10,000 Light-Years from Home
James Tiptree, Jr.
255 pages
published in 1973
Ther may have been something ineluctably masculine about James Tiptree Jr’s writing, as Robert Silverberg will never live down writing in his appreciation of Tiptree, but he’s still part of my Year of Reading Women project. Because as we all know now, but Silverberg didn’t, “James Tiptree Jr” was a pseudonym for Alice B. Sheldon. Sheldon’s reasons for chosing a male pseudonym were many and complex and if you want to know all about it, read Julie Phillips James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon. Suffice to say that at the time of 10,000 Light-Years from Home, Tiptree’s first collection, the secret was not out yet, as is obvious from Harry Harrison’s introduction, full of what “he” did during the war. All of which was true by the way, just with the genders flipped.
James Tiptree, Jr. therefore was an obvious entry for my little project; the reason I chose this particular collection was just because this was the only one at hand. I’ve read quite a lot of Tiptree stories, as well as several under her other pseudonym, Raccoona Sheldon, but mostly through various anthologies rather than her own collections. Because 10,000 Light-Years from Home is such an early collection it misses most of Tiptree’s best stories. Worse, some of her better known early stories, like e.g. “The Last Flight of Dr. Ain” or “Your Haploid Heart” are also missing. Yet what remains is still a very good collection of short stories any writer could be proud of. What struck me is that some of the stories in this collection could’ve been published in Analog unaltered, which is not what you’d expect from Tiptree’s reputation as a “difficult”, too feminist, New Wave writer who helped ruined science fiction, as some of the troglodytes online would have it.