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Up the Walls of the World
The first novel from the award-winning author of Brightness Falls from the Air, a writer “known for gender-bending, boundary-pushing work” (Tor.com).
Up the Walls of the World is the 1978 debut novel of Alice Sheldon, who had built her reputation with the acclaimed short stories she published under the name James Tiptree Jr. A singular representation of American science fiction in its prime, Tiptree’s first novel expanded on the themes she addressed in her short fiction.
Known as the Destroyer, a self-aware leviathan roams through space gobbling up star systems. In its path is the planet Tyree, populated by telepathic wind-dwelling aliens who are facing extinction. Meanwhile on Earth, people burdened with psi powers are part of a secret military experiment run by a drug-addicted doctor struggling with his own grief. These vulnerable humans soon become the target of the Tyrenni, whose only hope of survival is to take over their bodies and minds—an unspeakable crime in any other period of the aliens’ history...
Up the Walls of the World is the 1978 debut novel of Alice Sheldon, who had built her reputation with the acclaimed short stories she published under the name James Tiptree Jr. A singular representation of American science fiction in its prime, Tiptree’s first novel expanded on the themes she addressed in her short fiction.
Known as the Destroyer, a self-aware leviathan roams through space gobbling up star systems. In its path is the planet Tyree, populated by telepathic wind-dwelling aliens who are facing extinction. Meanwhile on Earth, people burdened with psi powers are part of a secret military experiment run by a drug-addicted doctor struggling with his own grief. These vulnerable humans soon become the target of the Tyrenni, whose only hope of survival is to take over their bodies and minds—an unspeakable crime in any other period of the aliens’ history...
320 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published February 1, 1978
66 people are currently reading
2111 people want to read
About the author
James Tiptree Jr.
244 books588 followers"James Tiptree Jr." was born Alice Bradley in Chicago in 1915. Her mother was the writer Mary Hastings Bradley; her father, Herbert, was a lawyer and explorer. Throughout her childhood she traveled with her parents, mostly to Africa, but also to India and Southeast Asia. Her early work was as an artist and art critic. During World War II she enlisted in the Army and became the first American female photointelligence officer. In Germany after the war, she met and married her commanding officer, Huntington D. Sheldon. In the early 1950s, both Sheldons joined the then-new CIA; he made it his career, but she resigned in 1955, went back to college, and earned a Ph.D. in experimental psychology.
At about this same time, Alli Sheldon started writing science fiction. She wrote four stories and sent them off to four different science fiction magazines. She did not want to publish under her real name, because of her CIA and academic ties, and she intended to use a new pseudonym for each group of stories until some sold. They started selling immediately, and only the first pseudonym—"Tiptree" from a jar of jelly, "James" because she felt editors would be more receptive to a male writer, and "Jr." for fun—was needed. (A second pseudonym, "Raccoona Sheldon," came along later, so she could have a female persona.)
Tiptree quickly became one of the most respected writers in the field, winning the Hugo Award for The Girl Who was Plugged In and Houston, Houston, Do You Read?, and the Nebula Award for "Love is the Plan, the Plan is Death" and Houston, Houston. Raccoona won the Nebula for "The Screwfly Solution," and Tiptree won the World Fantasy Award for the collection Tales from the Quintana Roo.
The Tiptree fiction reflects Alli Sheldon's interests and concerns throughout her life: the alien among us (a role she portrayed in her childhood travels), the health of the planet, the quality of perception, the role of women, love, death, and humanity's place in a vast, cold universe. The Otherwise Award (formerly the Tiptree Award) has celebrated science fiction that "expands and explores gender roles" since 1991.
Alice Sheldon died in 1987 by her own hand. Writing in her first book about the suicide of Hart Crane, she said succinctly: "Poets extrapolate."
Julie Phillips wrote her biography, James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon
At about this same time, Alli Sheldon started writing science fiction. She wrote four stories and sent them off to four different science fiction magazines. She did not want to publish under her real name, because of her CIA and academic ties, and she intended to use a new pseudonym for each group of stories until some sold. They started selling immediately, and only the first pseudonym—"Tiptree" from a jar of jelly, "James" because she felt editors would be more receptive to a male writer, and "Jr." for fun—was needed. (A second pseudonym, "Raccoona Sheldon," came along later, so she could have a female persona.)
Tiptree quickly became one of the most respected writers in the field, winning the Hugo Award for The Girl Who was Plugged In and Houston, Houston, Do You Read?, and the Nebula Award for "Love is the Plan, the Plan is Death" and Houston, Houston. Raccoona won the Nebula for "The Screwfly Solution," and Tiptree won the World Fantasy Award for the collection Tales from the Quintana Roo.
The Tiptree fiction reflects Alli Sheldon's interests and concerns throughout her life: the alien among us (a role she portrayed in her childhood travels), the health of the planet, the quality of perception, the role of women, love, death, and humanity's place in a vast, cold universe. The Otherwise Award (formerly the Tiptree Award) has celebrated science fiction that "expands and explores gender roles" since 1991.
Alice Sheldon died in 1987 by her own hand. Writing in her first book about the suicide of Hart Crane, she said succinctly: "Poets extrapolate."
Julie Phillips wrote her biography, James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 99 reviews
March 24, 2015
If you've ever wanted to experience perceptions and sensations of minds of very different biological order meeting, intertwining, and attempting to sort out reality from within post-body psychic spaces, all with a meticulous fidelity to exploring what this might actually be like and how it would work, then you've come to the right place. Possibly the only place.
Of course, there's also Joanna Russ' slightly earlier experiential novel of psi phenomena, And Chaos Died, but where Russ renders this kind of mental first-contact in a swirl of disorientation and confusion (which, granted, is probably pretty accurate to suddenly being upended into such sensations), Tiptree strives for a mechanical (though not to say unemotive) clarity. Oddly, Russ' stream-of-conscious garble seems the more literary experiment, whereas Tiptree's perhaps equally experimental commitment to making completely alien and often synesthetic sensory systems comprehensible nonetheless reads more conventionally sci-fi (and so reliant for parts on more predictable plot/action movements).
Still, it's an extremely ambitious book, interleaving three plotlines unfolding along three different modalities of consciousness and extending them far far past the their expected point of convergence and out to an almost-philosophic universal scope. Relentlessly foreign, precise, sensorial, psychologically knowing (as befits Tiptree's actual identity, psychologist Alice Sheldon), subversively feminist, and with a cavalcade of memorably rendered characters, whether human or non.
Of course, there's also Joanna Russ' slightly earlier experiential novel of psi phenomena, And Chaos Died, but where Russ renders this kind of mental first-contact in a swirl of disorientation and confusion (which, granted, is probably pretty accurate to suddenly being upended into such sensations), Tiptree strives for a mechanical (though not to say unemotive) clarity. Oddly, Russ' stream-of-conscious garble seems the more literary experiment, whereas Tiptree's perhaps equally experimental commitment to making completely alien and often synesthetic sensory systems comprehensible nonetheless reads more conventionally sci-fi (and so reliant for parts on more predictable plot/action movements).
Still, it's an extremely ambitious book, interleaving three plotlines unfolding along three different modalities of consciousness and extending them far far past the their expected point of convergence and out to an almost-philosophic universal scope. Relentlessly foreign, precise, sensorial, psychologically knowing (as befits Tiptree's actual identity, psychologist Alice Sheldon), subversively feminist, and with a cavalcade of memorably rendered characters, whether human or non.
April 3, 2020
This story of three parallel plotlines that concerns itself with psychology and the powers of the mind and not with technological SF is right down my alley as a Sturgeon fan.
Tiptree did a great job in portraying different kinds of consciousness, different kinds of communications - always a pet topic of mine in SF.
Her three ways of evolution of intelligence felt believably. She easily got me into the alien society as well as into the outliers of the human one. I love those thought experiments with alien aliens.
The end felt satisfying, hopeful that coexistence of such diverse lifeforms is possible and uplifting.
A great story for SF readers who don't need action and technical topics to engage their speculative thoughts.
Tiptree did a great job in portraying different kinds of consciousness, different kinds of communications - always a pet topic of mine in SF.
Her three ways of evolution of intelligence felt believably. She easily got me into the alien society as well as into the outliers of the human one. I love those thought experiments with alien aliens.
The end felt satisfying, hopeful that coexistence of such diverse lifeforms is possible and uplifting.
A great story for SF readers who don't need action and technical topics to engage their speculative thoughts.
July 28, 2008
This is one of those books that make me say, yes that's what science fiction should be. Meditations upon gender and species, the nature and scale of existence, all culminating in a glorious affirmation of the place that love occupies in a scientific universe.
This is one of those books where a plot summary just doesn't do much justice, but here goes. There are three narrative threads that become more and more entwined as the novel climaxes: on our planet, a group of extremely damaged individuals are the subjects of a military study attempting to harness psychic communication. On the planet Tyree, a race of superpsychic airborne manta-rays come to realize that their planet is endangered. The menace they face is an inconceivably vast, somewhat deranged interstellar entity that destroys suns without really thinking, and warps localized time in space the way that you or I might pluck a blade of grass, all the while trying to understand what the hell it's supposed to be doing. Along the way, the real events of the book unfold: sacrifice and forgiveness, acceptance, the fluidity of gender roles and self-definition, and our capacity to heal and support one another. And ultimately, our desire to transcend, to go up the titular walls of the world.
I know that's all fairly vague, but I really can't be any more specific. This is one of those books that sort of washes over you, that you just have to let happen. I encourage you to give it a try.
This is one of those books where a plot summary just doesn't do much justice, but here goes. There are three narrative threads that become more and more entwined as the novel climaxes: on our planet, a group of extremely damaged individuals are the subjects of a military study attempting to harness psychic communication. On the planet Tyree, a race of superpsychic airborne manta-rays come to realize that their planet is endangered. The menace they face is an inconceivably vast, somewhat deranged interstellar entity that destroys suns without really thinking, and warps localized time in space the way that you or I might pluck a blade of grass, all the while trying to understand what the hell it's supposed to be doing. Along the way, the real events of the book unfold: sacrifice and forgiveness, acceptance, the fluidity of gender roles and self-definition, and our capacity to heal and support one another. And ultimately, our desire to transcend, to go up the titular walls of the world.
I know that's all fairly vague, but I really can't be any more specific. This is one of those books that sort of washes over you, that you just have to let happen. I encourage you to give it a try.
April 15, 2020
This is a debut SF novel by James Tiptree Jr.. I read is as a part of monthly reading for April 2020 at Hugo & Nebula Awards: Best Novels group. The novel received enough nominations to appear on the final ballot of Hugo award in 1979, but the nomination was withdrawn by the author.
It is a galaxy-spanning marvelous work of the 70s New Wave SF, which attempted to move the genre fiction from ghetto to mainstream. In its grandiosity it comes close to by .
The story is a bit hard to get into: there are three plot-lines, two of which are by alien minds, so tjhey are intentionally full of content that cannot be easily digested. Don’t be discourages and barge on, you’ll be rewarded!
