Reviews for The Macdesigners's handbook

The average rating for The Macdesigners's handbook based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-12-31 00:00:00 Dan Steele James Tiptree Jr, or Alice Sheldon as she was known when publishing psychology papers instead of science fiction stories, is one of the best of an innovative era for the form, beginning to publish right at the cusp of the 60s and 70s. Whether originally intended or incidental, her choice of a male pseudonym allowed her uncommon approaches to questions of gender and identity, so that many of her short works simultaneously subtly satirize male literary gaze while gracefully exploring the changing gender politics of her time, with an insight that often extends past their occasional datedness and into ours. At the same time, she wrote with a great stylistic and conceptual fluidity, turning on a dime from imitation adventure tropes of her chosen form to modernist subjectivity and deep conceptual dislocation and expansion. Her stories, then, are some of the best SF can offer. Thoroughly thoughtful and usually experimental, often unabashedly embracing the sheer alienness and fantasy the form promises while exploring timely concerns, and never completely ignoring the essentially pulp entertainment that the form is built on (even if only to toy with it). This does not hold her back. She is non-literary by normal definition, too gleefully sci-fi for some, but much sharper than much of that morass of mediocrity that makes up all too much "literary fiction" today. This was her third collection, 1978, but it draws from across her productive period up to that point, around two novellas that were also published separately. By story: Your Haploid Heart (1969): A relatively earlier example and it shows in an action-forward compression that favors rapid plot development over elegance. The breathless pace works alright though, as there's a lot crammed into here: psychosexual hang-ups, what it means to be human, the consideration of genetic crossover if there are in fact other "human" populations in the universe, and reproductive strategies that exist on earth but are under-utilized by higher organisms. And So On, And So On (1971): An and a slighter example. The subject here is the necessity of new frontiers to sustain intelligent life's development, and perhaps civilization's integrity, which makes it a short companion to Delaney's much greater expansion of these ideas in The Star Pit. By arranging it as, essentially, a chorus of voices by ambiguous speakers in a context that only appears by suggestion, Tiptree allows the themes and meanings to seep out upon the reader's awareness. Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (1974): After those introductory pieces, we start to get into the meat of the collection. Here, emotional memory as flashes of disembodied light above a vast and devastated landscape. This is a great example of Tiptree's affinity for complex formal/thematic progression within a single story. Initially we seem to be in the deceptive vernacular Americana of a kind of Boy's Adventure Story, but this is quickly unsettled by fever-dream, high concept pseudo-science (not-so-fringe British parapsychologist Whately Carrington), social shifts, intimations of the final Ending that extends beyond the last page of many Tiptree stories, and something like tragedy in thematic and narrative dissection of human emotion. All in 20 pages. It's not for nothing that this story leant its title to the omnibus edition of her stories that came out after her death. A Momentary Taste of Being (1975): As the longest, centerpiece novella here (at a full 100 pages, this could have been published as a stand-alone, honestly) I saved this one nearly for last. For that reason only, I'd been feeling that this collection was a bit weaker than Tiptree's others. But no, it's all here. Subtly developing a direly believably version of the space-colonization-is-the-only-way-out-for-an-overcrowded-earth plot, we see the best the human race has to offer pulled together in a last collective effort to find a new habitable world. And at the threshhold of success, we see the corrupting power of possibility, and the ways in which we can fall apart. But what is 'human'? Our selfish or sectionalist fallibility or our sometimes greater collective drive towards some great success or meaning? The answers, here, are not simple and are finely recalibrated throughout, only to take a completely original turn by the end. It's one of Tiptree's best, and essential sci-fi reading in general. Houston, Houston, Do You Read? (1976): This was actually my original Tiptree introduction, as a stand-alone novella, with a Joanna Russ novella reading from the reverse end of the book. It's structurally and thematically a pretty straight-forward analysis of gender politics in the present and the implications of a post-male future world, related, perhaps, to Russ' The Female Man a couple years earlier, but in a less experimental format. Still, she uses psychotropic elements elegantly and conveys her concepts with effective economy. The Psychologist Who Wouldn't Do Awful Things to Rats (1976): I used to work in animal behavior. In the spectrum of neuroscience lab jobs, I preferred behavior specifically because it allowed me to deal, usually, with living animals, and in the case of my work, healthy ones as well. So I can empathize with the protagonist here, who is too soft to do 'proper' psychology studies with his rats, i.e. terrorizing them then chopping up their endocrine systems and cerebellums, or whatever. As a psychologist herself, Tiptree must have valued animal studies, but here seems to be urging that empathy specifically is not a frivolous or wasted feeling to have towards one's animal co-workers. And what she's actually advancing here -- enriched environments over sterile cages, access to nesting materials, and conditions designed to minimize stress as much as possible -- was actually just catching on as quantitatively better for behavioral study by the time she wrote this, fortunately. Here, however, the cautionary turns hallucinatory, then shifts darker. It's more of a pointed polemic than most of Tiptree's so the highlight for me is the drawing of various common rat behaviors of no interest to institutional research review/funding boards. Yep, those are all too familiar to me as well, and in fact we did use some as behavioral indices in my time afterall. Progress? She Waits for All Men Born (1976) And at last, as a coda, a pulp-poetically refined reflection on the death/life dialogue that drives evolution and cultural development onto ever greater peaks. And, on the inescapable flipside, troughs. Tiptree, playful as she may be, retains a very bleak overarching worldview and sense of the indifferent forces shaping life and the universe.

Review # 2 was written on 2019-01-05 00:00:00 Jessica Kisiel -Cuando la trama es la excusa.- Género. Relatos. Lo que nos cuenta. El libro Cantos estelares de un viejo primate (publicación original: Star Songs of An Old Primate, 1978) es una recopilación de relatos de James Tiptree, Jr. publicados entre 1969 y 1979 (pero la mayoría son de mediados de los setenta), con prólogo de Ursula K. Le Guin, que nos permitirán saber más de la vida y la muerte de un par de formas distintas, de charlas intrascendentes (o no) durante un Salto Transgaláctico y, entre otros temas, de los tripulantes de una nave que viaja en el tiempo. ¿Quiere saber más de este libro, sin spoilers? Visite: