Review: Star Songs of An Old Primate

Star Songs of An Old Primate by James Tiptree Jr.
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

There wasn't a moment of reading this book where I wasn't engaged, excited, or delighted. Ursula Le Guin's excellent introduction was especially fun, as this collection came out very soon after Tiptree was revealed to be Alice Sheldon. Le Guin insists that saying Tiptree "doesn't exist" is absurd (after all, she's exchanged many letters with him) and urges the reader to think about how identity is formed, and how an author shapes our expectations. She also points out a tidbit I didn't know but thought was neat: Tiptree withdrew "The Women Men Don't See" from award consideration prior to being 'outed', because many lauded the story for Tiptree's ability to understand women despite being a man.

Anyway, this anthology is classic Tiptree. You can see Alice Sheldon's long government and research careers at work in "The Psychologist Who Wouldn't Do Awful Things to Rats" and "Your Haploid Heart." Her interest in biology and gender come to the fore in "Haploid" as well as "A Momentary Taste of Being," "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?" and "She Waits for All Men Born." "All Men Born" is a fantastically dark, optimistic end to the anthology, and feels very modern even today. As characteristic of Tiptree, many of the stories read like mysteries; something is hidden, just barely visible through the layers of the story, until a sudden reveal in the third act. And yet I didn't get tired of the format, even when re-reading "Houston" for the third time.

I have a major bone to pick with "A Momentary Taste of Being," though, because I wrote half that damn story and plotted out the rest of it. The central premise of the story and several of the big moments map on to a short story I drafted a year ago, though of course Tiptree's is eerier and she had a much better set-up and payoff. I had to put down the book halfway through that story and kick myself for not finishing my story earlier, because now I certainly couldn't write it without constant comparison to this one.

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Review: Souls/Houston, Houston, Do You Read?

Souls/Houston, Houston, Do You Read? by Joanna Russ
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I wasn't planning to read this yet, but I shouldn't be surprised that I picked it up and read it out of order, since it's the first book I've actually purchased in quite a long time (support your local library, folks!). I liked the idea of a neat pair of double-bound novellas. They're printed upside down and backward to each other. So cute, and such an excellent pairing of novellas and authors. Both won the Hugo and Houston additionally won the Nebula.

Houston, Houston, Do You Read? by James Tiptree, Jr. starts with three male astronauts attempting to reach Houston. Instead, they make contact with an unexpected ship full of young women. The main character, Lorimer, is a man who is very aware of his lack of masculinity, and juxtapoxing that insecurity between the competent young women and the very masculine men on his ship provides some beautiful (if slightly unsettling) meaning and character development. I won't go into the plot here, but this is the best of Tiptree's stories that I've read so far and deserves any award that you could throw at it.

Souls by Joanna Russ features a sharp-minded Abbess in Germanic England who is faced with a Viking invasion. Again, with such a short story I won't go into the plot, but I'm slightly disappointed that the vague plot summary on the cover is not really what happens in the story. It's compellingly written - not quite the masterpiece that Houston is - and a quick but fascinating read.

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Review: Warm Worlds and Otherwise

Warm Worlds and Otherwise by James Tiptree Jr.
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

James Tiptree Jr., if you didn't know, is a pseudonym for Alice Sheldon, who wrote many short stories in the 60s and 70s. Tiptree was known for a while for being very reclusive and quiet about 'his' identity, and this early collection begins with an essay by Robert Silverberg on the theme of "Who is James Tiptree, Jr.?" Silverberg correctly picks some of the easy identifiers out - he figures out that Sheldon worked for the government and lived in the DC area - but also goes on what is a deliciously fallacious spiel about how Tiptree is obviously male, because of the "masculine" qualities of his mind evidenced by his interest in the nature of the universe and big, SFnal ideas. There is also a short editor's note after the essay, from Silverberg, mentioning that after Sheldon's identity came to light she sent him a letter saying that she hoped he wasn't embarrassed by his emphatic insistence that she was male, and he writes that he has now had to grapple with some confusing ideas about gender and the mind. I enjoyed every minute of it.

The story collection itself is a bit of a mixed bag. I started with "The Girl Who Was Plugged In," since that was the story I had heard about and was most eager to read. "Plugged In" uses a device common to several of the stories in this collection, wherein the narrator is speaking to the reader. This device takes on different iterations throughout the anthology - sometimes it's simply a narrator/reader relation, sometimes a character in the story is telling the story to you as if you were a friend who needed to be filled in - and I don't quite think it always works for me. Sometimes it adds a frame to the story that makes the story a bit bigger, takes it beyond the thought-experiment quality that many SF short stories have, but sometimes it's used to lower the level of detail and formality in the story, taking what could have been a much fuller, more structured story and turning it into a casual conversation over drinks with many unrelated interruptions. It almost works better within the anthology than not, because the repeated use of the device creates the idea that these are all just casual happenings in a world where weirder things happen regularly.

There is also a strong pulp feel to all of the stories, a sense of a luridly colorful, occasionally grimy world filled with wondrous strangenesses. Several of the stories are knockout classics - "The Girl Who Was Plugged In" is one, "Love is the Plan, The Plan is Death" and "The Women Men Don't See" are two others. The others, while varying levels of quality, all have a depth to them that is both literary and pulpy at the same time, a sense that there are layers left to explore on further readings, but that those layers are dark crevices and alleyways. Some stories are primarily character studies, but most are iterations of our own world with a slight technological/SFnal twist. A few, like "Plugged In," go beyond the here-and-now and stretch into the future, or into other worlds. Most are concerned with human nature (the big ideas that Silverberg considered so masculine), a few with gender and other social issues. They are all well-constructed and intriguing, if occasionally uneven and bewildering on a first read.

I may add short summaries of each story to this review at a later time, because I'm having a hard time finding summaries of the more obscure stories elsewhere.

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