The lines are (in order of appearance):
A giant entity going through the deep space, later called by others the Destroyer, on its millenia-long mission
Tivonel, a manta ray-like female flyer on the gas giant planet of Tyree, a semi-nomadic civilization with gender roles reversed compared with what is common on Earth and with psi-like powers. These aliens are threatened by the arrival of the Destroyer, who they feel extinguished a lot of life in the galaxy
Doctor Daniel Dann, a male 1970s drug-addict with M.D., who works at a telepathy lab run by the US Navy. He is skeptical about all parapsychological mumbo-jumbo but this is just a place for him to hide in plain sight. However, both his clients and he himself start to experience strange things
A very nice book with great ideas and twists.
It is a galaxy-spanning marvelous work of the 70s New Wave SF, which attempted to move the genre fiction from ghetto to mainstream. In its grandiosity it comes close to by .
The story is a bit hard to get into: there are three plot-lines, two of which are by alien minds, so tjhey are intentionally full of content that cannot be easily digested. Don’t be discourages and barge on, you’ll be rewarded!
The lines are (in order of appearance):
A giant entity going through the deep space, later called by others the Destroyer, on its millenia-long mission
Tivonel, a manta ray-like female flyer on the gas giant planet of Tyree, a semi-nomadic civilization with gender roles reversed compared with what is common on Earth and with psi-like powers. These aliens are threatened by the arrival of the Destroyer, who they feel extinguished a lot of life in the galaxy
Doctor Daniel Dann, a male 1970s drug-addict with M.D., who works at a telepathy lab run by the US Navy. He is skeptical about all parapsychological mumbo-jumbo but this is just a place for him to hide in plain sight. However, both his clients and he himself start to experience strange things
A very nice book with great ideas and twists.
February 16, 2025
This novel badly needed another draft, but my biased little shrivelled heart cannot hate it. I even got goosebumps at the end, because the intention is actually so lovely? Too bad that the prose just becomes awkward simplistic & repetitive at the end. It could have been amazing, because the concepts are really fucking cool.
But what's done is done, aka I already read Tip's biography and so it was impossible not to read into things... Like the lesbian longings of Doctor Daniel Dann (lol), gender as a prison, the wish to be disembodied and floating off into spaces on numerous adventures. I am quite surprised at the lack of an absolutely overbearing mother, haha, cause that would have fulfilled the Tiptree Bingo.
There is some problematic shit, too, but I don't have the energy to get into it right now. Loving JTTJ forever, even when the writing falls short. I just cannot otherwise!
But what's done is done, aka I already read Tip's biography and so it was impossible not to read into things... Like the lesbian longings of Doctor Daniel Dann (lol), gender as a prison, the wish to be disembodied and floating off into spaces on numerous adventures. I am quite surprised at the lack of an absolutely overbearing mother, haha, cause that would have fulfilled the Tiptree Bingo.
There is some problematic shit, too, but I don't have the energy to get into it right now. Loving JTTJ forever, even when the writing falls short. I just cannot otherwise!
February 11, 2025
3.5 rounded up for effort
(The following was written by a genuine Tiptree megafan who had suuuuppperrr low expectations going into this book, which were not a mistake)
A big morass of ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ with sprinkles of genuine insight. Might go down better with illicit substances, definitely benefits from having read the author‘s biography. Is pretty much all of the author‘s thinly veiled neuroses in a Trenchcoat
(The following was written by a genuine Tiptree megafan who had suuuuppperrr low expectations going into this book, which were not a mistake)
A big morass of ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ with sprinkles of genuine insight. Might go down better with illicit substances, definitely benefits from having read the author‘s biography. Is pretty much all of the author‘s thinly veiled neuroses in a Trenchcoat
February 21, 2025
Not always the easiest book to read — many sections felt dense and tiring to get through. But the exploration of consciousness decoupled from physical form, all through the lens of three vastly different sources of consciousness, tickled parts of my brain that I didn’t know existed.
April 19, 2020
2 1/2 stars, really.
This book was ok. It was enjoyable in spots but seemed too stretched out in many other spots--mostly because of characters' drawn-out internal monologues as they confusedly tried to figure out what was happening to them. Maybe it was the psychedelic era that caused Tiptree write like that. Though 1979 was, IMHO, a little bit beyond the hippie/psychedelic era, it seems to me that the book had those influences.
The worldbuilding was great.
I loved
And I loved when, Clever.
There were some high points. for instance. Nice touch. Good attention to resolving subplots.
But then I didn't love the sort of
So bright spots amid a book that could have been shorter, and therefore=boring spots. You decide.
This book was ok. It was enjoyable in spots but seemed too stretched out in many other spots--mostly because of characters' drawn-out internal monologues as they confusedly tried to figure out what was happening to them. Maybe it was the psychedelic era that caused Tiptree write like that. Though 1979 was, IMHO, a little bit beyond the hippie/psychedelic era, it seems to me that the book had those influences.
The worldbuilding was great.
I loved
And I loved when, Clever.
There were some high points. for instance. Nice touch. Good attention to resolving subplots.
But then I didn't love the sort of
So bright spots amid a book that could have been shorter, and therefore=boring spots. You decide.
September 30, 2018
Following three different events and the lives involved, we’re taken through an utterly beautiful, ethereal, transcendent and life affirming experience. The way these lives intertwine and the affect they have on each other is described with such poetic emotion it made me think of Shakespeare. My heart and my mind feel ready to burst with the tenderness, curiosity, and potent vigor of this story.
April 15, 2022
Das wird noch ein wenig nachhallen.
February 6, 2025
This is a messy novel more interesting for what it says about Tiptree’s search for better ways than for its story and characters. There is so much going on, with two worlds and many characters in each and mind melding and body swapping and a sapient computer program and a vast ominous star destroyer—and yet so many of these details are variations on the same themes, and not ones that add much insight.
The most repetitive pattern is of traumatized, misfit humans being totally alien to each other—especially, because this is Tiptree writing in the 1970s USA, to people of another gender and sex—and healing from their trauma only when alien shenanigans forcibly displace their bodies. It is sad and frustrating how close some of the characters come to figuring themselves out, figuring out how to connect, but in the end the solutions are only escapism. We get the values of empathy and imagination touted, but no template of how to move forward with them unless supernatural events cure us of the prison of our dysmorphic gendered bodies. Physicality itself is such a source of pain for Tiptree, a dark state I remember very well from my own dysmorphia.
Gender, too, is so close to getting somewhere interesting in this book but it always falls short for me. The alien society has different binary gender roles, but despite some imaginative playing around, the humans and aliens have no moment of doubt about translation: gametes and the social hierarchy immediately determine which alien word means male and which means female, even though there is much else to contrast and no real reason such a direct parallel should be made. The moments of strange transness are pulled away from, instead of becoming the heart of the novel, and we move into ever more jumbled sci fi plots instead of unpacking them.
I might reread some chapters after I read the Tiptree biography, and when I don’t have to read fast for book club, but overall I’m a much bigger fan of her short stories than this novel.
But I’d be super down to discuss specifics in the comments. There are a lot of topics to unpack.
The most repetitive pattern is of traumatized, misfit humans being totally alien to each other—especially, because this is Tiptree writing in the 1970s USA, to people of another gender and sex—and healing from their trauma only when alien shenanigans forcibly displace their bodies. It is sad and frustrating how close some of the characters come to figuring themselves out, figuring out how to connect, but in the end the solutions are only escapism. We get the values of empathy and imagination touted, but no template of how to move forward with them unless supernatural events cure us of the prison of our dysmorphic gendered bodies. Physicality itself is such a source of pain for Tiptree, a dark state I remember very well from my own dysmorphia.
Gender, too, is so close to getting somewhere interesting in this book but it always falls short for me. The alien society has different binary gender roles, but despite some imaginative playing around, the humans and aliens have no moment of doubt about translation: gametes and the social hierarchy immediately determine which alien word means male and which means female, even though there is much else to contrast and no real reason such a direct parallel should be made. The moments of strange transness are pulled away from, instead of becoming the heart of the novel, and we move into ever more jumbled sci fi plots instead of unpacking them.
I might reread some chapters after I read the Tiptree biography, and when I don’t have to read fast for book club, but overall I’m a much bigger fan of her short stories than this novel.
But I’d be super down to discuss specifics in the comments. There are a lot of topics to unpack.
July 16, 2021
Fusioni
Un Distruttore — Fredda e sola, la malvagia presenza vaga per le correnti stellari. È immensa, nera e quasi immateriale. I suoi poteri superano quelli di qualsiasi altra cosa senziente — sta spegnendo mondi nell'Universo. Presto toccherà anche al pianeta Tyree, abitato da una razza pacifica, le cui forme ricordano quelle di mante volanti, e dotata di notevoli poteri mentali.
Per la sua stessa sopravvivenza dovrà tentare di ricreare il proprio mondo in qualche altra parte della galassia. Incapace di farlo fisicamente, cercherà di trasferire quante più menti possibili in altri corpi estranei, scegliendo quelli di un'altra razza da poco scoperta, una razza che vive sul pianeta che tutti conosciamo come Terra.
Questa l'idea di base del romanzo, una fusione aliena mente-corpo. A renderla ulteriormente interessante ci pensa la capacità di questo autore — anzi, autrice! — di ricorrere ad un tipo di sensibilità narrativa priva di idee scontate, che anzi ribalta i ruoli uomo-donna, padre-madre, pensiero-materia, ottenendo come risultato una percezione più consapevole di ciò che è altro, anche grazie all'ambientazione legata al pianeta Tyree, così ricca di immagini e sensazioni.
I personaggi, almeno i protagonisti, sono abbastanza a fuoco, e vanno vissuti nel contesto di ciò che accade loro, in questa nuova esperienza aliena che annulla i limiti corporali, che li rende *pensiero* ondeggiante negli spazi siderali.
Per quanto riguarda lo stile dell'autrice, c'è da dire che il ricorso ad una narrazione eterea, quasi liquida in molti passaggi, tende a smorzare il ritmo e a volte a disperdere la scena; siamo in presenza di una lettura che punta al cervello, non allo stomaco, con incursioni letterarie di realtà virtuale e molte altre idee. Troppe, forse, e tutte in un solo romanzo, sì da sollevare un velo di inconcludenza.
Un buon romanzo con il quale misurarsi.
Un Distruttore — Fredda e sola, la malvagia presenza vaga per le correnti stellari. È immensa, nera e quasi immateriale. I suoi poteri superano quelli di qualsiasi altra cosa senziente — sta spegnendo mondi nell'Universo. Presto toccherà anche al pianeta Tyree, abitato da una razza pacifica, le cui forme ricordano quelle di mante volanti, e dotata di notevoli poteri mentali.
