeta distante, los nativos descubren que una enorme criatura interestelar se desplaza destruyendo sistemas planetarios, en apariencia creando una zona de vacío que protegerá a los sistemas exteriores de una explosión galáctica. Intentando comunicarse con esta vasta criatura, las gentes del lejano planeta entran en contacto con los terrestres, y juntos encuentran un nuevo y sorprendente modo de vivir.

5 stars from my teenage self who read it new, probably honestly would only get 3 from my current self if it hadn't been a favorite at that age.

This was Tiptree's first published anthology, a collection of her early SF stories; it's a shame that I'd previously read a collection of her outstanding later work, because these suffer by comparison. Tiptree's work is known for its sharp, sometimes blistering takes on power structures, especially sexual, chauvinistic, or military-industrial, but these stories here just hint at that with wisps of playfulness (ie, "I'll Be Waiting For You When the Swimming Pool is Empty"), or pathos ("Forever to a Hudson Bay Blanket"), or tragic consequences ("The Peacefulness of Vivyan"). Worse, the pacing and editing of most of these are so typical of late-'60s/early-'70s SF mags that there's not much to set these above any workaday stories by some anonymous writers (apologies to Harrison, Pohl, and whoever else was editor of the day). These are fine taken for what they are, but these stories just do not stand proud above the heap. It's clear that Tiptree really honed her craft through the 1970s, but I'm a bit let down by the more humble beginnings. Go for a later collection instead, such as "Out of the Everywhere."

I hadn't read any Tiptree before this; her stories are strong, and this anthology makes me want to read more. This is a very good collection, reflecting a strong, wry wit and a healthy discomfort with any bellicose and sexist society. Only one story here dragged for me; I found "Slow Music" both drawn out and trite, a long doggerel a bit too precious and without much final pay-off. On the other and more positive hand, the first story in the collection ("Angel Fix") is flat-out funny, the last two are brilliant, and "We Who Stole the 'Dream'" is ruefully memorable. This collection is definitely worth recommending.½

Of her two novels, I like this one the best.

I already knew she was my favorite short story writer, so...

Esta colección de cuentos de la autora de "En la cima del mundo", publicados entre los años 1969 y 1976, reúne algunas de las historias más admirables de "James Tiptree Jr.", entre ellas la muy famosa "Houston, Houston, ¿me recibe?", Premio Nébula 1976.

4.5 los dos novelas
5 stars Houston, Houston, Do You Read?
4 stars Souls

"Souls," Joanna Russ, 4 stars
Somewhere in England (?) And in time, there is an abby, and an abbess. A Viking ship comes to steal their treasures and rape their nuns and make slaves of their folk.
The abbess is a wise nun, who never panicked when the Vikings came to ravage the Abby. She instead talks to the leader:
" '..you are a very clever man, torvald. I beg your pardon, Thorvald. I keep forgetting. But as to what men want from women, if you ask the young men, they would only wink and dig one another in the ribs, but that is only how they deceive themselves. That is only body calling to body. They themselves want something quite different and they want it so much that it frightens them. So they pretend it is anything and everything else: pleasure, comfort, a servant in the home. Do you know what it is that they want?'
'What?' Said Thorvald.
'The mother,' said Radegunde, 'as women do, too; we all want the mother...' "
I agree.

