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I've been working on this on and off for probably close to a year. I've wanted to read Tiptree for a long time; she was a ground-breaking sci-fi writer and one of the few women who gained recognition in this field in the 1970s. The stories in this collection were all really... haunting. Almost every story followed me around for a few days after I finished it, which is partly why reading this took so long.
In many ways, her stories present a really hopeless future, but Tiptree's characters also keep going and striving (which is part of why they were so haunting to me; Ursula Le Guin, a favorite of mine who was much younger than Tiptree but writing at the same time, has a lot more hope in her stories - or maybe she just uses fiction to explore hopeful concepts? I could spend a long time thinking about this). In particular, Tiptree's vision of gender in the future was fascinating to me. In several of the stories presenting a future with a gender binary, the women end up as sex slaves on spaceships, but are no less interesting or competent for that; it's the men who are caricatures of macho maleness while the women are working five times as hard to succeed and servicing the men as an understood price of admission. Her stories really focus on the female characters when you look at them collected like this; it's really interesting to me that no one caught on that she was a woman for such a long time.
Overall, I'm glad I read this, since Tiptree's work is so hugely influential (so clear now looking back on other SF that I've read). I won't likely seek her out again in the near future, however, which has more to do with how sad her stories make me and nothing to do with their artistry or literary merit, of which I don't think enough can be said.
(Marking this with my "hugo" tag because this collection includes the following Hugo Award winners: 1974 novella, "The Girl Who Was Plugged In"; 1977 novella, "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?")
In many ways, her stories present a really hopeless future, but Tiptree's characters also keep going and striving (which is part of why they were so haunting to me; Ursula Le Guin, a favorite of mine who was much younger than Tiptree but writing at the same time, has a lot more hope in her stories - or maybe she just uses fiction to explore hopeful concepts? I could spend a long time thinking about this). In particular, Tiptree's vision of gender in the future was fascinating to me. In several of the stories presenting a future with a gender binary, the women end up as sex slaves on spaceships, but are no less interesting or competent for that; it's the men who are caricatures of macho maleness while the women are working five times as hard to succeed and servicing the men as an understood price of admission. Her stories really focus on the female characters when you look at them collected like this; it's really interesting to me that no one caught on that she was a woman for such a long time.
Overall, I'm glad I read this, since Tiptree's work is so hugely influential (so clear now looking back on other SF that I've read). I won't likely seek her out again in the near future, however, which has more to do with how sad her stories make me and nothing to do with their artistry or literary merit, of which I don't think enough can be said.
(Marking this with my "hugo" tag because this collection includes the following Hugo Award winners: 1974 novella, "The Girl Who Was Plugged In"; 1977 novella, "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?")