Per la sua stessa sopravvivenza dovrà tentare di ricreare il proprio mondo in qualche altra parte della galassia. Incapace di farlo fisicamente, cercherà di trasferire quante più menti possibili in altri corpi estranei, scegliendo quelli di un'altra razza da poco scoperta, una razza che vive sul pianeta che tutti conosciamo come Terra.
Questa l'idea di base del romanzo, una fusione aliena mente-corpo. A renderla ulteriormente interessante ci pensa la capacità di questo autore — anzi, autrice! — di ricorrere ad un tipo di sensibilità narrativa priva di idee scontate, che anzi ribalta i ruoli uomo-donna, padre-madre, pensiero-materia, ottenendo come risultato una percezione più consapevole di ciò che è altro, anche grazie all'ambientazione legata al pianeta Tyree, così ricca di immagini e sensazioni.
I personaggi, almeno i protagonisti, sono abbastanza a fuoco, e vanno vissuti nel contesto di ciò che accade loro, in questa nuova esperienza aliena che annulla i limiti corporali, che li rende *pensiero* ondeggiante negli spazi siderali.
Per quanto riguarda lo stile dell'autrice, c'è da dire che il ricorso ad una narrazione eterea, quasi liquida in molti passaggi, tende a smorzare il ritmo e a volte a disperdere la scena; siamo in presenza di una lettura che punta al cervello, non allo stomaco, con incursioni letterarie di realtà virtuale e molte altre idee. Troppe, forse, e tutte in un solo romanzo, sì da sollevare un velo di inconcludenza.
Un buon romanzo con il quale misurarsi.
February 11, 2025
This book is bonkers. I didn’t always enjoy reading it, but I love it anyway. I’m glad I read Tiptree’s other work and her biography first and fairly recently—I don’t think I could have gone along with the wild storyline and themes without that background.
I grant that this book is flawed, but I love the Tyrenni and their windswept joy, I love Tiptree’s nuanced construction of Tyrenni gender roles and communication styles and hierarchies. I love the focus on empathy and parenting and respect. I love how Alli Sheldon inhabits a male perspective and shows the world beyond maleness with such vivid simultaneous pain and beauty.
“For the first time he has really grasped life’s most eerie lesson:
“The Other Exists.”
I grant that this book is flawed, but I love the Tyrenni and their windswept joy, I love Tiptree’s nuanced construction of Tyrenni gender roles and communication styles and hierarchies. I love the focus on empathy and parenting and respect. I love how Alli Sheldon inhabits a male perspective and shows the world beyond maleness with such vivid simultaneous pain and beauty.
“For the first time he has really grasped life’s most eerie lesson:
“The Other Exists.”
July 11, 2021
Come l'ho iniziato ho subito avuto una brutta impressione. Sapete cosa penso della maggioranza degli Urania. È uno di questi.
È tutta una cosa troppo strana e anche la scrittura, agli inizii, è strana.
Il problema è anche che solo a pagina 138 l'autrice, finalmente, ci dice a cosa assomigliano gli abitanti di Tyree. Per una volta la copertina è giusta ma il 90% delle volte le copertine degli Urania non mi dicono niente quindi vuoi te che pensassi che fosse la giusta rappresentazione. .
Alla fine metto 2☆. Quest'anno o sono cattiva io o becco troppi brutti libri. Sto facendo una strage.
È tutta una cosa troppo strana e anche la scrittura, agli inizii, è strana.
Il problema è anche che solo a pagina 138 l'autrice, finalmente, ci dice a cosa assomigliano gli abitanti di Tyree. Per una volta la copertina è giusta ma il 90% delle volte le copertine degli Urania non mi dicono niente quindi vuoi te che pensassi che fosse la giusta rappresentazione. .
Alla fine metto 2☆. Quest'anno o sono cattiva io o becco troppi brutti libri. Sto facendo una strage.
July 26, 2018
Alice B. Sheldon publiziert im Alter von 51 Jahren unter dem Pseudonym "James Tiptree Jr." ihre ersten Kurzgeschichten. Sci-Fi ist in den 60ern bis 80ern eine Männderdomäne, aber sie behauptet sich, ihr (falscher) Name wird schnell zum etablierten Begriff. Zwanzig Jahre später erfüllt sie einen Selbstmordpakt mir ihrem Mann und erschießt erst ihn und dann sich. Wer war diese Frau? was hat sie für Geschichten geschrieben? Warum lerne ich sie erst so spät kennen?
"Die Mauern der Welt hoch" ist einer von nur zwei Romanen und ein für mich außergewöhnliches Leseerlebnis. Eine ausführliche Rezension folgt.
"Die Mauern der Welt hoch" ist einer von nur zwei Romanen und ein für mich außergewöhnliches Leseerlebnis. Eine ausführliche Rezension folgt.
Read
August 4, 2019This has a humongous amount of gender stuff, some startlingly ahead of its time.
It also really really did not age well wrt race.
Review coming on Tor.com once I actually write it (but there are still other reviews before it, so it will be a while before it goes online). I am also considering writing something longer about it.
______
Source of the book: Bought with my own money (Friends of Lawrence Public Library booksale)
It also really really did not age well wrt race.
Review coming on Tor.com once I actually write it (but there are still other reviews before it, so it will be a while before it goes online). I am also considering writing something longer about it.
______
Source of the book: Bought with my own money (Friends of Lawrence Public Library booksale)
September 24, 2015
This book is absolutely bonkers. Mad. And completely wonderful.
This was Tiptree's first novel, but naturally enough many of the concerns and interests of his short stories are present here as well. I am so sad that he did not write more novels; this made me so happy, as did Brightness Falls from the Air, that I do wonder what else could have come from that amazing brain.
Let's start by talking about the authorial situation and get that out of the way. This was published in 1978. Tiptree had been revealed as Alice Sheldon at the end of 1976. I was surprised therefore to discover that the brief bio in the end flap (oh hard backs I really do love you) makes no mention of him being her, although it does acknowledge Tiptree as a pseudonym. But I guess that pre internet, how are people going to know about the identity? Via Locus maybe, and gamines, and word of mouth. Tiptree was not such a big deal that the New York Times was going to run an expose. Presumably therefor with this publication your more casual, less crazy SF fans aren't going to know who Tiptree 'really' is - and Tiptree is enough of a name (... and male...?) to make it worth keeping the pseudonym. But THEN I turned to the back and the back cover image is Sheldon! Now I've seen the pic before and it's quite obvious to me who this is; but others have suggested that this could, actually, be an ambiguously gendered person. I'm not entirely convinced. But anyway, there's that.
Now, to plot. I'm going to be entirely spoilery because I really want to think about what Tiptree is doing here.
The story is told for about the first half or so from three alternating perspectives. The first, IN ALL CAPS BECAUSE THAT'S HOW A LEVIATHAN OUGHT TO BE REPRESENTED THANK YOU VERY MUCH, is some sort of being that is mammoth on a scale humans cannot comprehend. The wee beastie doesn't get that much page time, but it's enough to set up a vague sympathy; it's alone and cannot fulfil its duty. SAD. This being doesn't have much of a plot by itself, although it does play crucial roles in the lives and deaths of others.
The second is told mostly from the perspective of Tivonel, a flighty female of Tyree who enjoys hunting and gathering and is happy to leave such momentous tasks as Fathering to the Fathers; she'd rather be out flying on the High Winds. Because she is of a race of enormous manta-life beings who live in the winds of their planet, rarely interacting with solid matter. These beings mostly just live normal lives, thinking about who will Father their next child and whether to stay in the Deep for a long time or go flying the winds... until their scientist-equivalents report that the stars in a certain section of the sky are going out, and that they are receiving telepathic signals (which is how they communicate) from dying planets. And this wave of death is coming closer. So what can they do to save themselves and their children?
And there's the third part of the plot. The human one. Here, Doctor Daniel Dann is helping out with. Trial into the use of psionic skills with a ragtag group of people that he doesn't believe are capable of any such thing, with paranoid military types looking over their shoulder, and meanwhile he's heavily dosing himself with all sorts of not-meant-for -recreational-use drugs. He falls in love or lust or wonder with their computer analyst, and the discovers himself on Tyree. Because what the folk of Tyree discover is that they can swap minds and bodies with others. Of course on Tyree this is a life-crime, but if it's aliens and it's to save the children it doesn't really count... Right?
Eventually the plots join up, with Dann rather enjoying himself on Tyree and then some of them ending up with the GREAT LEVIATHAN TYPE THING IN SOME SORT OF MYSTERIOUS WAY. Its duty is revealed which is nice. Although then it's subverted which is for the good of others but I can't help but feel sad for a being whose entire existence is coopted by tiny little atoms of life who have the arrogance to think they know best.
Let's stop and consider for a moment that Tiptree is writing a story about experimental psychology, basically, using humans as test subjects. And the military and some sort of covert operations people are watching with paranoid glee wanting to control what goes on. Also quite a lot of this can be seen as first contact and exploration fiction. This, people, is what happens when someone with the life experience of Sheldon, and the imagination of Sheldon, writes a novel following Hemingways injunction to write what you know.
Anyway. The characters. Oh the characters. The humans are definitely the most interesting but I'll start by talking about Tyree, where Tiptree is setting up a a little gender mischief just because . You might have picked the idea that there, it's the males who care for the children. Fathering is considered the greatest and most important of skills and as a consequences the Fathers are the biggest, the strongest, the most revered. At the time we come to Tyree there are some females who are agitating for females to be allowed to develop Fathering skills, in the expectation that this will help them to develop their life field and you know, be more respected. OH THE LOLZ. Tivonel is our main focus here, and she's not one of these uppity females. In fact she doesn't really see the point in it all; why would you want to be tied down with children when you could be off exploring instead? She changes a little over the course of the story, becoming a but more reserved and interested in thinking beyond her own experiences, but that's about it. This isn't to say I didn't like her, I did - I don't know that she really needed to change all that much. It wouldn't have made sense for her to become the equivalent of a woman's-libber, since the planet is destroyed by the end and she's staying to be a part of the crew of the leviathan for possibly all time.
The humans, though. This is where Tiptree does some lovely things.
Dan isn't an especially nice person, although he takes his job seriously and tries to help those who need it. He's too caught up in his own grief to really comprehe d those around him, which begins to change when he has an experience with Margaret Omali in which they experience the worst event of the other's life. For him, that was his wife and child dying in a fire and the fear that he could have saved them. For her, it was a cliterodectomy in her early teens. Yes this is a book that mentions that this really happens. More in her in a minute. This is the beginning of Dan becoming empathetic, and he genuinely evolves and becomes more sympathetic as a character. Through him Tiptree explores the impossibility of knowing another human and the possible consequences if we did know another. We become more human. If we're not scared off. Also that taking lots of drugs is a bad idea.
Margaret... scarred physically and emotionally as an adolescent, incapable of having human relationships of any sort and far more interested in computers, is a cousin of the Parson women in "The Women Men Don't See." As soon as she's given an out she takes it, flying into the galaxy as pure life and taking up residence inside the great star beast/ship and far more at. Home there than on earth. Where, by the way, she is not alone because there's a Computer program - a ghost program from an early version of the Internet - - which has also made its way there. Of course. It is sad that Tiptree presents Margaret as incapable of even friendship because of that psychic scarring, although at the same time it's not necessarily so unlikely either, since it was inflicted by her stepfather and her mother seems not to have interfered. That's going to lose you trustIn humanity. She changes because she uses her skills to interact with something so completely alien as to be virtually unknowable, and she also starts to have friendships, on her own terms and because she wants to in her own way, not because she's expected to. And she is respected for what she is able to do.
The people who are being tested for their psychic abilities are the humans who get the rest of the page time, and it's the women who are most present. At first this is became of the way Dan looks at them, again like in "The Women Men Don't See." But ultimately they develop as their own human selves and Dan acknowledges his errors. The generic housewife type, Winona, is disregarded by Dan as having no brains to speak of and completely frumpy besides. But when she gets to Tyree, she is hugely valued because of her skills in Fathering, which of course is as it should be. She is more than just a mother though, contributing to their survival in real ways. Which don't involve sex.
Valerie, whom Dan regarded as basically a nice body and not much else, comes into her own once she is out of a system where men are all around ogling her body, as Dan had been; she flourishes in experimenting and investigating. Which is a bit hard on her friend, Fredericka, known as Frodo. Theirs is clearly a lesbian relationship, if so discretely described that I'm sure you could pretend not to see it if you wanted to. Frodo doesn't have that much to do aside from me a bit surly, but her moment of realising that Valerie doesn't need her as her only friend anymore and that this makes her sad is one of the more poignant and human-true moments of the story.
Most of the men are crazy. Noah, the investigator into psychic abilities, isn't, but he's largely ineffectual. The military man is nuts, the maybe-CIA man is definitely nuts, and the male psychic subjects are also basically nuts. Except for the young twins, who once they are reunited with one another are basically human and not nuts.
Things that this reminds me of: FarScape, since the leviathan beastie is somewhat like Moya. It also reminds me of the mysterious creature in Marianne de Pierres' Sentients of Orion series. There are some similarities to Paul McCauley work, although I can't pinpoint details. And with Margaret Omali being a computer programmer, with the TOTAL program inside the leviathan, and the possibility that our heroes are all actually existing as energy bundles within the synapses of some sort of a computer in the end, there are clearly some connections to cyberpunk too.
This book is crazy and awesome and trust me, I have not completely spoiled it and you should totally go out and read it. If you can find a copy. I'll lend you mine if you promise to return it.
This was Tiptree's first novel, but naturally enough many of the concerns and interests of his short stories are present here as well. I am so sad that he did not write more novels; this made me so happy, as did Brightness Falls from the Air, that I do wonder what else could have come from that amazing brain.
Let's start by talking about the authorial situation and get that out of the way. This was published in 1978. Tiptree had been revealed as Alice Sheldon at the end of 1976. I was surprised therefore to discover that the brief bio in the end flap (oh hard backs I really do love you) makes no mention of him being her, although it does acknowledge Tiptree as a pseudonym. But I guess that pre internet, how are people going to know about the identity? Via Locus maybe, and gamines, and word of mouth. Tiptree was not such a big deal that the New York Times was going to run an expose. Presumably therefor with this publication your more casual, less crazy SF fans aren't going to know who Tiptree 'really' is - and Tiptree is enough of a name (... and male...?) to make it worth keeping the pseudonym. But THEN I turned to the back and the back cover image is Sheldon! Now I've seen the pic before and it's quite obvious to me who this is; but others have suggested that this could, actually, be an ambiguously gendered person. I'm not entirely convinced. But anyway, there's that.
Now, to plot. I'm going to be entirely spoilery because I really want to think about what Tiptree is doing here.
The story is told for about the first half or so from three alternating perspectives. The first, IN ALL CAPS BECAUSE THAT'S HOW A LEVIATHAN OUGHT TO BE REPRESENTED THANK YOU VERY MUCH, is some sort of being that is mammoth on a scale humans cannot comprehend. The wee beastie doesn't get that much page time, but it's enough to set up a vague sympathy; it's alone and cannot fulfil its duty. SAD. This being doesn't have much of a plot by itself, although it does play crucial roles in the lives and deaths of others.
The second is told mostly from the perspective of Tivonel, a flighty female of Tyree who enjoys hunting and gathering and is happy to leave such momentous tasks as Fathering to the Fathers; she'd rather be out flying on the High Winds. Because she is of a race of enormous manta-life beings who live in the winds of their planet, rarely interacting with solid matter. These beings mostly just live normal lives, thinking about who will Father their next child and whether to stay in the Deep for a long time or go flying the winds... until their scientist-equivalents report that the stars in a certain section of the sky are going out, and that they are receiving telepathic signals (which is how they communicate) from dying planets. And this wave of death is coming closer. So what can they do to save themselves and their children?
And there's the third part of the plot. The human one. Here, Doctor Daniel Dann is helping out with. Trial into the use of psionic skills with a ragtag group of people that he doesn't believe are capable of any such thing, with paranoid military types looking over their shoulder, and meanwhile he's heavily dosing himself with all sorts of not-meant-for -recreational-use drugs. He falls in love or lust or wonder with their computer analyst, and the discovers himself on Tyree. Because what the folk of Tyree discover is that they can swap minds and bodies with others. Of course on Tyree this is a life-crime, but if it's aliens and it's to save the children it doesn't really count... Right?
Eventually the plots join up, with Dann rather enjoying himself on Tyree and then some of them ending up with the GREAT LEVIATHAN TYPE THING IN SOME SORT OF MYSTERIOUS WAY. Its duty is revealed which is nice. Although then it's subverted which is for the good of others but I can't help but feel sad for a being whose entire existence is coopted by tiny little atoms of life who have the arrogance to think they know best.
Let's stop and consider for a moment that Tiptree is writing a story about experimental psychology, basically, using humans as test subjects. And the military and some sort of covert operations people are watching with paranoid glee wanting to control what goes on. Also quite a lot of this can be seen as first contact and exploration fiction. This, people, is what happens when someone with the life experience of Sheldon, and the imagination of Sheldon, writes a novel following Hemingways injunction to write what you know.
Anyway. The characters. Oh the characters. The humans are definitely the most interesting but I'll start by talking about Tyree, where Tiptree is setting up a a little gender mischief just because . You might have picked the idea that there, it's the males who care for the children. Fathering is considered the greatest and most important of skills and as a consequences the Fathers are the biggest, the strongest, the most revered. At the time we come to Tyree there are some females who are agitating for females to be allowed to develop Fathering skills, in the expectation that this will help them to develop their life field and you know, be more respected. OH THE LOLZ. Tivonel is our main focus here, and she's not one of these uppity females. In fact she doesn't really see the point in it all; why would you want to be tied down with children when you could be off exploring instead? She changes a little over the course of the story, becoming a but more reserved and interested in thinking beyond her own experiences, but that's about it. This isn't to say I didn't like her, I did - I don't know that she really needed to change all that much. It wouldn't have made sense for her to become the equivalent of a woman's-libber, since the planet is destroyed by the end and she's staying to be a part of the crew of the leviathan for possibly all time.
The humans, though. This is where Tiptree does some lovely things.
Dan isn't an especially nice person, although he takes his job seriously and tries to help those who need it. He's too caught up in his own grief to really comprehe d those around him, which begins to change when he has an experience with Margaret Omali in which they experience the worst event of the other's life. For him, that was his wife and child dying in a fire and the fear that he could have saved them. For her, it was a cliterodectomy in her early teens. Yes this is a book that mentions that this really happens. More in her in a minute. This is the beginning of Dan becoming empathetic, and he genuinely evolves and becomes more sympathetic as a character. Through him Tiptree explores the impossibility of knowing another human and the possible consequences if we did know another. We become more human. If we're not scared off. Also that taking lots of drugs is a bad idea.
Margaret... scarred physically and emotionally as an adolescent, incapable of having human relationships of any sort and far more interested in computers, is a cousin of the Parson women in "The Women Men Don't See." As soon as she's given an out she takes it, flying into the galaxy as pure life and taking up residence inside the great star beast/ship and far more at. Home there than on earth. Where, by the way, she is not alone because there's a Computer program - a ghost program from an early version of the Internet - - which has also made its way there. Of course. It is sad that Tiptree presents Margaret as incapable of even friendship because of that psychic scarring, although at the same time it's not necessarily so unlikely either, since it was inflicted by her stepfather and her mother seems not to have interfered. That's going to lose you trustIn humanity. She changes because she uses her skills to interact with something so completely alien as to be virtually unknowable, and she also starts to have friendships, on her own terms and because she wants to in her own way, not because she's expected to. And she is respected for what she is able to do.
The people who are being tested for their psychic abilities are the humans who get the rest of the page time, and it's the women who are most present. At first this is became of the way Dan looks at them, again like in "The Women Men Don't See." But ultimately they develop as their own human selves and Dan acknowledges his errors. The generic housewife type, Winona, is disregarded by Dan as having no brains to speak of and completely frumpy besides. But when she gets to Tyree, she is hugely valued because of her skills in Fathering, which of course is as it should be. She is more than just a mother though, contributing to their survival in real ways. Which don't involve sex.
Valerie, whom Dan regarded as basically a nice body and not much else, comes into her own once she is out of a system where men are all around ogling her body, as Dan had been; she flourishes in experimenting and investigating. Which is a bit hard on her friend, Fredericka, known as Frodo. Theirs is clearly a lesbian relationship, if so discretely described that I'm sure you could pretend not to see it if you wanted to. Frodo doesn't have that much to do aside from me a bit surly, but her moment of realising that Valerie doesn't need her as her only friend anymore and that this makes her sad is one of the more poignant and human-true moments of the story.
Most of the men are crazy. Noah, the investigator into psychic abilities, isn't, but he's largely ineffectual. The military man is nuts, the maybe-CIA man is definitely nuts, and the male psychic subjects are also basically nuts. Except for the young twins, who once they are reunited with one another are basically human and not nuts.
Things that this reminds me of: FarScape, since the leviathan beastie is somewhat like Moya. It also reminds me of the mysterious creature in Marianne de Pierres' Sentients of Orion series. There are some similarities to Paul McCauley work, although I can't pinpoint details. And with Margaret Omali being a computer programmer, with the TOTAL program inside the leviathan, and the possibility that our heroes are all actually existing as energy bundles within the synapses of some sort of a computer in the end, there are clearly some connections to cyberpunk too.
This book is crazy and awesome and trust me, I have not completely spoiled it and you should totally go out and read it. If you can find a copy. I'll lend you mine if you promise to return it.
January 30, 2017
Was für eine Perle! Ein "Zufallsfund" in der Bücherei, nachdem ich im aktuellen "Büchermagazin" einen Artikel über James Tiptree gelesen habe, der ja eigentlich eine SIE war - nämlich Alice B. Sheldon.
