Reviews for Ten thousand light-years from home

The average rating for Ten thousand light-years from home based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-03-31 00:00:00 Avon Avell You know this is an early edition (possibly the first edition of the first Tiptree publication?!) when the foreword just describes the author as a mysterious unknown, messing up the one concrete detail provided by following the misdirection of the male pseudonym. Anyway, this seems pretty excellent. Total aliens-and-technology sci-fi but kicks off in high gear with an unusual vividness and originality. Plus the opening story compares human fetishization (sexual or not) of alien contact with cargo cults, so we're already on pretty interesting and unusual social/anthropological/erotic ground right out the gates. Later, a pretty harsh account of a reversal of power structures, where some more of Tiptree's (well-chosen) axes to grind begin to glint in the twilight. I was having a conversation the other day, where another reader said she couldn't read these because they were too sci-fi, meaning too confusingly alien to really immerse in. And I realized that my problem writing I deem too sci-fi is that it's not confusing enough ie too straightforward either as scientific concept or as adventure story (the ordinary poles). Tiptree's strength, often is in nonlinear storytelling and a delirious withholding of contextual information, plunging the reader breathlessly into fantastical scenarios that she may only begin to grasp by the last word. It's quite amazing, deftly controlled, rather experimental, and to me, entirely gripping. Breakdown: And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill's Side (1972) Aforementioned fetishization of extreme otherness. Kind of desperate and tragic in its way, even. The Snows Are Melted, the Snows Are Gone (1969) Arguably frivolous, but the more frivolous Tiptrees are still marvelous playgrounds of sheer invention. The utter lack of context for this bizarre procedural of entrapment (by an armless girl and a wolf working in tandem) is of course far more gripping than any specific explanation could be, investing the whole with fierce momentum. The Peacefulness of Vivyan (1971) A tangled story of paranoia and betrayal, tangled mostly by its being elegantly filtered through a very limited viewpoint, oddly sympathetic despite its manipulation from outside. *Mamma Come Home (1968) Here, one of Tiptree's typically likeable glib male mouthpieces gets turned to greater gender political ends. Pulls no punches, both in violently disturbing the status quo, while indicating that the full disturbance here already is the status quo, and then restoring equilibrium via conceptually-troubling technique that further feeds the unsettling conceptual heart here. All delivered nonetheless by very relatable characters. After reading Malberg's alienations for a bit, Tiptree's warmth, even when being dazzlingly smart and serious, is impressive. She can make the wildest conceptions convincing just by ensuring that they're human. Not surprising, perhaps, from a psychologist. Help (1968) Sequel to the previous, working in the same way to repurpose alien visitors as a spotlight on the ways humans already treat eachother in groups. Where the last was about gender, this is all religion. Not in an allegorical way, just straight up about how religion operates in history and (possible) future. *Painwise (1972) Like "Snows Are Melted" above, here's another out of total left-field. I won't spoil the weirdness of the voyage by saying a thing, besides that this is sheer invention, and still with (somehow) relateability, and quite a lot of pathos. I read a whole book of old Harlen Ellison stories just before this one, and he could only wish for this kind of deftness of imagination. Seriously. *Faithful to Thee, Terra, in Our Fashion (1969) Oh, here again. I LOVE how Tiptree just dumps us headlong into these premises, and by the time we figure them out and try to catch our breaths we're buried in gripping plot, and then stumble into some kind of deep tragedy out of nowhere. This one is just insanely dense, too. The Man Doors Said Hello To (1970) Arguably zany... but extremely entertaining and actually funny. While I'm comparing wildly, this nearly as much fun as John Sladek's totally manic "The Secret of the Old Pudding" which may be Sladek's finest, whereas this is more of a light intermission or aside. The Man Who Walked Home (1972) Bizarre take on time travel spans hundreds of years of post-apocalyptic history as an instigating event converges very very slowly with the plot. Time perception / scale / out-of-syncedness all captured very very uniquely Forever to a Hudson Bay Blanket (1972) Another alternative time-travel variant, forges a human (and tragic) connection in spite of itself. I'll Be Waiting for You When the Swimming Pool