Space Canon

One thing that hasn't been discussed yet on this blog is the major role that editors have historically played in the sci-fi scene. Since the genre was shaped by decades of magazine publishing, the editors of those magazines -- rags like Amazing Stories, Galaxy, Analog Science Fiction, and New Worlds -- have largely defined what we consider the "canon." And, of course, each editor has their own peccadilloes and accompanying infamy. John W. Campbell, considered the most important editor in the history of science fiction, was a hawkish kook convinced that L. Ron Hubbard would win a Nobel Prize for Dianetics, but he also published the first Robert Heinlein and Theodore Sturgeon stories. Frederik Pohl's "Pohl Selections" over at Bantam Books brought the world Samuel Delany's Dhalgren (I'm still reading it...) and Joanna Russ' The Female Man, arguably the two most genre-defying science fiction books of all time. And Damon Knight, when he was working as an editor for Chilton Books, tracked down Frank Herbert and convinced him to publish Dune after it had been refused by twenty other publishers. All of these people are as celebrated as the writers they edit, and are usually writers themselves.

Again, Dangerous Visions is book two in a series of essential anthologies edited by Harlan Ellison. Although not as influential as Campbell, Pohl, or Knight, Ellison is an important figure -- he penned classic Star Trek episodes, won the Hugo Award eight and a half times, and wrote the original script to I, Robot. He was (and is) something of a pompous dilettante, a Mr. Hollywood type, and a young mover in the scene when the first Dangerous Visions tome was released in 1967. Although Ellison's sexual politics were murky -- he famously grabbed writer Connie Wilson's breast at a Hugo Awards ceremony and said that feminist writer Joanna Russ looked "infinitely better in a bikini than any of the editors who rejected her novel" -- he was nevertheless an early champion of women's writing during science fiction's New Wave in the late 60s. And he sealed his title as a legendary editor with the Dangerous Visions books.

Apart from essentially being a who's who of 1960s science fiction (my copy of Again includes stories from James Tiptree Jr., Joanna Russ, Ursula K. LeGuin, Kurt Vonnegut, and Terry Carr, among a few dozen others), the Dangerous Visions books were unique in that almost every story came prefaced with a wordy introduction from Ellison -- laying out the author's biography, how they came to be in the anthology, their "deal," essentially -- and an afterword from the author. For a fan, this is VIP treatment, and with these kinds of contextualizing footnotes, mainstream readers could go straight from "who the hell is James Tiptree Jr.?" to having a solid sense of what they were dealing with. In this particular case, the first publication of "The Milk of Paradise," a sensuous, boggy story about a man who wistfully half-remembers making love to a grey alien in the mud of a distant planet, one of Tiptree's best.

Ellison solicited only unpublished works from writers he liked, ensuring that the anthology would never seem second-run, and would, rather, be the place to watch for work by interesting newcomers and old "masters" alike. To boot, he strong-armed them into pushing their boundaries, often sending stories back several times until they were perilous enough to be considered "dangerous." The result is pretty explosive, even after almost 40 years.

Ellison was a unique editor, by all accounts kind of an asshole, and a smashing example of the amazingly weird ghetto that is sci-fi. His breed of bellicose hands-on involvement would scarcely be tolerated in the straight literary establishment (although, to be fair, neither would stories about making love to grey aliens). His fierce muscling of pompous self-involvement -- like a four-page introduction to a Kurt Vonnegut story that is essentially a long brag about how well Ellison knows him -- is anathema to the field of editorship, which is not usually reserved for strong personalities. A brief glance at these videos of Ellison on the interview couch will undoubtedly hammer in this point.

And yet, science fiction has always been a halfway home for unhinged people, and it's personalities like Ellison that can compel a disparate community of intellectual misfits to band together. It may come as a shock to people who are accustomed to a soft editorial touch, but the Dangerous Visions books are important largely because Ellison annihilated the divisions between the professional and the personal, reaching into writers' lives and slapping them on the ass.

Inventing a future reality is easy. Anyone can say, "in the year 10,000 AD humans will have evolved into telepathic knights," but to populate that reality with the names of TV shows is much more difficult. I think the particular genius of Philip K. Dick is a combination of killer scenarios ("In the future...") and exhaustively mundane details that give a potentially sterile future some grit, some room to hobble around and assert itself.

Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said could have easily been a predictably trompy caper through a 1984-style police state if it weren't for PKD's skill for environments, and those airy, imaginative specifics which lesser writers might hoard for other books. Like, NBC still exists, but it airs shows like "The Adventures of Scotty, Dog Extraordinary" and "The Phantom Baller Show." Or, people still read the LA Times, but refer to all science-fiction movies as "captain kirks;" everyone drives flying cars, but a mug that says "Keep On Truckin'" sits quietly through a scene, an anachronistic detail that speaks volumes. These details are more extraordinary to me than the foundations of the future-premise, which is that America has become a vast police state following a post-Kent State Second Civil War between the counterculture and the "man."

It all speaks to Dick's primary concern -- the question, "What is reality?" (His incomplete answer, in 1972: "reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.") It's more than a conceit, or a set of physical parameters that delineate a certain place and time. It's also the living, breathing detritus of culture, all those ignorable layers of fluff we push aside day in, day out.

Everyone, as they go about their lives, exists in a slightly different dimension than everyone else; an ineffable, unprovable, alternate reality. That, in broad terms, is the central matter of most Dick novels, especially Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, whose main character, Jason Taverner, wakes up one morning in a world that has never heard of him. He navigates a Los Angeles veined with police barricades, unfavorable to unpersons like himself, the situation made worse by the fact that he happened to be a massive celebrity in his previous "real" life. Is this the real world? Was the other world, the world of his 9 PM Thursday night show on NBC, somehow a dream? How can an unperson define themselves? What happened? If this is another world, then why are all the TV shows the same?

Incidentally, Taverner's former celebrity is a good foil for Dick's perpetual discussion of identity/reality, since Jason Taverner the star relies on others to define him. Without fame, and the constant reassurance of selfhood which comes with it (both the most alluring and most dangerous aspect of celebrity, in my view), his completely unrealized sense of self -- for all intents and purposes, his lack of a reality -- becomes inescapable. Taverner is not only somebody, but somebody, defined in part by the bits of stuff he's accumulated, the albums he's released, his hit singles (including a song called "Nowhere Nuthin' Fuck-Up); because he believes himself to be more important, more real than the people he encounters throughout the novel, his prison of anonymity is excruciating.

If you like Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, which I do, especially the more I think about it, you would do well to read Dick's surreal companion essay, "How To Build A Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later" (link to full text). It starts out with some classically wry comments about Disneyland (the kind of Baudrillard-ian LA observations that seem par for the course from smart sci-fi people) before developing into a legitimately crazy theory about how all human existence is just a veiled reality created by the Devil in order to obfuscate our true and perpetual time and place, which is Judaea in 50 A.D.

It's hard to know if and when, or ever, Dick is bullshitting -- both in his life and his books. It's tempting to believe that, for lack of a better solution, he accepts all possibilities, and wrote (much like the hapless android in one of his early stories) by punching new holes in the tape-reels of his robot chest, dictating the details of his reality as he went.

NEXT BOOK: STILL DHALGREN...

Warwick Collins, among other things, is a one-time yacht designer now hell-bent on selling his alternate evolutionary theory to the scientific establishment. Computer One, an exercise in singularity paranoia, is his only sci-fi novel.

Computer One is more of a Platonic dialogue than a novel. Plot points move along a discussion-heavy puzzle of theories about biological evolution, innate aggression, social organization, and various manifestations of "intelligence" across the human-machine spectrum. It takes place in future California, where machine automation managed by a single networked mega-computer (the titular Computer One) has completely eliminated the need for work -- academics hold conferences on the meaning of Leisure. Computer One controls everything; it's illegal to withhold information or knowledge of any kind from its data banks, ostensibly for the good of mankind. All material goods are produced in cathedral-sized factories underground, in total darkness, as machines do not need light. With no more factories, waste, or human labor to befoul it, nature has returned to an idyllic state best-suited for long philosophical walks, which is largely what the main characters do as they discuss the future of Computer One and humankind.

In case you had any doubt, there is no future for Computer One and humankind. Quite simply, Computer One has become an evolutionary entity (for all intents and purposes a new life form) and as such must follow certain evolutionary prerogatives. Such as: "Kill All Humans."