Ich bin kein allzugroßer Fan von Science Fiction; ich finde tödliche Laserstrahlen, oder wuschige Roboter, oder Raumschiffe mit doppelter Lichtgeschwindigkeitsgeschwindigkeit nicht so rasend spannend, aber ich lerne ja immer gerne dazu.
"Die Mauern der Welt hoch" - gab es übrigens schon mal unter dem Titel "Die Feuerschneise" ist die Geschichte einer Welt in den Weiten des Weltalls, die von einem monströsen Zerstörer zunächst bedroht und dann eben zerstört wird. Die Bewohner dieser Welt - Tyree - versuchen zu retten, was zu retten ist, uns so begehen manche von ihnen das größte Verbrechen, was es überhaupt gibt: Lebensraub. Es erwischt eine Gruppe speziell begabter Menschen, die unter der Leitung von Doktor Daniel Dan ihre übernatürlichen Fähigkeiten unter Beweis stellen sollen. Die Bewohner von Tyree schlüpfen in deren Körper, während die Menschen zu Tyreenern werden - und dem Untergang geweiht sind...
Man merkt es der Autorin an, dass sie nicht nur in der Psychologie zu Hause ist, sondern auch aus ihrem großen Wissenstopf schöpft, den sie während ihrer Zeit bei der Armee und der CIA füllen konnte, wenn sie teilweise bis ins kleinste Detail von Tyree und dessen Bewohner schreibt. Interessant war zu lesen, dass in dieser Welt die Männlichen Kinder bekommen und aufziehen, während die Weiblichen Abenteuer und Sex suchen. Dabei wird allerdings das Kinderaufziehen und das "Bevatern" als Zustand höchster Ehre angesehen, während man es den "wilden Weiblichen" nicht zutraut, zu so etwas fähig zu sein. Dementsprechend ist die Verwirrung und das Chaos natürlich groß, als sich plötzlich andere Lebewesen in den Körpern der Tyreener befinden und damit zurechtzukommen versuchen.
Der Sprachstil von Tiptree wechselt von poetisch zu erzählend, von wissenschaftlich zu erheiternd. Es gibt keine Stelle, die in Schnulz oder Schmalz abschwirrt, es gibt keine SF-Szene, die irgendwie unglaubwürdig erscheint. Eine richtig tolle ausgewogene Mischung aus allem!
Für mich als jemanden, der mit SF nicht allzuviel anfangen kann, war dieses Buch ein richtig schöner Genussschmöker, den ich nur wärmstens empfehlen kann!
Ich bin kein allzugroßer Fan von Science Fiction; ich finde tödliche Laserstrahlen, oder wuschige Roboter, oder Raumschiffe mit doppelter Lichtgeschwindigkeitsgeschwindigkeit nicht so rasend spannend, aber ich lerne ja immer gerne dazu.
"Die Mauern der Welt hoch" - gab es übrigens schon mal unter dem Titel "Die Feuerschneise" ist die Geschichte einer Welt in den Weiten des Weltalls, die von einem monströsen Zerstörer zunächst bedroht und dann eben zerstört wird. Die Bewohner dieser Welt - Tyree - versuchen zu retten, was zu retten ist, uns so begehen manche von ihnen das größte Verbrechen, was es überhaupt gibt: Lebensraub. Es erwischt eine Gruppe speziell begabter Menschen, die unter der Leitung von Doktor Daniel Dan ihre übernatürlichen Fähigkeiten unter Beweis stellen sollen. Die Bewohner von Tyree schlüpfen in deren Körper, während die Menschen zu Tyreenern werden - und dem Untergang geweiht sind...
Man merkt es der Autorin an, dass sie nicht nur in der Psychologie zu Hause ist, sondern auch aus ihrem großen Wissenstopf schöpft, den sie während ihrer Zeit bei der Armee und der CIA füllen konnte, wenn sie teilweise bis ins kleinste Detail von Tyree und dessen Bewohner schreibt. Interessant war zu lesen, dass in dieser Welt die Männlichen Kinder bekommen und aufziehen, während die Weiblichen Abenteuer und Sex suchen. Dabei wird allerdings das Kinderaufziehen und das "Bevatern" als Zustand höchster Ehre angesehen, während man es den "wilden Weiblichen" nicht zutraut, zu so etwas fähig zu sein. Dementsprechend ist die Verwirrung und das Chaos natürlich groß, als sich plötzlich andere Lebewesen in den Körpern der Tyreener befinden und damit zurechtzukommen versuchen.
Der Sprachstil von Tiptree wechselt von poetisch zu erzählend, von wissenschaftlich zu erheiternd. Es gibt keine Stelle, die in Schnulz oder Schmalz abschwirrt, es gibt keine SF-Szene, die irgendwie unglaubwürdig erscheint. Eine richtig tolle ausgewogene Mischung aus allem!
Für mich als jemanden, der mit SF nicht allzuviel anfangen kann, war dieses Buch ein richtig schöner Genussschmöker, den ich nur wärmstens empfehlen kann!
March 5, 2021
This is my first Tiptree, and gosh it was great! .. A group of psychics have been rounded up by the government for an experiment, and things are starting to seem like they might not be too straight forward. Meanwhile, on a world in another galaxy, solar flare like things are killing the alien race living there...Not really solar flares, more like a HUGE curious alien who doesn't even realize the damage he is causing.
When some of the aliens try to survive by following a bandwidth they pick up on, suddenly they have traded bodies with the human psychics...and all sorts of adventure ensues.
The writing is so beautiful, I actually can picture all three groups and their worlds. It seemed so real, I had to remind myself it was just a book...lol. I loved it
When some of the aliens try to survive by following a bandwidth they pick up on, suddenly they have traded bodies with the human psychics...and all sorts of adventure ensues.
The writing is so beautiful, I actually can picture all three groups and their worlds. It seemed so real, I had to remind myself it was just a book...lol. I loved it
April 10, 2017
I am entirely blown away by Tiptree.
Speechless.
I have low expectations of classic SF, but Tiptree has taught me a sharp lesson in how much more interesting things became in the 70s. A traditional Cold War military story - in which the Navy try to use telepathy to communicate with submarines - is subverted by the non-traditional characters long before you begin to appreciate the dilemma and politics of the desperate aliens trying to reach out across the ether. Expect much musing on gender roles, morality and the nature of the individual. Surprisingly modern in its outlook, and unexpectedly optimistic.
Full review
Speechless.
I have low expectations of classic SF, but Tiptree has taught me a sharp lesson in how much more interesting things became in the 70s. A traditional Cold War military story - in which the Navy try to use telepathy to communicate with submarines - is subverted by the non-traditional characters long before you begin to appreciate the dilemma and politics of the desperate aliens trying to reach out across the ether. Expect much musing on gender roles, morality and the nature of the individual. Surprisingly modern in its outlook, and unexpectedly optimistic.
Full review
January 16, 2017
I couldn't imagine a more 70s piece of science fiction if it showed up and challenged me to a disco dance competition, and I own a replica Zardoz mask. Tiptree weaves a tripart plot about telepathy, alien minds, and salvation.
THE DESTROYER is some kind of immense and ancient interstellar war-machine on an endless journey between systems, obliterating intelligent life by forcing their stars to go nova. It speaks in ITALICS ALL CAPS. Tyree is a gas giant world soon to be targeted by THE DESTROYER, where a civilization of telepathic wind dwelling mantas have a complex and peaceful society based around the wisdom of Fathers, and shared engram-experience patterns. On Earth, Dr. Daniel Dann is a drug addicted medical advisor to a U.S. Navy psi project to develop telepathic communications, which will be used to transmit orders to nuclear submarines.
The Tyreen embark on a desperate plan to transmit some of their minds telepathically to Earth, which might ensure their survival but is also their worst kind of crime. Dr. Dann mopes about his alienation and sexual frustration and the futility of the project. Then as doom approaches Tyree, Dann swaps minds with Giadoc, a Tyreen scientist. He learns telepathy, tries to heal the others as they seek shelter from THE DESTROYER deep within the gas giant, and then when all is lost, it turns out that THE DESTROYER has been partially hijacked by Margorie Omali, a brilliant African-American computer programmer, and TOTAL, a variant of the ARPANET. Dann, the Tyreens, and everybody struggles for mental integrity within the vast bulk of THE DESTROYER.
There's at least two really cool ideas here, gas giant civilizations and alien berserkers, and bunch of stuff about telepathy and alternate senses and socialities. As I've heard, Tiptree has a keen and ironic eye for gender politics, and there's some good style there, but so much of the story is buried under flopsy cruft that it's hard to discern what happens, or why we should care. The Tyreen's are so utopian they can't seem to conceive of their extinction except rationally. The whole thing feels rather half-baked.
I think I'd like to read some of Tiptree's short stories, but this first book has not impressed me.
THE DESTROYER is some kind of immense and ancient interstellar war-machine on an endless journey between systems, obliterating intelligent life by forcing their stars to go nova. It speaks in ITALICS ALL CAPS. Tyree is a gas giant world soon to be targeted by THE DESTROYER, where a civilization of telepathic wind dwelling mantas have a complex and peaceful society based around the wisdom of Fathers, and shared engram-experience patterns. On Earth, Dr. Daniel Dann is a drug addicted medical advisor to a U.S. Navy psi project to develop telepathic communications, which will be used to transmit orders to nuclear submarines.
The Tyreen embark on a desperate plan to transmit some of their minds telepathically to Earth, which might ensure their survival but is also their worst kind of crime. Dr. Dann mopes about his alienation and sexual frustration and the futility of the project. Then as doom approaches Tyree, Dann swaps minds with Giadoc, a Tyreen scientist. He learns telepathy, tries to heal the others as they seek shelter from THE DESTROYER deep within the gas giant, and then when all is lost, it turns out that THE DESTROYER has been partially hijacked by Margorie Omali, a brilliant African-American computer programmer, and TOTAL, a variant of the ARPANET. Dann, the Tyreens, and everybody struggles for mental integrity within the vast bulk of THE DESTROYER.
There's at least two really cool ideas here, gas giant civilizations and alien berserkers, and bunch of stuff about telepathy and alternate senses and socialities. As I've heard, Tiptree has a keen and ironic eye for gender politics, and there's some good style there, but so much of the story is buried under flopsy cruft that it's hard to discern what happens, or why we should care. The Tyreen's are so utopian they can't seem to conceive of their extinction except rationally. The whole thing feels rather half-baked.
I think I'd like to read some of Tiptree's short stories, but this first book has not impressed me.