Inside of the Abbess, there is another being. All these years Radegunde has been playing the Abbess, the mother Superior. When Thorvald and his men attack the Abby, and break their promise not to hurt the inhabitants, it brings forth The hidden Radegunde:
" '...he said, 'out of my way then, old witch!'
She began to cry in sobs and gulps. She said, 'one is here but another will come! One is buried but another will rise! She will come, Thorvalvd!' and then in a low, quick voice, 'do not push open this last door. There is one behind it who is evil and I am afraid' --but one could see that he was angry and disappointed and would not listen. He struck her for a second time and again she fell, but with a desperate cry, covering her face with her hands...
...I could see the Abbess clearly -- at that time I did not wonder how this could be, with the Shadows from the Tallow dip half hiding everything in their drunken dance -- but I saw every line in her face as if it had been full day and in that light I saw Radegunde go away from us at last.
have you ever been at some great King's Court or some Earl's and heard the storytellers? There are those so skilled in the art that they not only speak for you what the person in the tale said and did, but they also make an action with their faces and bodies as if they truly were that man or woman, so that it is a great surprise to you when the tale ceases, for you almost believe that you have seen the tale happen in front of your very eyes and it is as if a real man or woman had suddenly ceased to exist, for you forget that all this was only a teller and a tale.
So it was with the woman who had been Radegunde. She did not change; it was still Radegunde's gray hairs and wrinkled face and old body in the peasant woman's brown dress, and yet at the same time it was a stranger who stepped out of the Abbess Radegunde's as out of a gown dropped to the floor. The stranger was without feeling, though Radegunde's tears still stood on her cheeks, and there was no kindness or joy in her... "

The little boy who is now an old man, and is relating the talr to us, the reader, was Radegunde's little Foster son. When Radegunde, the Abbess, changed into Radegunde, the spiritual Other, she went away, but not before she left a little fire of contentment inside of her foster son. She knew he would be suffering from the abandonment, so her last gift to him was a lasting contentment in his heart:
"But something troubles me even there, and will not be put to rest by the memory of the Abbess's touch on my hair. As I grow older it troubles me more and more. It was the very last thing she said to me, which I have not told you but will now. When she had given me the gift of contentment, I became so happy that I said, 'Abbess, you said you would be revenged on Thorvald, but all you did was change him into a good man. That is no revenge!'
What this saying did to her astonished me, for all the color went out of her face and left it gray. She looked suddenly old, like a death's head, even standing there among her own true folks with love and joy coming from them so strongly that I myself might feel it. She said 'I did not change him. I lent him my eyes; that is all.' Then she looked beyond me, as if at our village, at the Norsemen loading their boats with weeping slaves, at all the villages of Germany and England and France where the poor folks sweat from dawn to dark so that the great Lords may do battle with one another, at castles under siege with the starving folk within eating mice and rats and sometimes each other, at the women carried off or raped or beaten, at the mother's wailing for their little ones, and beyond this at the Great wide world itself with all its battles which I had used to think so grand, and the misery and greediness and fear and jealousy and hatred of folk one for the other, save -- perhaps - for a few small bands of savages, but they were so far from us that one could scarcely see them."



If you know that James Tiptree, Jr, is the pen name of Alice Sheldon, then you understand more about how the author could write a story like"Houston, Houston, Do You Read?". Her understanding of the male psyche, with its need to control and keep down women, makes reading stories like this one a salve for someone who's been hurt by a man trying to control their life, and come out the other side. Sadly, she suffered so much in her life, that she took her own life.

"Houston, Houston, Do You Read?", 5 stars
A wonderful story, my fantasy come true. An Earth where an epidemic came and made all the men sterile. When they died off, peace reigned.

A group of astronauts, from Earth circa the 1970s, have made a trip around the Sun and are headed back to earth. But something happened to them on the way back, they passed through an anomaly, or a prick of a black hole, it's never explained, but it jumps them into the future. They're in great denial at first, but eventually they have to accept what has happened, that they have jumped 300 plus years into the future.
On their communications line, they begin receiving messages from another spacecraft:
" 'judy?' Luna Central or whoever it is says. 'They don't answer. You want to try? But listen, we've been thinking. If these people really are from the past this must be very traumatic for them. They could be just realizing they'll never see their world again. Myda says these males had children and women they stayed with, they'll miss them terribly. This is exciting for us but it may seem awful to them. They could be too shocked to answer. They could be frightened, maybe they think we're aliens or hallucinations even. See?'
5 seconds later the nearby girl says, 'da, margo, we were into that too. Dinko. Ah, Sunbird? Major Davis of Sunbird, are you there? This is Judy Paris in the ship Gloria, we're only about a million kay from you, we see you on our screen.' She sounds young and excited. 'Luna Central has been trying to reach you, I think you're in trouble and we want to help. Please don't be frightened. We're people just like you. We think you're way off course if you want to reach Earth. Are you in trouble? Can we help? If your radio is out can you make any sort of signal? Do you know Old Morse? You'll be off our screen soon, we're truly worried about you. Please reply somehow if you possibly can, Sunbird, come in!'
Dave sits impassive. Bud glances at him, at the Port window, gazes stolidly at the speaker, his face blank. LoriMer has exhausted surprise, he wants only to reply to the voices. He can manage a rough signal by heterodyning the probe beam. But what then, with them both against him?"

Finally accepting the truth, the astronauts accept help from the women. They will have to travel close enough to be able to go outside of their spaceship and jetpack over to theirs. They have some time, while they travel towards the women's ship:
" 'Earth is making up a history for you, Sunbird,' the Margo voice says. 'We know you don't want to waste power asking, so we thought we'd send you a few main points right now.' She laughs. 'It's much harder than we thought, nobody here does history.'
.. .'Let's see, probably the most important is that there aren't as many people as you had, we're just over 2 million. There was a world epidemic not long after your time. It didn't kill people but it reduced the population. I mean there weren't any babies in most of the world. Ah, sterility. The country called Australia was affected least.' Bud holds up a finger.
'and North Canada wasn't too bad. So the survivors all got together in the South part of the American states where they could grow food and the best communications and factories were. Nobody lives in the rest of the world but we travel there sometimes. We have five main activities, was industries the word? Food, that's farming and fishing. Communications, transport, and space -- that's us. And the factories they need. We live a lot simpler than you did, I think. We see your things all over, we're very grateful to you. Oh, you'll be interested to know we use zeppelins just like you did, we have six big ones. And our fifth thing is the children. Babies. Does that help? I'm using a children's book we have here.'
The men had Frozen during this recital: LoriMer is holding a cooling bag of hash. Bud starts chewing again and chokes."

The men find out that the epidemic made men sterile.
" 'is it still dangerous, Doc?' Dave asks. 'What happens to us when we get back home?'
'they can't say. The birth rate is normal now, about 2% and rising. But the present population may be resistant. They never achieved a vaccine.'
'only one way to tell,' Bud says gravely. 'I volunteer.'
Dave merely glances at him. Extraordinary how he still commands. Not submission, for Pete's sake. A team.
The history also mentions the riots and fighting which swept the world when humanity found itself sterile. Cities bombed, and burned, massacres, panics, mass rapes and kidnapping of women, marauding armies of biologically desperate men, bloody cults. The crazies. But it is all so briefly told, so long ago. List of honored names. 'We must always be grateful to the brave people who held the Denver Medical Laboratories -' and then on to the drama of building up the helium supply for the dirigibles.
In three centuries it's all dust, he thinks. What do I know of the hideous 30 Years War that was three centuries back for me? Fighting devastated Europe for two generations. Not even names."

Lorimer tries to defend the mess that men had made of the world in the past:
"...'I'm a man. By God yes, I'm angry. I have a right. We gave you all this, we made it all. We built your precious civilization and your knowledge and comfort and medicines and your dreams. All of it. We protected you, we worked our balls off keeping you and your kids. It was hard. It was a fight, a bloody fight all the way. We're tough. We had to be, can't you understand? Can't you for Christ's sake understand that?'
another silence.
'We're trying,' Lady Blue says. "'We are trying, Dr Lorimer. Of course we enjoy your inventions and we do appreciate your evolutionary role. But you must see there's a problem. As I understand it, what you protected people from was largely other males, wasn't it? We've just had an extraordinary demonstration in that. [Bud tries to rape one of the Judys.] You have brought history to life for us.' Her wrinkled brown eyes smile at him; a small tea-colored matron holding an obsolete artifact.
'but the fighting is long over. It ended when you did, I believe. We can hardly turn you loose on earth, and we simply have no facilities for people with your emotional problems.'
'besides, we don't think you'd be very happy,' Judy Dakar adds earnestly.
'We could clone them,' says Connie. 'I know there's people who would volunteer to mother. The young ones might be all right, we could try.' "

The reader can figure out what happens to the antique spacemen.