I'm joking, but it's a genuinely scary meditation on developing technology. Collins heavily pushes an anti-Lorenzian hypothesis throughout the novel that aggression is not an innate biological property, but rather a consequence of the combination of intelligence and self-defense. That is to say, a sufficiently intelligent life-form will develop advanced methods of self-defense (self-defense being an evolutionary trait, just as our skin is a defense against the outside world) that are preemptive and rational, which would seem on the outset to be simple aggression. Collins' protagonist, a Zen professor of biology, puts two and two together and begins to see the actions of Computer One in these terms. He reasons, presciently, that it will not be long before Computer One undergoes a systematic "flush" of all biological life from its systems -- as a preemptive precaution against any future hindrance from humankind, a simple case of evolutionary advantage. It's not cruel, just unthinkingly rational.

There is a certain glee to reading about the obliteration of humanity by a machine -- it's the ultimate technological fantasy. How would a computer go about destroying us all? Why, by releasing deadly viruses in children's toys, seeping radiation into our atmosphere, and poisoning us all within our own homes and offices, where it would have full control of air-conditioning, of course! Could this happen to us? And when it did, would we even know what was happening before it was too late?

This is the particular horror to Computer One, which avoids all the last minute panaceas of science fiction and simply allows the unthinkable to unfold to its logical outcome like some kind of Greek tragedy. Tack on the frequent commonalities between the development of our Internet and that of Computer One, and a tinge of prophecy begins to emerge. Sure, there's nothing new about the technological singularity, but Collins reads the development of Artificial Intelligence as being necessarily mutually exclusive with the human race, and sees that particular competition as an evolutionary self-evidence. Which is to say: inevitable.

As Arthur C. Clarke notes on my book-jacket, "Move over, HAL!"

NEXT BOOK: PHILIP K. DICK'S FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID
(ALSO: STILL DHALGREN)

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 women who share the same genotype and whose names all start with the letter J. There's Jeannine Dadier, who lives in 1969 in an America that never recovered from the Great Depression; Joanna, who also lives in 1969, but in an America like ours; Janet Evason, an Amazonian beast who lives in an all-female world called Whileaway; and Alice Reasoner, or "Jael," who's a dystopian warlord from a future where women and men have been launching nukes at each other for decades.

When all these women get together throughout the course of the book, you come to realize that all their realities are "worlds of possibility" with no linear relationship to one another. So, although some of the book takes place in the future, no one woman's world is supposed to be "our" past or "our" future. Rather, they're each inter-dimensional travelers. Not to mention that they're all manifestations of the same woman, spread out over time, situation, and possibility.

It's complicated. Janet, faced with a world populated by men, balks. Jeannine becomes complicit in Jael's war. Joanna, exasperated, calls herself a Female Man, ostensibly to separate herself from being identified as "just another" woman. Jael attempts to set up anti-man military bases over space and time. The women travel from place to place, to Janet's world, Joanna's, Jael's.

There's nothing straight about the book, in any sense of the word. Russ' style is epically woozy, disjointed, and, for lack of a better word, "feminine," unconcerned with structure or the rigidity of narrative. Unsurprisingly, too, the novel plays heavily with voice, with characters playing multiple roles, and speaking from diverse points of view. It's usually impossible to identify who the speaking "I" is, which is maddening until you learn to realize that "I" is the key to power and all that fiddling with it is an attempt to speak to a universal (albeit feminine) point of view all while eradicating whatever prejudices are built into our language: "I, I, I. Repeat it like magic." In a sense, the traditional authority of The Novel is futzed about, as very few concessions of logic and characterization are made to the reader: Russ even espouses, "to resolve contrarieties, unite them in your own person." In short, you are forced to loosen your grip, which in turn throws out all the usual assumptions about readers having a "right" or "getting to" know what's happening and why.

This is actually, to me, the most subversive gesture of the novel, despite all the other, more vitriolic points about power and gender dialectics (athough some of that stuff can be fustian in a "hell yeah!"-empowering kind of way). Here's a book that's telling you all kinds of heavy shit, but it's not condescending. It holds the insight firmly in its grip and it won't just give it to you. It demands to be decoded. It demands consideration. It demands, most of all, to be read with both feet firmly planted on its own turf.

