Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

2010 February 03 • Wednesday

For my birthday last August, my brother conspired with my parents to give me an impressive collection of James Tiptree, Jr., stuff. There were rare books, inscribed first editions, even this letter, which is quoted in Julie Phillips's great Tiptree biography.

Among the books was this hardcover copy of 10,000 Light-Years from Home, signed and inscribed by the author.

It's true, the Ace paperback has more errors of that kind than any other book I've ever read.

It's not O'Neill's work that they give to Tiptree on the copyright page, though, but Arthur Miller's. Tiptree's "Birth of a Salesman" is born again as "Death of a Salesman" on the copyright page.

In addition to the poor printing, the layout of the book is awful. New stories don't start on the next page but get going just a few lines after the end of the last one. Story titles are in all caps, but Tiptree sometimes uses all caps within the stories, so this is inadequate and potentially confusing.

It is an excellent collection, though, if you can get past all that crap. The first story, "And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill's Side", is a powerful demonstration of one of Tiptree's main themes, the coupling of sexual desire with self-destruction.

"Painwise" also typically links longing with doom but uses a wonderfully imaginative narrative: a man who can't feel pain is welcomed by empaths who want nothing more than to travel around the universe sampling all the most delicious foods of the various galaxies. The empaths can't get their own take-out, though, because everywhere they go, there are beings in pain, and the empaths' particular sensitivity amplifies pain to an unbearable degree. But "No-Pain", as they call the main character, can do it for them and his company won't cause them any distress.

"The Man Doors Said Hello To" shows a lighter, more whimsical side of Tiptree. A lightness of tone often accompanies her heaviest stories, but here that ratio is flipped to create an amusement with a dash of menace.

Tiptree loved Star Trek and there is a reference to her favorite character, Spock, in "I'll Be Waiting for You When the Swimming Pool Is Empty". This collection's final story, "Beam Us Home", is a tribute to Star Trek that focuses on another familiar Tiptree theme, the despair over senseless and apparently inevitable human violence. Once again a desire to leave one world for another is what drives the main character. Once again this longing might lead only to suicide—but here, significantly, it might not.