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

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 of the genre, and Alice was no different: a terrible powerhouse of a woman, who spent her childhood in the unspoiled Congo and World War II in a Pentagon sub-basement.

Julie Phillips’ James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon tells the story of this incredible person, who struggled with a whole heap of things, including a tragically sublimated homosexuality; on trying to be normal, Alice only achieved “delicate tension” which she described as “endless makeshift.” She rebelled, sometimes dejectedly, against a world which didn’t allow for unusual, self-directed women. Born into Chicago high society and surrounded by cotillions and finishing schools, other women and their concerns seemed Martian; over the course of her many careers, she perpetually found herself the only woman in a sea of men, who she identified with much more than her female counterparts. Eventually, Alice concluded that “the only way to survive as an intelligent woman was to think of herself as a secret exception — not really a woman at all.”

Hence, eventually, the masculine pseudonym.

“Tiptree,” initially only a pen-name, quickly turned into an entirely separate male personality, one which enabled Alice to say subversive things and talk authoritatively about all the traditionally un-feminine aspects of her life, like her military experience, hard science, and shooting elephants in the Belgian Congo. To keep her true identity concealed, she had to insinuate a career in Intelligence, a sense that Tiptree was the alias of a hush-hush government official: an entirely separate, decade-long narrative, a masterwork in itself.

Alice was complicated, interesting, and heart-wrenchingly relatable-to; her biographer writes with real insight, no easy task for the story of a notoriously secretive woman who occasionally used her CIA experience to vanish for weeks at a time. To wit, Alice on her own psyche: “I live way within, in the unformed, unchallenging depths, occasionally lashing out at someone with a tongue-whip of words, a severe glitter — ‘See, I contain marvels!’ — then whisk, back into the hole.”

This book awakened a monster inside me.

Here is this brilliant person, so dissatisfied with the conditions of her (admittedly incredible) life, and to realize that I have the formidable privilege of having been born when I was, into a world where my self-possesed weirdness, my terror of carrying out a conventional life, my questioning, where nothing and no one that I want is very much impossible, and where the demands of the status quo have calcified to the point of being unappealing to even the mainstream…what luck has unfairly befallen me. What an injustice to Alice, who could have used the break.

I’m rarely roused to feminist ire. I was raised without the notion of inferiority and my personal manifest destiny has never been trampled by Man; I identify conceptually, but there’s precious little fuel for my fire. Reading about Alice B. Sheldon has been revelatory, because unlike suffragettes and Gloria Steinem, she was like me (although, clearly, a genius). The way she considered the world, her conflicts, her totally self-sufficient, inscrutable personal universe, her disastrous relationships, her little perversities and vices, her interests and fears — it’s like reading about a more interesting version of myself. To discover that this woman, this lost sister, had to waste a single instant of her precious time on Earth fighting against entrenched patriarchies — in the army, in the CIA, in academia — it’s intolerable. I imagine myself in her situation, just trying to be my weird self in a world full of boring expectations, and it makes me feel hopeless, too. Alice might’ve given up on being creative if she hadn’t become James Tiptree Jr.

Which, incidentally, makes me even more thankful for Science Fiction (G bless it), a jolly universe full of stringy-haired Futurians, who immediately recognized the Tiptree voice as that of a fellow outsider, and lavished understanding praise upon its violent, sexed, fresh vision. Harlan Ellison told Tiptree, “Nobody touches you!” Philip K. Dick admitted to being “humbled and nettled” by Tiptree, whose work he found “damn good.” Alice scrapped for her whole life against a conservative world that didn’t get her, and here she was, in her fifties, as a man, finally got.

By the time her secret was uncovered, Tiptree was a legend, and she had placed herself at the vortex of a massive sea-change in the depiction of gender in science fiction. By pulling the wool over everyones’ eyes, she revealed the truth. And it took a lie to do it.

NEXT BOOK: CLIFFORD D. SIMAK’S A CHOICE OF GODS

“Brightness falls from the air” is a line from A Litany in Time of Plague, a death-themed Elizabethan poem by Thomas Nashe:

Beauty is but a flower
Which wrinkes will devour;
Brightness falls from the air,
Queens have died young and fair,
Dust hath closed Helen’s eye.
I am sick, I must die.
Lord, have mercy on us!

The line, both unlikely and modern, is perhaps what Nashe is best remembered for: T.S. Eliot wrote about it at length, and, in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the protagonist Stephen Dedalus meditates on it extensively, despite misremembering it as “Darkness falls from the air.” Unfortunately, most literary scholars believe “air” is a typographic error; Nashe probably meant “hair,” which makes considerably more sense in the context of the poem. If the typo hadn’t occurred, Nashe would almost certainly be a footnote in poetic history; could he have known that one misplaced letter could make his name? Doubt not the power of well-chosen (or accidentally-chosen) words to make history.

In any case, the typo prevailed over the centuries, and the line eventually became the title of a science fiction novel by James Tiptree, Jr. Unfortunately, the title is probably the best thing about Tiptree’s novel. Brightness Falls From The Air is a good story, involving an isolated outpost of keepers on a distant planet, charged with studying and protecting a vulnerable, beautiful alien race that had been roundly abused by humans in the past. There are some interesting themes, about the destruction of beauty and how it’s the worst of all crimes, and Tiptree has an elegant style. Nevertheless, the whole thing is encased like in a block of lucite in a deep and complicated parlor drama among its characters, a motley crew of “wacky” aliens and people, thrown together in extenuating circumstances like a long, tiring sitcom (or space opera).

This isn’t to say that I hated this novel or have anything particularly virulent to say about it. There was story, but nothing subversive, funny, no subtext, nothing for me to get excited about. No gristle.

I had great hopes about Tiptree, because of the writer’s history: James Tiptree Jr. is actually Alice B. Sheldon, a lady science fiction author who decided to cut through the crap and just pretend to be a dude for most of her career, in order to get published. It wasn’t until the late 1970s that her true identity was revealed, much to the embarrassment of critics who had praised “his” work over the decades. She’s known now as being a catalyst for the overall maturing of SF at the end of the 20th century; The James Tiptree, Jr. Award is given in her honor every year for a work of science fiction or fantasy that expands or explores our understanding of gender. Besides, she seems like she was a really cool woman: a liberal bisexual who worked for the CIA. Of her pseudonym, she said, “I had the feeling that a man would slip by less observed. I’ve had too many experiences in my life of being the first woman in some damned occupation.”

From what I can gather, Brightness is both Tiptree’s best-known and least-liked work, and the short stories are what’s really good, so I will be happy to give him (well, her) another chance.

NEXT BOOK: BRIAN ALDISS’ GALAXIES LIKE GRAINS OF SAND