Urban Honking

In the hotel room carpeting that is my life, The Female Man was a major event. It’s among the most important-feeling events of my career as a reader, but it’s also the kind of book that sounds crummy on paper. But here goes. The Female Man takes place in four worlds inhabited by four different […]

We are far from the halcyon days of mimeographed fan-zines, paperbacks, and magazines, which used to be the lifeblood of science-fiction. These were rich with epistolary rants from readers and first-run stories, crummy illustrations of sensuous monsters and their prey; they were also ephemeral, paper, dust-to-dust-able. Today if one seeks a thoughtful criticism of science […]

In the opening passage of The Puppet Masters, Robert A. Heinlein asks, “Were they truly intelligent? By themselves, that is? I don’t know and I don’t know how we can ever find out. If they were not truly intelligent, I hope I never live to see us tangle with anything at all like them which […]

People throw around words like “dystopia” and “post-apocalyptic” a lot when they talk about modern science fiction novels. I wonder, have those people read Parable of the Sower? Dystopia. Dissed Topia. Apocalytpic and Apocryphal-ictic. Parable of the Sower takes place in a dramatically fucked-up Southern California in 2024. The state’s traditional problems — water shortages, […]

Like James Tiptree Jr, Andre Norton was one of science fiction’s false men. Only her pseudonym wasn’t much of a secret, and “Andre” (or Andrew, or Allan, her other noms de plume) was definitely not as acerbic, depressive, epistolary, or gender-forward as Tiptree. Rather, Andre Norton wrote real golden age yarns, the kind of books […]

An announcement: an interview I conducted long ago with my friend Mark Von Schlegell, a great modern science fiction writer, a true intellectual of the genre, has been re-edited, supplemented, and posted over on Strange Horizons. As innocuous as this is, it’s my first formal foray into the actual, contemporary science fiction publishing world, and […]

When James Tiptree Jr. first sent Up the Walls of the World to his/her editor, Judy-Lynn Del Rey, the latter protested against the novel’s use of the present tense, dismissing it as a “pseudo-literary trick.” Tiptree refused to change it (railing, “Christ I worked over that thing like an engraver, it’s a machine, I can’t […]

Man meets Aliens, Man hurts Aliens, Man and Aliens play tic-tac-toe and talk about Ethics, Man realizes that Aliens are Human, Man Saves Aliens, Aliens save Man(kind). NEXT BOOK: JAMES TIPTREE JR’S UP THE WALLS OF THE WORLD

Clifford Simak’s A Choice of Gods is one of those science fiction books that dazzles with premise, not style. It also comes from a particular school of early 70s SF (and this is a nebulous designation to say the least) that, buoyed by the nascent environmentalism movement, thought of the future as a return to […]

As you may remember from a previous Space Canon entry, Alice B. Sheldon was, for a decade, the science-fiction writer James Tiptree Jr. She used the pseudonym because writing science fiction was a guilty pleasure, but also because she was sick of being “the first woman in some damned occupation.” Tiptree ranks among the greats […]