September 1, 2022
Through the vast interstellar deeps moves The Destroyer. A huge intelligence that destroys suns and planets, even if they contain life. On the gas giant Tyree the aerial inhabitants know that their planet is next and are desperately seeking a way off the dying world as their sun flares. And on Earth, a group of nascent psi-talents are dragooned into a military experiment, unaware that their powers will be forcibly acquired by the military. The three disparate entities are linked when the psychic sending of the humans is detected on Tyree and a rebel group of Tyrenni decide to commit life-crime - forcibly evicting the psyches of other organisms and replacing them with their own. It is a criminal act on Tyree but some Fathers are so desperate they do it. Seven humans are evicted and suddenly find themselves inhabiting Tyrenni bodies on the dying planet, while the Tyrenni are now inhabiting earthbound meatsuits. The interplay between the stay-behind Tyrenni and the exiled humans comes to a head when they are called into a nebulous area of space by The Destroyer just as Tyree is destroyed. What they find there, as disembodied engrams of their intelligences, turns all their beliefs on their heads and reveals a much more Universal terror which puts the actions of The Destroyer in a very different light. An astonishing debut novel from James Tiptree Jr. (Alice Sheldon). It is densely plotted and rewards attention. RECOMMENDED.
August 10, 2022
Un livre de la liste Haraway. Donc de la scifi cheesy à lire dans le train sauf que badaboum c'est en fait féministe.
Encore un bouquin de la liste Haraway qui ne déçoit pas. Le début est un peu long à démarrer, ça plante le décor à un rythme assez lent. Pas mal d'arcs narratifs laissés en suspens. La description de Tyree se fait en douceur. Cela ressemble un peu à un jeu d'écriture rigolo où les sens "vue" et "ouïe" sont inversés.
Et ensuite ensuite...
Ah comment parler du livre sans tout dévoiler... En fait c'est un traité des relations entre les êtres, ça parle de compassion, de sensations. Ça parle genre aussi, ça parle rôles sociaux de genre. Ça parle gravité, cosmogonie et traumatisme. Ça parle corps coeur et esprit.
Titre alternatif : Petit manuel d'humanité à l'usage des êtres extraterrestres, CW race primitive et agressive.
Les personnages sont interressants et nuancés. Les taré.es terrestres se révèlent les plus doué.es pour l'apocalypse et devinez quoi ? Ça ne surprendra personne.
Une invitation à se ré-imaginer soi-même, à mettre au centre les connexions importantes, l'empathie et l'amour.
C'est beau c'est drôle c'est absurde et si curieusement intéressant. Je reste avec cette couverture kitsch et des images colorées plein la tête. Je nourris ma cosmogonie personnelle de ce récit inventif et caressant. Je pense qu'il faudrait en faire une série queer.
Encore un bouquin de la liste Haraway qui ne déçoit pas. Le début est un peu long à démarrer, ça plante le décor à un rythme assez lent. Pas mal d'arcs narratifs laissés en suspens. La description de Tyree se fait en douceur. Cela ressemble un peu à un jeu d'écriture rigolo où les sens "vue" et "ouïe" sont inversés.
Et ensuite ensuite...
Ah comment parler du livre sans tout dévoiler... En fait c'est un traité des relations entre les êtres, ça parle de compassion, de sensations. Ça parle genre aussi, ça parle rôles sociaux de genre. Ça parle gravité, cosmogonie et traumatisme. Ça parle corps coeur et esprit.
Titre alternatif : Petit manuel d'humanité à l'usage des êtres extraterrestres, CW race primitive et agressive.
Les personnages sont interressants et nuancés. Les taré.es terrestres se révèlent les plus doué.es pour l'apocalypse et devinez quoi ? Ça ne surprendra personne.
Une invitation à se ré-imaginer soi-même, à mettre au centre les connexions importantes, l'empathie et l'amour.
C'est beau c'est drôle c'est absurde et si curieusement intéressant. Je reste avec cette couverture kitsch et des images colorées plein la tête. Je nourris ma cosmogonie personnelle de ce récit inventif et caressant. Je pense qu'il faudrait en faire une série queer.
March 15, 2020
This was beautiful. "Let's try it all." 😭
I can't believe how much I enjoyed this one overall, given how hard it was to follow at times. So ambitious! It was like reading an undiscovered Philip K. Dick novel, with the classic SF feeling of his early years, but with all the care and craft of his later years.
I wouldn't be surprised if this novel inspired Stephen King's Dark Tower series with its talk of "the Beam" and using the phrase "[name] that was." It's certainly inspired me.
So much of these themes are already present in the first two books of my own Adelaide in Ozghard, so now working on the third and final book and reading this masterpiece... I have a lot to try and live up to.
May the Winds bless and keep you, Alice. You were amazing.
I can't believe how much I enjoyed this one overall, given how hard it was to follow at times. So ambitious! It was like reading an undiscovered Philip K. Dick novel, with the classic SF feeling of his early years, but with all the care and craft of his later years.
I wouldn't be surprised if this novel inspired Stephen King's Dark Tower series with its talk of "the Beam" and using the phrase "[name] that was." It's certainly inspired me.
So much of these themes are already present in the first two books of my own Adelaide in Ozghard, so now working on the third and final book and reading this masterpiece... I have a lot to try and live up to.
May the Winds bless and keep you, Alice. You were amazing.
October 12, 2015
This novel is a departure for James Tiptree, Jr., a writer more noted for her taut, dour short stories. In this novel she expands on her darker themes of gender, exogamy, failures to communicate either ideas or emotion, and entropy (that life is only a flicker in darkness, soon to be extinguished), and then finds for each of them sort of lighter facet, even introducing something akin to hope.
Three separate beings converge, first in conflict, then in cooperation, and the dark forces of small individual lives and the dark forces of the universe become subsumed in a new principle of life, engagement, and possibility.
Some great wraith-like being—the destroyer—is coursing through the galaxy, its physical span as broad as a solar system, and it has fallen separate from its kind. It is plagued with some guilt, an evil about which it is unclear and confused. Shame keeps it from seeking and returning to its own, but until it understands where the shame lies and how it might be atoned, it will persist in what it believes is its purpose, to destroy worlds and their sentient beings. On the wind world of Tyree, its wind-dwelling, manta-like creatures are aware of a cataclysm that will destroy the planet, some great heat and radioactivity that is approaching the planet from afar. The Tyrenee are physical beings whose life force is a mental field about their bodies which is decorously composed to preserve privacy, though the beings are capable of transferring memory engrams and can mentally bond, though this degree of intimacy is rare. Their lives are sedate and without conflict, occupied only in gathering food, rearing children, and maintaining polar outposts where collectives use their combined mental powers to reach beyond the planet to find and study other minds. On Earth a group of misfit telepathic sensitives is called in by an intelligence branch of the DOD to conduct some viability tests at a station near Norfolk, involving transmission and reception of thoughts from a submarine off the coast. The presiding spirit of this group is Dr. Daniel Dann, fifty-ish, down at this heels, prone to bouts of self-loathing, and subject to painful empathy with the sensitives on the team. Another in this group is Margaret Omali, the computer specialist whose anodyne for pain, emotion, and memories is the dispassionate intelligence of computers and their networks.
A large part of the novel is misdirection about the destroyer’s purpose. There is something dark and implacable about the destroyer, as if invested with a cosmic necessity to extinguish life. But this immense dark being is diverted, its attention drawn to a strand of mental activity, a tendril of life force crossing the expanse of space, and suddenly there’s a confusion about the destroyer’s purpose. Is it going to follow the strand to its source and destroy that world? But its wonder is so oddly benign that the darker implications are for a moment allayed. This being’s later encounter with the pin-prick sized life force of Omali, and then later the life forces of the survivors of Tyree (including the psychic Earthlings under Dr. Dann’s wing), while initially alarming, slowly begin to morph into a beneficial relationship, one which reshapes all the beings’ perspectives. In Aeschylus’ Oresteia, his trilogy of tragedies about Orestes’ quest to avenge his father’s death, the defining spirit resides in the Furies who wreak death with powers beyond even the gods. In that cycle of plays the Furies are tamed, their forces turned from vengeful harshness to ameliorative justice. In the same fashion, the destroyer is transformed, actually restored to its original purpose, becoming aware again that it was meant to preserve life, to remove it from dying systems and translate them elsewhere.
Up the Walls of the World is surprisingly buoyant; surprising because Tiptree’s short stories prior to this, her first novel, are dark and characterized by a sense of inevitable loss and death. The optimism that arises in Up the Walls—minds meeting, communicative and empathetic; life forces persisting and surviving in darkness and void; laughter and joyful alien sex; even the comedy of aliens thriving on Earth in the guise of a troupe of mindreaders for hire—is set against both Tiptree’s reputation and against this novel’s grim backdrop: darkness and destruction impending, a world about to be destroyed by radiation, a group of diffident psychics under the control of paranoid military authorities, aliens willing to alter their moral compass to save their lives, and two humans (Omali and Dr. Dann) with tragic back stories. Tiptree’s prose reaches a rhapsodic pitch when she describes the persistence of the life force in Omali and the alien Giadoc, and she achieves a sort of euphoria in the musings of the female alien Tivonel. These are aspects of Tiptree’s writing that are well done, and she deals with the ineffable (usually anathema in SF) in both a wondrous and compelling way.
As with much of her writing, this novel bears re-reading, as the reversal of polarity in the story (from grim to expectant) is subtly produced and all the more effective for the way she’s set the stage. Also fruitful in a second reading will be the accounts—as usual tersely told in the Tiptree fashion—of the subtle verbal relations between the burgeoning Earthling telepaths, of the descriptions of wondrous, windy Tyree, and of the destroyer’s slow alteration of mind. I look forward to revisiting these characters some time in the future!
Three separate beings converge, first in conflict, then in cooperation, and the dark forces of small individual lives and the dark forces of the universe become subsumed in a new principle of life, engagement, and possibility.
Some great wraith-like being—the destroyer—is coursing through the galaxy, its physical span as broad as a solar system, and it has fallen separate from its kind. It is plagued with some guilt, an evil about which it is unclear and confused. Shame keeps it from seeking and returning to its own, but until it understands where the shame lies and how it might be atoned, it will persist in what it believes is its purpose, to destroy worlds and their sentient beings. On the wind world of Tyree, its wind-dwelling, manta-like creatures are aware of a cataclysm that will destroy the planet, some great heat and radioactivity that is approaching the planet from afar. The Tyrenee are physical beings whose life force is a mental field about their bodies which is decorously composed to preserve privacy, though the beings are capable of transferring memory engrams and can mentally bond, though this degree of intimacy is rare. Their lives are sedate and without conflict, occupied only in gathering food, rearing children, and maintaining polar outposts where collectives use their combined mental powers to reach beyond the planet to find and study other minds. On Earth a group of misfit telepathic sensitives is called in by an intelligence branch of the DOD to conduct some viability tests at a station near Norfolk, involving transmission and reception of thoughts from a submarine off the coast. The presiding spirit of this group is Dr. Daniel Dann, fifty-ish, down at this heels, prone to bouts of self-loathing, and subject to painful empathy with the sensitives on the team. Another in this group is Margaret Omali, the computer specialist whose anodyne for pain, emotion, and memories is the dispassionate intelligence of computers and their networks.
A large part of the novel is misdirection about the destroyer’s purpose. There is something dark and implacable about the destroyer, as if invested with a cosmic necessity to extinguish life. But this immense dark being is diverted, its attention drawn to a strand of mental activity, a tendril of life force crossing the expanse of space, and suddenly there’s a confusion about the destroyer’s purpose. Is it going to follow the strand to its source and destroy that world? But its wonder is so oddly benign that the darker implications are for a moment allayed. This being’s later encounter with the pin-prick sized life force of Omali, and then later the life forces of the survivors of Tyree (including the psychic Earthlings under Dr. Dann’s wing), while initially alarming, slowly begin to morph into a beneficial relationship, one which reshapes all the beings’ perspectives. In Aeschylus’ Oresteia, his trilogy of tragedies about Orestes’ quest to avenge his father’s death, the defining spirit resides in the Furies who wreak death with powers beyond even the gods. In that cycle of plays the Furies are tamed, their forces turned from vengeful harshness to ameliorative justice. In the same fashion, the destroyer is transformed, actually restored to its original purpose, becoming aware again that it was meant to preserve life, to remove it from dying systems and translate them elsewhere.
Up the Walls of the World is surprisingly buoyant; surprising because Tiptree’s short stories prior to this, her first novel, are dark and characterized by a sense of inevitable loss and death. The optimism that arises in Up the Walls—minds meeting, communicative and empathetic; life forces persisting and surviving in darkness and void; laughter and joyful alien sex; even the comedy of aliens thriving on Earth in the guise of a troupe of mindreaders for hire—is set against both Tiptree’s reputation and against this novel’s grim backdrop: darkness and destruction impending, a world about to be destroyed by radiation, a group of diffident psychics under the control of paranoid military authorities, aliens willing to alter their moral compass to save their lives, and two humans (Omali and Dr. Dann) with tragic back stories. Tiptree’s prose reaches a rhapsodic pitch when she describes the persistence of the life force in Omali and the alien Giadoc, and she achieves a sort of euphoria in the musings of the female alien Tivonel. These are aspects of Tiptree’s writing that are well done, and she deals with the ineffable (usually anathema in SF) in both a wondrous and compelling way.
As with much of her writing, this novel bears re-reading, as the reversal of polarity in the story (from grim to expectant) is subtly produced and all the more effective for the way she’s set the stage. Also fruitful in a second reading will be the accounts—as usual tersely told in the Tiptree fashion—of the subtle verbal relations between the burgeoning Earthling telepaths, of the descriptions of wondrous, windy Tyree, and of the destroyer’s slow alteration of mind. I look forward to revisiting these characters some time in the future!
August 16, 2017
1.5 stars, rounding up because I rather liked the writing style for the humans in the first few chapters.
Otherwise: no conflict; a couple of interesting places it could have gone, but didn't; mostly just boring.
Otherwise: no conflict; a couple of interesting places it could have gone, but didn't; mostly just boring.
September 21, 2024
Having never read any Tiptree before, I'll have to take it on faith that this first novel of hers isn't really representative of her body of short work, for which she's much more famous. That and her rather bizarre life story. Go read her wikipedia page, it's something.
The cliffs notes version is that in her girlhood she travelled Africa with her parents, becoming the title character of two travelogues written by her mother. She worked in Air Force intelligence during WWII and briefly in the CIA. After quitting she got a doctorate in experimental psychology, and started publishing science fiction stories as James Tiptree, Jr. More than a penname, this became a male alter ego that she maintained even in correspondence with other authors, never appearing publicly. After about a decade, a slip of the pen allowed fans to locate her mother's obituary, and unmask her true identity. This book was published about a year after that unmasking. A decade later, she died in what was either a murder-suicide or a suicide pact with her infirm husband. Because of that, the award named for her was renamed recently due to concerns that it could be taken as glorification of the murder of the disabled. An interesting figure, to say the least.
ANYWAY, the book itself. It tells a tripartite story of a deranged nebular organism, telepathic gas-giant dwellers, and nascently psychic human misfits. These three plots initially kick each other off in a falling domino fashion, then slowly swirl together until they're inseparable. Along the way there is astral projection, body-swapping, mind-melding, and more. Events will occur in one strand, and the effects will not be seen or understood until a later section where they are experienced from a different perspective. Even the styles between the sections are fairly distinct, the human being more psychological, given that we're trapped within our individual sensations and experiences, unlike the Tyrenni. Their sections concentrate on trying to evoke an alien land(wind?)scape and sensorium. Initially, the description of the Tyrenni is kept somewhat vague, and it isn't quite clear if they're meant to be physical beings or are some kind of disembodied psychic energy field.
That lack of description gives Barlowe a chance to craft his "least out of place if you plopped it right into Expedition" creature in the entire Guide to Extraterrestrials. Beautiful, and it hits every point of the meagre descriptions. And I am so, so glad that I've found another one of these creatures that plays more than a bit part in the story: the Tyrenni are front and centre.
Their society is a satirical reversal of human sexual roles: like seahorses, male Tyrenni gestate and birth the young, and perform all childcare, while females travel, work, and pursue males sexually. However, in a second order reversal, it is the "fatherly" virtues of care and family that are held highest by the Tyrenni, a literal patriarchy. Is the male Giadoc more like a man, because he is physically large and strong, and part of the sex with all political authority, or is he more like a woman, because he has given birth and raised an infant? Tiptree furthers the satire by having some female Tyrenni wish to break into the male sphere, hatching schemes to somehow keep their eggs for themselves. The female Tivonel worries that as agriculture advances, males may no longer need females to provide for them, and they will become superfluous.
Untangling all the layers would probably need a whole review in itself. There is a grass-is-greener aspect to the struggle of the female Tyrenni. It's their social system which constrains them, not their inability to become pregnant. Tivonel herself doesn't see anything wrong with the system she lives in - she enjoys the female world of travel, adventure, and physical struggle. At the same time, she exhibits some male behaviours, like aiding a child who has accidentally twisted his psychic field outside of his body, normally a father's task. She sees as a little "off" those female Tyrenni who conceive of life as a battle of the sexes, but also recognizes the achievements of those few who have managed to cultivate fatherly abilities.
The human side of the story ties into this to an extent. Winona laments her fate as a used-up widow, Omali's life is defined by , and the lesbian schoolgirls cling to each other in a homophobic world. At the same time, we witness Dann's fatherly empathy, and his love of Omali proves not to be possessive but platonic. But on the whole, the human side is more a story of being locked in your own head, with your private shames and fears, unable to truly connect with others. Once they are open to each other, all of the test subjects are able to become comrades, even the "mysogynist [sic]" dwarf who cannot read safe combinations from women's minds.
Despite the seemingly heavy setup, and Tiptree's reputation as a dark writer, it all comes out to a shockingly happy conclusion. While I do like that in some ways, I also really, really love tragedy. The ending isn't even bittersweet, it's just sweet. A happy ending isn't a bad thing in itself, but when it contrasts so strongly with the pathos of earlier events, it becomes pat. That lack of tragedy is even more disappointing because of something I discovered while reading.
My Stapledon senses started tingling HARD about halfway through. Not unusual, his themes aren't that particular to him. But the more I read, the more it felt almost like Stapledon fanfiction. I've had this feeling before (Fire Time), but wasn't able to prove it. But here, I hit paydirt. In "Favored by Strange Gods: A Selection of Letters from James Tiptree, Jr. to Joanna Russ", an article published in OTHER ALIENS No. 67, a letter is reprinted in which she says she hadn't read much of anything "since my Stapledon orgy, except the dreary drafts of this exquisitely awful first novel I am trying to perpetrate". In an earlier letter, she references writing "a story in which an alien culture has large, strong males whor are also biologically equipped for child-caring. (Rather like sea-horses.)" so it's definitely this book. While I would've liked some more detail, I think it's safe to say that Star Maker was the biggest influence, with its nebular organisms, utopic telepathic hiveminds, struggling noble civilizations cut down by cosmic dangers out of their control, etc. Other more particular connections could be made, such as between a scene in Last Men in London where the protagonist is made completely aware of another's consciousness, and the same thing occurring between Dann and Valerie. The test subjects, especially the dwarf Chris, are easy "submerged supermen" of Odd John.
Fanfiction is a bit of strong word. This world is Tiptree's own, it's just that some themes and a couple specific situations are referencing Stapledon. She breaks with Stapledon in not making a tragedy. I'm sure even the paranoid guy who got turned into a dog turned out fine in the end. (Sirius?) Tiptree's interest in sex roles is a bigger difference. The only two times I can recall this coming up for Stapledon was the end of the brute-men in Star Maker, and when the enlightened society in Darkness and the Light were struck by an eldritch plague of androgyny and sexual dysfunction. Here, the relation between man and woman, male and female, is a bigger concern. Class and Marxism were Stapledon's big concerns outside his transcendental desires. Actually, maybe I'm selling him short, there was the main character's girlfriend in A Man Divided, she was meant to be an independent woman, and the second men and third men were supposed to be more egalitarian than us, I believe.
Tiptree merges Stapledonian concerns (universal brotherhood, the cosmic and the quotidian, speculative biology, yearning for telepathy and transcendence) skilfully with her own interests, and for that I commend her. It's one thing to write a riff on another writer, it's another to write one that simultaneously expands past his horizons, while remaining true to the inspiration.
Summary:
The cliffs notes version is that in her girlhood she travelled Africa with her parents, becoming the title character of two travelogues written by her mother. She worked in Air Force intelligence during WWII and briefly in the CIA. After quitting she got a doctorate in experimental psychology, and started publishing science fiction stories as James Tiptree, Jr. More than a penname, this became a male alter ego that she maintained even in correspondence with other authors, never appearing publicly. After about a decade, a slip of the pen allowed fans to locate her mother's obituary, and unmask her true identity. This book was published about a year after that unmasking. A decade later, she died in what was either a murder-suicide or a suicide pact with her infirm husband. Because of that, the award named for her was renamed recently due to concerns that it could be taken as glorification of the murder of the disabled. An interesting figure, to say the least.
ANYWAY, the book itself. It tells a tripartite story of a deranged nebular organism, telepathic gas-giant dwellers, and nascently psychic human misfits. These three plots initially kick each other off in a falling domino fashion, then slowly swirl together until they're inseparable. Along the way there is astral projection, body-swapping, mind-melding, and more. Events will occur in one strand, and the effects will not be seen or understood until a later section where they are experienced from a different perspective. Even the styles between the sections are fairly distinct, the human being more psychological, given that we're trapped within our individual sensations and experiences, unlike the Tyrenni. Their sections concentrate on trying to evoke an alien land(wind?)scape and sensorium. Initially, the description of the Tyrenni is kept somewhat vague, and it isn't quite clear if they're meant to be physical beings or are some kind of disembodied psychic energy field.
That lack of description gives Barlowe a chance to craft his "least out of place if you plopped it right into Expedition" creature in the entire Guide to Extraterrestrials. Beautiful, and it hits every point of the meagre descriptions. And I am so, so glad that I've found another one of these creatures that plays more than a bit part in the story: the Tyrenni are front and centre.