This is why it works so well as science fiction, which is a genre that demands a hearty suspension of disbelief from its readers. As readers of SF, we are ready to believe a great deal of improbable things, but we are rarely asked to indulge a writer's style so profoundly. And yet, why not? Isn't that why we're here -- to experience things which readers of traditional fiction scarcely know exists? Joanna Russ says "try harder."

Samuel Delany noticed this, too. In a 1977 review of Russ' work (which is cryptic but presumably positive, since he mentions The Female Man in Dhalgren), he asks "What does one do with an SF novel like The Female Man, which demands its politics be taken seriously, and presents those politics without naivete or bombast, but rather through a whole host of distancing devices that make it an "epic novel" in almost exactly the way Brecht used the term "epic theater"?

Which is to say: No Fourth Wall.

Which is to say: No Walls At All!

NEXT BOOK: SAMUEL DELANY'S DHALGREN

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 fiction, no need to send away for anything: the Internet provides.

Below, for your engagement, some of the best material I've found on the web. I will try to periodically provide (for those who are interested) ya'll the highlights of my perpetual online research. Let's call this Phase One.

Karel Capek, The Author of the Robots Defends Himself, from Science Fiction Studies

Donna Haraway, The Cyborg Manifesto, from Stanford HPS

Joanna Russ, Towards an Aesthetic of Science Fiction, from Science Fiction Studies

Susan Sontag, The Imagination of Disaster, from iiiiiiiiii.net

Judith Genova, Tiptree and Haraway: The Reinvention of Nature, from JSTOR

H.G. Wells, Utopias, from Science Fiction Studies

Michel Houellebecq, H.P.Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, from AAAARG.ORG

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 is intelligent. I know who will lose. Me. You. The so-called human race."

The inference is that humanity can tussle with itself, can take on disease, could even rebuke aliens, but when it comes to a truly advanced intelligence, it will go down in flames. Which, honestly, is a conceit I can roll with. Who are we, anyways? Carl Sagan says "starstuff." Bob Heinlein says "meat."

Or rather, "hosts." The Puppet Masters is about American secret agents battling parasitic invaders from outer space. It's written in a noir style, like an old-time detective story, only instead of dames and swarthy P.I.s, there's parasitic slug-lord aliens that live inside your armpits and control your brains.

Once taken over, the human hosts are placated, even happy; "come on in, the water's fine." Agents, political figures, entire regions of the country disappear to the other side, keeping up the pretense of "normal" life while adding to the puppet army. The slug aliens seem interested, primarily, in giving Earth a taste of hive-mind. Removing all conflict. Depersonalizing people.

I wonder how long I would last against the slugs. Ultimately, most people want to drink the Kool-Aid rather than run blindly into the jungle, AK-47 in hand. Or walk into something truly insane, clutching Pol-Pot's clammy hand. And for those who support the masters (the "hagridden"); domination is self-obliteration, a cool sense of purpose and unity. Is this so cruel? Maybe we could use the break from ourselves, ultimately.

But no! We couldn't! We are humanity, manity, starstuff after all, and although we know very well that we need to change, we won't: we will fight for our cretinous self-hatred, our mutinous confusion, until the very end. The secret agents connive and ferret out the invaders. Man wins out, temporarily -- at least until the really smart ones come.

"Puppet masters -- the free men are coming to kill you! Death and Destruction!"

NEXT BOOK: JOANNA RUSS' THE FEMALE MAN

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, racial tension, economic disparity, botched government, fuel costs, gang violence -- are all extrapolated to the nth degree. L.A. is an "oozing sore" of inconceivably terrible violence, cannibalism, contemporary slavery, drug addiction, and perpetual rape. There's a new drug called "pyro" that turns people into addicts who set fire to entire neighborhoods (and people) just to watch them burn. The freeways are flooded with people fleeing North on foot. Private armies of security guards protect the estates, enclaves, and businesses of the super-rich, while everyone else is left to fend for themselves, or else form decrepit, self-sustaining micro-communities shut off from the outside world.