Is Empty (1971) More or less a parable. I expect a bit more nuance from Tiptree at this point, but it's a dagger-toothed satiric fable nonetheless. *I'm Too Big but I Love to Play (1970) I started trying to read this on no sleep and it didn't make the slightest sense. Now that I've read it with more complete attention, some of the connections are still a bit perplexing, but it's all holding more (splendidly, inventively) together. An experiment in perspective turned investigation of the human condition turned historical reimagining. Birth of a Salesman (1968) Tiptree has this amazing ability to write dizzying alien governmental/bureaucratic agencies from within. It doesn't sound like it could possibly be as much fun as it is, but here, as in "Faithful to Thee, Terra" there's just an incredible amount of exotic anthropological detail, humor, and cryptic plotting jammed into such a tight space. *Mother in the Sky with Diamonds (1971) This may push Tiptree's flirtations with plunging the reader directly into the confusingly alien to the furthest extent seen here. Set in a future where corporate space rock colonization seems driven by symbiosis with martian algae in biological pods, our protagonist attempts to hide a space freighter from the pre-biologic era (which he misses, a lone lifeline to the reader here). I had to re-read the beginning once I was further in to actually process it completely, and it's still full of the only-partially-explained, but it's all quite a dazzling performance overall. Beam Us Home (1969) A somewhat more normative easing out around a very human problem.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-08-07 00:00:00 Emily Barr Compared with literary fiction, the science fiction back catalogue has suffered badly over the years, with many classics from the field out of print. Gollancz has thankfully made inroads into these missing titles with their excellent (if mostly ebook) Gateway series. Now, Penguin has decided to bring back some of the greats too, in a handsome new series (if rather oddly formatted - they're unusually small books, perhaps to make them fatter, as we're less used now to the sensible length that books were in the past). It was brave of Penguin to include a collection of short stories as one of their launch titles for this new set of reprints. Short stories are arguably the definitive format for SF - one where it beats most other genres hands down (it's really difficult, for example, to make a detective short story work) - and I'm yet to speak to anyone who doesn't enjoy short stories. Yet in the publishing world, collections of short stories are often considered to be a waste of paper. Certainly this collection ought to be republished, because it's a cracker. In reality Alice Sheldon, James Tiptree Junior (who started writing when the prejudices of the time meant you sold more copies with a male author), packs in a real mix of stories. Some have a 60s/70s feel - dark, dystopian and with more explicit sexual content than earlier work - others feel more at home in the 50s - wisecracking, fast moving and with a humorous undertone even if the topic is deadly serious. Amongst those with the 50s vibe are a couple of excellent stories (Mama Come Home and Help) where Earth is effectively on the receiving end of the kind of alien incursions that historical human empires made on what became their colonies - in this case, defeated by the cleverness of the central character. Another, Faithful to Thee, Terra, In Our Fashion - one of the most memorable - starts off as the humorous attempt of the human race marshall to keep the peace on Raceworld, but takes an unexpected twist when we discover why he and his colleagues are there. The more modern feeling stories range from a sweet short story that's probably more fantasy than SF (The Man Doors Said Hello To) to a moving post apocalyptic tale in The Snows are Melted, The Snows are Gone. Although some of the 70s-feeling stories had a more balanced approach, it's fair to say that the 50s-feeling content was surprisingly sexist given a female writer (presumably because it was felt necessary to write this way to fit in). This is at its gentlest with a clever time travel story, but in a couple of other examples feels a little out of place to a present-day reader (for example when we get a line where the protagonist describes a female character entering as 'A kitten in an aqua lab coat tottled through the door' - okay for P. G. Wodehouse, but not here). They didn't all come together for me. There's one, for example (I'm Too Big but I Love to Play) featuring a vast alien creature that is learning through sort of becoming humans that felt too much like hard work. However, the vast majority are instantly great, and there's a good range available. Overall, this is a truly classic SF short story collection and a strong opening for the series.