I've read this a few times, and it always hits so close to home. What's it like being a woman in a"man's world"? Ha! Disappointing, enraging, bewildering, heartbreaking, disillusioning, disgusting, to name just a few of the adjectives that apply. Especially if you had a mother and father who were Innocents and had no plans to try to prepare you for this jungle, only fears and old-fashioned ideas about how to raise you, along with your other 4 sisters and (more important than girls) 2 brothers. I also always wanted to go with"aliens" but was never presented with the opportunity this mother and daughter were.

Found here: https://www.ida.liu.se/~tompe44/lsff-book/tiptree21.html

The author is a woman writing a male narrator with a male penname. I think knowing this gives extra context to what feels like an adventure story but turns into something else by the end.

It was very uncomfortable to read the narrator's attempts to try very hard to sexualize Mrs. Parsons (and her "rump"), as though he was doing her a favor. It seemed like he had to be able to do that first before he would be able to see her as capable of anything else besides being a sitcom mom on Gilligan's Island, making the bed and bringing him drinks in a coconut cup.

I first read this years ago—to my surprise, probably within a few years of its original publication. I’m rereading it now since I’ve started reading more SF again recently, and I thought it would be a good time to reread some old favorites and classics.

Like so much of the science fiction from this era (the 1960s and ’70s) Ten Thousand Light-Years From Home is a diverse and imaginative collection of stories. If there is a theme tying all fifteen together, perhaps it’s simply that there’s nothing special, nothing unusual, about planet Earth—it’s the entire Universe that’s nuts.
   ‘Tiptree’ (Alice Bradley Sheldon) had hit the ground running, selling her first few short stories almost before the ink was dry, and from the ones here I can see why magazine editors snapped them up. The writing itself is terrific: razor-sharp, it rattles along, often funny, comic-book fast but absolutely sure-footed, not a word out of place. The ideas aren’t bad either, and here are just a few:

• Sex with aliens as like an addictive drug, and humans as the helpless sex-junkies of the Galaxy: ‘…some Sirians had come in. That was my first look at Sirians in the flesh, if that’s the word. God knows I’d memorised every news shot, but I wasn’t prepared. That tallness, that cruel thinness. That appalling alien arrogance. Ivory-blue, these were. Two males in immaculate metallic gear. Then I saw there was a female with them. An ivory-indigo exquisite with a permanent faint smile on those bone-hard lips…’
• There are two stories in which we humans are more like seventeenth-century South-Sea Islanders, peering out to sea, uncomprehending, as a four-master looms into view on the horizon—except that, here, it’s a starship of course. First to arrive are traders after ore on the Moon (or are they really after something more ominous?) The second ship, a few years later, turns out to be full of missionaries instead, bringing to Earth their dotty alien religion.
• There’s a satire about the nature of civilisation: ‘progress’ is fine (particularly, for instance, if it stops people dropping babies down wells to appease their gods); but, beyond that, what is it all for?
• There are several stories about the pull of home, about being stranded or lost and trying to find your way back. For example, out at the centre of a kilometer-wide crater in what was formerly Idaho, on the exact same spot and at precisely the same time each year, something—a ‘monster’—appears for a few moments. Superstitions grow up around it, and elaborate rituals; people travel hundreds of miles to see it and make offerings. As the centuries go by though, and with the arrival of a more scientific outlook, there’s a slow dawning of understanding as to who this ‘monster’ is and what is happening to him. Just brilliant.

Alice Sheldon led a fairly extraordinary life herself, and among her many and varied accomplishments was a doctorate in experimental psychology. My guess is that, with this in her background and with her SF-author’s hat on too, she spent more than a little time ruminating on the word ‘alienation’. It’s another theme here: a sense of wrongness, of not belonging, of never feeling quite at home in this world—and the wish that a giant hand (or spaceship more like) will come down out of the sky some day and yank you out of all this…or beam you up. But that’s just a childish fantasy, wishful thinking. This feeling of wrongness is everywhere: no matter where you go in this Alice-in-Wonderland Universe, you always feel ten thousand light-years from home.

This was my first book by Tiptree. I have mixed feelings about this book. She is writes in many styles. She has a habit of titling her stories with an idea that gives you no clue about the story itself. Lots of interesting short stories that are vastly different from each other.

This collection has 15 short stories:

And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill's Side - Amazing
The Snows Are Melted, the Snows Are Gone - Vary Good
The Peacefulness of Vivyan - Pointless
Mamma Come Home - Good Story
Help - Good Story
Painwise - Pointless, bad story
Faithful to Thee, Terra, in Our Fashion - Fun story
The Man Doors Said Hello To - Good story
The Man Who Walked Home - Interesting idea
Forever to a Hudson Bay Blanket - Good story
I'll Be Waiting for You When the Swimming Pool Is Empty - Interesting idea
I'm Too Big but I Love to Play - Pointless
Birth of a Salesman - Fun space story
Mother in the Sky with Diamonds - Didn't like it
Beam Us Home - Didn't like it

Even so, I will look for her novels.½

The richness and invention of these stories stands out sharply from much of the SF of the late 1960s and early 70s. I appreciate them though I don't really enjoy them. Reading them half a century after they were written in like being immersed in hot house loam and constantly confronting the roots of less articulate growths that have colonized the soil.

The planet Damiem, home only to a small human outpost there to protect its native people, is about to experience a rare and beautiful phenomenon as the remnants of a nearby stellar explosion pass through its atmosphere. A few visitors have been permitted to come and watch... but some of them may not be who they say they are at all.

It's an interesting and hard-to-pin-down novel. On one level, it's a fairly straightforward SF thriller. There are nefarious plans, culminating in a hostage situation and gunfire and action and such. But it definitely feels like there's a lot more going on underneath the surface.

For one thing, although it's not always reflected in the tone of the writing, this is dark. Like, really, really dark. The history of what was done to the alien people on this planet is comprehensively, intimately, viscerally horrific. The story of what happened to the exploding star is incredibly sad when we first hear it, and then later takes on some additional tragic and sinister twists. And there's some stuff about child pornography that is treated so casually that it's easy to somehow forget to be appalled by it, which is its own kind of disturbing. None of this is graphic or gory or explicit, but I think that actually jut makes it worse. Tiptree is utterly masterful at knowing just exactly how much to show or tell us and how much to leave to our imaginations for maximum effect.

The combination of all of this doesn't feel like it should work all that well, really. Especially as the plot has a lot of implausibilities and contrivances, not to mention characters who are so cavalier about obvious signs of looming danger that you really want to smack some sense of caution into them. And I'm not remotely sure how I feel about any aspect of the ending.

And yet, somehow it all ends up being effective. I felt a real sense of building dread through the first half of the novel, the action-y stuff definitely held my interest, and some of the more disturbing moments had me finishing a scene, taking a deep breath, and deciding I needed to go and do something else for a little bit to let my brain settle before coming back to it, which is not something a story manages to do to me very often.

Rating: It's very hard to know how to rate this. I'm going to give it a 4/5, but some unsettled part of my brain that is still chewing over the way it deals with all those painful themes of exploitation and such is convinced that's selling it short.

An intelligently, intricately plotted thriller that starts off innocently enough with a party to view the final passage of a nova. Aliens, spacers, pushers, and porn stars interact to form a clever commentary on love and autonomy. Starts off slow but worth sticking it out.

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3443946.htm

Three male astronauts from our near future are warped far forward in time to a solar system where men have died out and only women (and non-binary enbies) are left, reproducing by cloning and living an eco-friendly lifestyle (with space travel). The men are interviewed by the women, having been lightly drugged to lose their inhibitions; and it's strongly implied that as the story ends, they are about to be killed off as a danger to humanity. It's chilling but also very subtle, and I wonder how many of those who voted for it in 1977 actually understood the full point.