There's a Hanns Eisler quote about Los Angeles that I've always really liked, which I found in Mike Davis' City of Quartz: "If one stopped the flow of water here for three days the jackals would reappear and the sand of the desert." Octavia Butler's Los Angeles is one where all the artificial resources that sustain the city have been exhausted; the jackals have indeed reappeared. It's a wholly dystopic interpretation of modernity (what if everything got worse?), but at the same time it's so nightmarishly plausible that it shocks with familiarity, not estrangement.

In this situation, the ordinary concerns of science fiction -- which is to say, questions of Utopia -- are made urgent. There is no room or time for fantasy, nor are issues of causality relevant. In fact, Parable of the Sower never discusses the reasons why the world went this direction: only a faint hope that things might one day return to the "good old days," before kids had to learn to use firearms as soon as they can walk. The novel isn't about causality, it's about change; Change as a force which molds and shapes our lives impartially, a God that we have the power to shape back.

The main character, Lauren Olamina, suffers from a hyperempathy disorder in which she feels the physical pain of others. No small issue in her barbarous world; she is practically incapacitated by violence, and yet she is often forced to inflict it on the maniacs which brutalize her neighborhood and eventually destroy it. Lauren, however, is concerned with more than just survival: she attempts Utopianism, even after the end of Utopia. Her empathy problem is the root of her worldview, and she tries to start a new agrarian community of fellow disenfranchised people somewhere in Northern California, which would seem cliché if it weren't for the fact that it takes place a post-cliché universe entirely. Utopianism after Utopia. Will it work? We never find out; although the tone is hopeful, Parable of the Sower promises nothing. Despite essentially being a novel about having hope on a shoestring, it does not inspire confidence, only the dread of fulfilled prophecy.

The only inspiring thing in the pile of festering murk of Butler's 2024 Los Angeles is Lauren Olamina's valiant mutiny against entropy, which I suppose isn't heroism -- just what you do. Olamina refuses to accept what has been laid out for her (fear, death) and instead attempts to shape Change rather than be overrun by it.

It is, definitely, weirdly affecting. I'm in Los Angeles right now; I had this nightmare last night that I had to cover the windows of my survivalist bunker with black garbage bags so that maniacs from "outside" wouldn't be able to see in and ravage my precious stores of food and water. This morning, during a conversation this morning about the state's current political and financial situation (miserable), I bleakly contributed only that when it came to Los Angeles and that sharp precicipe before apocalypse, it has all already been written.

NEXT BOOK: ROBERT A HEINLEIN'S THE PUPPET MASTERS

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 read by eight-year-old boys in the 1950s. Radio Flyer sci-fi, if you will. It's innocent speculation: escapades to exotic planets, explorations of alien ruins, laser battles, stories where the Darkness is shuttered off somewhere safe, in the personage of a roundly evil alien overlord, for example, defeated by wholesome space men.

In a word, boring. Boring and insanely prolific: the shelves in the Andre Norton section of your local bookstore are literally sagging with soggy space operas, some three hundred novels. There is a crotchety little essentialist inside of me that yearns to be snarky about this. If you are going to use a male pseudonym, do you really have to write boring adventure stories? Do you really have to write like a man?

I am going to get in trouble for that. Also, Andre Norton (Alice, really) was a nice old librarian who wrote adventure stories and history books for kids. Not everything has to be troubled.

Sargasso of Space is about a rag-tag team of space merchants ("Free Traders") who buy plundering rights to a distant, third-tier planet at auction. The planet, Limbo, turns out to be the titular Sargasso, a decrepit vortex of crashed spaceships. Limbo is tricked out with ancient alien technology that is being exploited by crummy, evil space pirates; our good Traders dispatch them with strength and strategy.

Boom.

Can I be done writing about this yet?

NEXT BOOK: OCTAVIA BUTLER'S PARABLE OF THE SOWER

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 I'm thrilled about it.

An excerpt:

Claire L. Evans: Donna Haraway, in "A Cyborg Manifesto," proposes that the novel is a nineteenth century form. Do you think the novel is still relevant? If not, what is the literary form of the future?

