Warm Worlds and Otherwise. James Tiptree, Jr. 1975.
It kind of feels like the world is spinning apart sometimes, doesn’t it? I don’t want to catastrophize, but as far as I can tell I’m far from the only one feeling this way. I’m expecting another child at the moment, which means I’m obviously a ball of hormones and my mood baseline is a little more anxious than normal (and I tend towards anxiety anyway). But at the same time…I’m expecting another child at the moment, and I don’t really want to think that the world is spinning apart. I really do feel hopeful most of the time, strangely. I tend to get very calm at moments of external crisis.
All of this is to say I’ve been reaching towards older sci-fi recently, in both my writing and my watching. Some of it is for comfort - Star Trek episodes I’ve already seen make up the bulk of what I stream before bed now, and Trek’s optimistic, earnest vision of the future is something I recommend to anyone who’s worried about the world as it is. But I’ve also been thinking of the science fiction writers of the 60s and 70s recently, and I’d hardly call their work therapeutic. There’s something about the paranoia of that period, the sense that things are becoming unglued for good or bad, that resonates right now. There’s fear in that, but also possibility.
Tiptree is one of my favorites from that period, as I’ve written in this space before. Everything seems to be coming apart in her stories: gender, space, time, health, politics. Things you could count on can’t be counted on anymore. Assumptions you made - and the “you” could be her characters or her readers - are revealed to be flimsy and false. Her stories are often terrifying, but I wouldn’t call them nihilistic or even pessimistic. I think she identified a sort of peace in how much we can’t know.
We don’t know what happens to the mother and daughter in “The Women Men Don’t See” - we know they escape, but we don’t know if it’s to anywhere better. Their escape is still meaningful, though - their shared conviction that aliens would make better company than the sexist, predatory human men they know is satisfying to any woman reading the story, though the male narrator can’t understand it himself. This volume - and Tiptree’s work in general - is full of narrators not quite getting what they’re experiencing. They’re not unreliable narrators, exactly, but there is always an ironic distance between what they understand of their worlds and what their worlds actually are. Sometimes this distance can be traversed by the reader, but often not.
“The Last Flight of Doctor Ain” is another like this - we are never fully let in on why Ain does what he does, anymore than the people around him are. We can infer he has a primitivist desire to cleanse the earth of the humans destroying it, but we aren’t allowed into his thought process, nor do we learn what exactly turned him against people in the first place. The story is more frightening, for that, but we are allowed just enough of Ain’s thoughts to see the beauty he sees in the natural world, to see the life coming back as humanity retreats. There is hope there - just not for us.
My favorite from this collection is probably “Love is the Plan, the Plan is Death,” and it’s for exactly this reason - the atmosphere of ignorance, of our own smallness next to the unknowability of the world. It’s a fascinating story - one that deals with a consciousness that is fully alien from ours, yet no less conscious. An animal that has no understanding of the world around him or even of himself, and who finally dies - how could this ever be hopeful? Yet strangely, I find it so. It’s as if Tiptree was saying “here, too, is life, even if it doesn’t look like us or look how we would like.” Life goes on, life tries its best to stay alive and make sense of itself, and then it ends. A lot of what I’ve been reading lately seems to leave me with this feeling; maybe it’s me. But I don’t despair at that. It’s how life has always been.
Some of the stories here are extremely 70s, but in a way I find rather endearing. The gender politics and dialogue can get a little broad. It’s still worth reading, though. Tiptree always is.