Monday, 28 October 2024

10,000 Light-Years from Home - James Tiptree Jr. (1973)

 

Rating: Excellent

James Tiptree was actually a female writer using a male pen name to help her work be accepted in the male dominated world of science fiction. Her name was Alice Sheldon and judging from the fascinating and imaginative short stories found in this volume she was one of the best science fiction authors of the 1970s and 1980s. I grabbed 10,000 Light-Years from Home off the shelf because it presented a very different proposition to the heavy tomes I've been reading lately. It didn't disappoint. Tiptree's writing style and thematic bent reminds me of the short work of Walter Tevis. The stories are written in a vivid, almost hip style that pops out of the page with its inventiveness and intelligence. The unusual story titles reveal just how clever and snappy her writing is, the first being And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill's Side. Even after reading the story I'm not sure what it means, but the story slyly inverts the usual alien/human relationship, with the hapless humans totally addicted to the unique pleasures aliens provide. The Snows are Melted, the Snows are Gone drops the reader into an unfamiliar world with no explanation offered. The story is a vivid vignette involving an armless girl and her wolf, who trick a primitive human into capture. That's it basically, but Tiptree makes it very exciting and also leaves you wanting more. This story reminded me of the concepts found in the artwork of Moebius (Jean Giraud). In a similar fashion to Mobeius, Tiptree's stories are the kind that you just have to go with and not expect everything to be fully explained. The Peacefulness of Vivyan is the perfect example, an idiot savant who just wants to swim in an alien ocean is taken in by freaky seal-man creatures. All becomes apparent, kind of, but the writing is so good it doesn't matter either way, a big part of the reward is the narrative journey itself.


Alice Sheldon

One of the best stories in this collection is Painwise. A human starship pilot is along for the ride as his ship explores the galaxy, investigating worlds and the various freaky life-forms. He can't feel any pain, so when he is deposited on a planet it doesn't matter what happens to him, he'll survive and be patched up by the ship. Unfortunately he's had enough and tries many different ways to end his life, whilst also begging to be taken home. This is just the premise, what happens to him is ingenious and wild, you'll have to read the book to find out. Not every story has aged well, Birth of a Salesman is rooted in hip madmen style corporate argot that doesn't translate well for the current time, also the twist in the tale is just too obscure. However there's some great time travel stories, The Man Who Walked Home is brilliant and ingenious, as is Forever to a Hudson Bay Blanket, a tragic love story played out over a closed time loop. My favourite two stories are Mamma Come Home and Help. As with some of the stories in the Walter Tevis collection, Far From Home (1981), these stories feature reoccurring characters, in this case they work for NASA and are heavily involved when aliens, in the form of giant women, turn up. Tiptree has some fun satirising pulpy fantasies of giant sexy women, these women literally kill men by having sex with them, but not all is lost, as the clever ending reveals. In Help more aliens turn up and the crew have to try and deal with their religious fanaticism. Once again the satire is turned up to eleven and religion in general is the loser. These stories deal with some serious themes in fun and inventive ways, making you think a bit more deeply than you realise. Having finished 10,000 Light-Years from Home I'm not surprised that Alice Sheldon had a background in experimental psychology, worked for the CIA and was also a major in the US Air Force during WWII. Like her life, her fiction is a multifaceted and intelligent adventure. Recommended for those who want to be challenged, or who just love weird science fiction.

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