Out of the Everywhere and Other Extraordinary Visions, James Tiptree Jr
My views on the fiction of Alice Sheldon, who was most often published under the pseudonym James Tiptree Jr, are no secret, and plain to see in other reviews of her books on this site. In short, she wrote a number of excellent stories, some of which were stone cold classics of the genre, is chiefly notable for her masquerade as a male writer, and her influence on science fiction has likely been overstated because of her masquerade. Nonetheless, she remains worth reading.
Out of the Everywhere and Other Extraordinary Visions (1981, USA), her fourth collection, contains some of her best-known pieces of fiction. I’m not onboard with everything she wrote — I often find her style overly chatty, her use of American vernacular more alien than familiar, and her stories sometimes closer to an exploration of an idea than an actual plot. But when she was good, she was very, very good. And there were few to match her during her time when she was on top form. If you’re interested in 1970s science fiction, or feminist science fiction, then Tiptree’s works are a must read.
There are ten stories in Out of the Everywhere and Other Extraordinary Visions, published between 1974 and 1981. I read the 2016 SF Gateway ebook, but I much prefer the original Del Rey 1981 paperback cover art (see below), with its entirely inappropriate spaceship (which reminds me of the Space Shuttle).
The contents are a mixed bag and, much like her earlier collections, include a couple of classic pieces among several that are understandably forgotten. In no particular order:
‘The Screwfly Solution’, originally published as by Raccoona Sheldon, is one of Tiptree’s best-known stories. Fatal violence against women by men has reached epidemic proportions, and a scientist working in South America corresponds with his wife back home who fears for her life… and it’s all to do with engineering crop pests to wipe themselves out. I suspect a more subtle ending would have been more powerful, but the story still packs a punch.
‘Your Faces, O My Sisters! Your Faces Filled of Light!’ is, I think, one of my favourite Tiptree stories, despite being horribly bleak. A young woman acts as a courier between female-only communities in a post-apocalypse USA — but is that really true? Or is she just a young woman who has escaped from a hospital after suffering ECT? It’s the joy of the world she sees versus the world that might be real that gives this story its power.
‘With Delicate Mad Hands’ is often held up as typical Tiptree — which it is — and one of her best — which I’m not too sure about. An ugly young woman — and ugliness as psychopathology is dubious at best and offensive at worst — is inspired to become the best female spaceship crewperson in an overtly sexist near-future (women crewmembers are expected to have sex with male crewmembers), which leads to her killing the crew of her spaceship after the captain rapes her… and stumbling onto an alien world so radioactive it means its inhabitants come in a multitude of different shapes and have no real fixed gender. The disjoint between the two parts is too marked, and while the first half lays on the misogyny with a heavy hand, the second half doesn’t offset it. Disappointing.
‘Out of the Everywhere’, the title story, which I freely admit I don’t really understand. It feels like it should mean more than it does — but I can’t figure out what. A young energy-being alien crashes on Earth and buries parts of its psyche in three humans, an aeronautics engineer, his secretary, and his yet-to-be-born daughter. Who grows up to have an incestuous relationship with her father. It all feels very Randian, and not in a good way (is there a good way?), and when the alien finally reintegrates, nothing seems to have been achieved except some sort of weird incestuous Californian dynastic business story which goes nowhere.
‘We Who Stole the Dream’ is atypical in that it features violence and prejudice predicated on race, not gender. Alien slaves rebel, steal a spaceship and find their way to an interstellar empire of their own race — only to learn they are as bad those they fled, humanity.
The remaining stories are mostly forgettable — an alien do-gooder lands in small-town USA and tries to do good; alien estate agents treat humans the same way humans treat unwelcome animals on land they want to exploit; an alien fixes it so children are only awake and active in proportion to the number of children in a family; on an Earth after everyone has transcended, a young man meets a young woman who wants to stay (not bad, with a bitter end); and finally, a bar story about a Solaris-like world that broadcasts joy despite knowing of its impending death due to evolution (neat idea, wrong delivery vehicle).
All collections are by definition variable, because not every story written by an author is worth five stars. But if there’s at least one five-star story in a collection, then it’s a book worth reading. And for Tiptree, that’s generally true.
Sadly, that doesn’t hold true for many — or indeed most— science fiction authors.