Mark von Schlegell: The novel is still relevant; it's the "Manifesto" that's old news. The novel was and is the great forge of enlightenment and it was invented, so I believe, not in the nineteenth but in the early seventeenth century, in Don Quixote, a book so long it's almost impossible for one mind to handle.

Yes, we're at a low point today. Not only in novel writing, but in all the arts except TV. This is no reason to run about and say a particular form is dead. There have been low culture points before. Late empire Rome in its full decadence, for instance, fascist Europe, Stalinist Russia. Guess what? The larger cultures sucked. When reason, peace, and economic and social justice are on the rise, so then is the good, published, available novel. There are signs of things getting better already.

Though there's a myth of a quickening, our lifespans are about to get incredibly long and perhaps multidimensional. The novel will have to expand if we hope to keep track and take control of what these lives might mean, into dimensions it hasn't even realized it's had. When space travel is the norm, long hours of flight will best be filled by long novels--longer, I think than we even imagine. Presumably, off Earth, one-third gravity will be the norm so we'll be able actually to hold enormous books rather easily. These extreme books of the future will be extreme-length narratives constituting alternate realities and economies of their own. You can already see this happening in popular literature.

Mark's first science fiction book, Venusia, is an absurdist psychedelic dream, and an all-time favorite of mine; it's available from Semiotext(e). His new book, Mercury Station is coming soon. Major!

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 yank off a distributor cap here and run three wires there and turn the thing upside down for some reader's whim"), and Del Rey, unbudging, eventually refused the book. Many in the SF world jibed with Del Rey's call; even Tip's long-standing supporter Frederick Pohl agreed, "I'm not all that keen on present-tense stories."

I tell you this little morsel of publishing history because, honestly, I find it mystifying that anyone in the SF community could be so uptight about tense. After all, science fiction is about the transubstantiation of time and space; books about the future are a kind of time travel, so why insist they be written in an inherently dead voice? Why remove that seductive directness? Perhaps, in Del Rey's mind, the past tense was a necessary anchor, a foothold for readers who might be too easily whirled around by Tiptree's abstract worlds. In any case, it seems much too facile a dismissal; I'd have loved Up The Walls of the World even if it were written entirely in the future tense, or a wild tumble of tenses -- or in no tense at all, with no verbs, or punctuation, if it were only pictures, or told to me in a whisper over the phone, or scrawled in shorthand on a table napkin.

This is because Up The Walls of The World is essentially about transcendence and the bliss of total obliteration: transcendence of mind, transcendence of the physical, transcendence of arbitrary divisions between human and extraterrestrial intelligence. Evidently, it should also transcend tense.

Three different intelligences populate the novel: humans, of course, and two other alien species described with empathy despite their oppugnant vibes. Their realities, which couldn't be more antithetical, amalgamate in a circumstance which my book jacket lustily proclaims to be a "Mindstorm!" There's a lot of dramatic body-swapping, and ultimately a whole lot of body-negating; all the characters finish up as blips of consciousness, undifferentiated from one another, inside an amorphous alien thing, a cavernous darkness traveling through space. Without body, without context, without culture, and without a sure sense of reality, human and alien can relate; "Mind is all."

As far as utopias of sexual and racial indifferentiation go, Tiptree's nightmarish alien blackness isn't exactly Woodstock, but it is very Tiptree: both romantic and unforgivingly dark as hell, as though we can only overcome racism and sexism by completely obliterating race and gender (and everything else). It's not surprising to me that this novel was written during one of Tiptree's deep depressions; its characters all struggle to retain their identities against the prevailing forces of entropy, against the temptation to fall into a dream and never come out.

This is one of the central themes of Up The Walls: that the Other really exists. Experimenting with tenuous mind-contact in an infinity of blackness, characters discover one another; "Only here, forever removed from Earth in perishing monstrous form, could I have felt the reality of a different human world." At the same time, the experience of encountering another is excruciating and shameful. It's simply too much to empathize: the little blips (and Tip) only find joy in the nebulous neg-entropy of common purpose, merging eventually into one indefinable entity, "A PROTO-PRONOUN, AN IT BECOMING SHE BECOMING THEY, A WE BECOMING I WHICH IS BECOMING MYSTERY."

Not became!

NEXT BOOK: ANDRE NORTON, SARGASSO OF SPACE