Their society is a satirical reversal of human sexual roles: like seahorses, male Tyrenni gestate and birth the young, and perform all childcare, while females travel, work, and pursue males sexually. However, in a second order reversal, it is the "fatherly" virtues of care and family that are held highest by the Tyrenni, a literal patriarchy. Is the male Giadoc more like a man, because he is physically large and strong, and part of the sex with all political authority, or is he more like a woman, because he has given birth and raised an infant? Tiptree furthers the satire by having some female Tyrenni wish to break into the male sphere, hatching schemes to somehow keep their eggs for themselves. The female Tivonel worries that as agriculture advances, males may no longer need females to provide for them, and they will become superfluous.
Untangling all the layers would probably need a whole review in itself. There is a grass-is-greener aspect to the struggle of the female Tyrenni. It's their social system which constrains them, not their inability to become pregnant. Tivonel herself doesn't see anything wrong with the system she lives in - she enjoys the female world of travel, adventure, and physical struggle. At the same time, she exhibits some male behaviours, like aiding a child who has accidentally twisted his psychic field outside of his body, normally a father's task. She sees as a little "off" those female Tyrenni who conceive of life as a battle of the sexes, but also recognizes the achievements of those few who have managed to cultivate fatherly abilities.
The human side of the story ties into this to an extent. Winona laments her fate as a used-up widow, Omali's life is defined by , and the lesbian schoolgirls cling to each other in a homophobic world. At the same time, we witness Dann's fatherly empathy, and his love of Omali proves not to be possessive but platonic. But on the whole, the human side is more a story of being locked in your own head, with your private shames and fears, unable to truly connect with others. Once they are open to each other, all of the test subjects are able to become comrades, even the "mysogynist [sic]" dwarf who cannot read safe combinations from women's minds.
Despite the seemingly heavy setup, and Tiptree's reputation as a dark writer, it all comes out to a shockingly happy conclusion. While I do like that in some ways, I also really, really love tragedy. The ending isn't even bittersweet, it's just sweet. A happy ending isn't a bad thing in itself, but when it contrasts so strongly with the pathos of earlier events, it becomes pat. That lack of tragedy is even more disappointing because of something I discovered while reading.
My Stapledon senses started tingling HARD about halfway through. Not unusual, his themes aren't that particular to him. But the more I read, the more it felt almost like Stapledon fanfiction. I've had this feeling before (Fire Time), but wasn't able to prove it. But here, I hit paydirt. In "Favored by Strange Gods: A Selection of Letters from James Tiptree, Jr. to Joanna Russ", an article published in OTHER ALIENS No. 67, a letter is reprinted in which she says she hadn't read much of anything "since my Stapledon orgy, except the dreary drafts of this exquisitely awful first novel I am trying to perpetrate". In an earlier letter, she references writing "a story in which an alien culture has large, strong males whor are also biologically equipped for child-caring. (Rather like sea-horses.)" so it's definitely this book. While I would've liked some more detail, I think it's safe to say that Star Maker was the biggest influence, with its nebular organisms, utopic telepathic hiveminds, struggling noble civilizations cut down by cosmic dangers out of their control, etc. Other more particular connections could be made, such as between a scene in Last Men in London where the protagonist is made completely aware of another's consciousness, and the same thing occurring between Dann and Valerie. The test subjects, especially the dwarf Chris, are easy "submerged supermen" of Odd John.
Fanfiction is a bit of strong word. This world is Tiptree's own, it's just that some themes and a couple specific situations are referencing Stapledon. She breaks with Stapledon in not making a tragedy. I'm sure even the paranoid guy who got turned into a dog turned out fine in the end. (Sirius?) Tiptree's interest in sex roles is a bigger difference. The only two times I can recall this coming up for Stapledon was the end of the brute-men in Star Maker, and when the enlightened society in Darkness and the Light were struck by an eldritch plague of androgyny and sexual dysfunction. Here, the relation between man and woman, male and female, is a bigger concern. Class and Marxism were Stapledon's big concerns outside his transcendental desires. Actually, maybe I'm selling him short, there was the main character's girlfriend in A Man Divided, she was meant to be an independent woman, and the second men and third men were supposed to be more egalitarian than us, I believe.
Tiptree merges Stapledonian concerns (universal brotherhood, the cosmic and the quotidian, speculative biology, yearning for telepathy and transcendence) skilfully with her own interests, and for that I commend her. It's one thing to write a riff on another writer, it's another to write one that simultaneously expands past his horizons, while remaining true to the inspiration.
Summary:
May 31, 2025
Té idees interessants i les va trenant des d'un punt de vista benèvol. Té uns primers capítols que se m'han fet estranys per l'estil narratiu que més endavant canvia i el trobo justificat.
Hi ha una evasió dels conflictes interpersonals que podria haver donat una altra dimensió a la història tot i que no tinc clar si hauria sumat i restat a la història que s'explica.
Hi ha una evasió dels conflictes interpersonals que podria haver donat una altra dimensió a la història tot i que no tinc clar si hauria sumat i restat a la història que s'explica.
June 14, 2013
Unlike many stories of first contact this book does neither rushes the development of a basic comprehension of language and motivation nor makes the possibility of confusion the sole plot.
The story is built from three narratives: a being journeys from star to star, knowing that it has been separated from its fellows but able to remember neither what happened nor its purpose, seeking contact in a galaxy apparently lacking in intelligent life; on Tyree airborne mantas discover a being, the Destroyer, bent on destroying their world, and desperately seek a means of escape; on Earth US Army experiments in ESP are suddenly disrupted by mysterious interference and bouts of madness.
The creation of the alien races is well handled. The Tyree have different senses from humans, which – rejecting the temptation to invent new words – Tiptree describes using synaesthesia; this prevents the reader from carrying out a simple mental substitution of human terms for alien, producing a tension between confusion and familiarity which captures how perception can make a common reality uncertain. Lacking the examples of social interaction a similar unravelling of the conceptual framework of the lonely traveller is left for later in the book.
A second difference between races is their culture. The children of the Tyree are raised by the males, who are both mentally and physically more powerful so are, to the Tyree, better suited to the vital task of rearing the next generation. When they first encounter humans they naturally assume that human women are larger and stronger because they raise children. However – despite the obvious commentary on human society – the Tyree are not portrayed as more advanced for having this concept. There are female Tyree who want to raise children but their motives are not completely pure; as well as some who believe the ability is not sex specific, some are seeking it not for the act but for the status it brings. The reader is left to decide whether the arguments for equality can be transferred between races, or whether biology has made some tasks the province of specific sexes.
The culture clash from the human perspective is similarly nuanced. The rigid military minds have the greatest difficulty adapting to the Tyree’s communication through electromagnetic energy extended from minds loosely centred on rather than held within their physical bodies, whereas the ESP subjects adapt more rapidly to the concept. However, their comprehension of the immediate experience does not bring understanding of context: one subject initially parses the experience as entry into the spirit realm, while another falls into paranoia that their every thought and desire will be read from a distance.
Although the book raises interesting concepts of social structure and perception it is written in the style of a unexceptional pulp action-adventure. This does make some of the descriptions of mutual confusion veer into tedium and lead to some passages where the reader is drawn forward by the desire to read the answer to a question instead of carried forward by the quality of the prose.
Overall I enjoyed this book, more for the concepts than for the prose. I would recommend it to readers seeking a feeling of “what if” or a does of Golden Age Sci-Fi, but not to those seeking a rollicking adventure.
The story is built from three narratives: a being journeys from star to star, knowing that it has been separated from its fellows but able to remember neither what happened nor its purpose, seeking contact in a galaxy apparently lacking in intelligent life; on Tyree airborne mantas discover a being, the Destroyer, bent on destroying their world, and desperately seek a means of escape; on Earth US Army experiments in ESP are suddenly disrupted by mysterious interference and bouts of madness.
The creation of the alien races is well handled. The Tyree have different senses from humans, which – rejecting the temptation to invent new words – Tiptree describes using synaesthesia; this prevents the reader from carrying out a simple mental substitution of human terms for alien, producing a tension between confusion and familiarity which captures how perception can make a common reality uncertain. Lacking the examples of social interaction a similar unravelling of the conceptual framework of the lonely traveller is left for later in the book.
A second difference between races is their culture. The children of the Tyree are raised by the males, who are both mentally and physically more powerful so are, to the Tyree, better suited to the vital task of rearing the next generation. When they first encounter humans they naturally assume that human women are larger and stronger because they raise children. However – despite the obvious commentary on human society – the Tyree are not portrayed as more advanced for having this concept. There are female Tyree who want to raise children but their motives are not completely pure; as well as some who believe the ability is not sex specific, some are seeking it not for the act but for the status it brings. The reader is left to decide whether the arguments for equality can be transferred between races, or whether biology has made some tasks the province of specific sexes.
The culture clash from the human perspective is similarly nuanced. The rigid military minds have the greatest difficulty adapting to the Tyree’s communication through electromagnetic energy extended from minds loosely centred on rather than held within their physical bodies, whereas the ESP subjects adapt more rapidly to the concept. However, their comprehension of the immediate experience does not bring understanding of context: one subject initially parses the experience as entry into the spirit realm, while another falls into paranoia that their every thought and desire will be read from a distance.
Although the book raises interesting concepts of social structure and perception it is written in the style of a unexceptional pulp action-adventure. This does make some of the descriptions of mutual confusion veer into tedium and lead to some passages where the reader is drawn forward by the desire to read the answer to a question instead of carried forward by the quality of the prose.
Overall I enjoyed this book, more for the concepts than for the prose. I would recommend it to readers seeking a feeling of “what if” or a does of Golden Age Sci-Fi, but not to those seeking a rollicking adventure.
April 16, 2020
This book is packed with ideas and themes that were way ahead of its time. From sexuality to exploration of good and evil.
Unfortunately the plot is not really there to fuel the interest and the book is filled with literal junk that has no relevance on the story.
I will be very generous and mark it as three stars, putting it on the re-read shelf. I feel as if I did not get into it from the start and that prevented me from enjoying the themes this book explores. Also the writing itself drove me up the wall at certain times. I also found some of the dialogues straight up infuriating in their apparent inability to achieve any impact on the plot or benefit the reader in any significant way.
This novel is by far the most beautiful, poetic and message-loaded waste of time of the year.
Unfortunately the plot is not really there to fuel the interest and the book is filled with literal junk that has no relevance on the story.
I will be very generous and mark it as three stars, putting it on the re-read shelf. I feel as if I did not get into it from the start and that prevented me from enjoying the themes this book explores. Also the writing itself drove me up the wall at certain times. I also found some of the dialogues straight up infuriating in their apparent inability to achieve any impact on the plot or benefit the reader in any significant way.
This novel is by far the most beautiful, poetic and message-loaded waste of time of the year.
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