Still not impressed with Tiptree
In fact, less so than before, having read thanks to the dollar table the collection Star Songs of an Old Primate, and thus being able to prove that the stupid squicky grotesque and biologically impossible/implausible alien pregnancy/sex with doomed female aliens theme of "Color of Neanderthal Eyes" was not a one-off or atypical (q.v. "My Haploid Heart") and that to call gtsst writings "feminist" or "gender-bending" is like calling Camille Paglia's that. I mean, only in the most unsophsticated and unchallenging of ways is it a feminist text, to present over and over again all males as necessarily vile, vicious, mindless, penis-obsessed thugs completely incapable of even the most rudimentary awareness of women-as-persons; they all read as parodies of feminist thought, the old "man-hating" cliche that male-identified women and insecure male chauvinists keep clinging to as desperately as they did a hundred-odd years ago.
Cordwainer Smith, OTOH - I wouldn't have been surprised to learn that he was really she, and in fact when I first heard about Tiptree/Sheldon in that old-dusty-literary-scandals way, trying to put name to story title I half-thought that's who it was: the author of the unforgettable, haunting, haunted "Dead Lady of Clown Town," a story which when I read it in high school scavenging through the shelves of anthologies like a post-apocalyptic refugee seeking firewood, stuck even harder than "Game of Rat & Dragon," being one of the few things in there (along with Year of the Unicorn for another of those few) that at least hinted that there might be a different Way possible, another path of being human, even if escape to it was barred me.
Even at only $1, I feel shortchanged. (That "Houston, Houston, do you read?" won both the Hugo and Nebula in 1977 says a lot about the dismal state of pretty much everything in the 1970s. Unless you were there, it's hard to believe what a trumpet-blast of fresh air and wonder the arrival of Star Wars was. Yes, dammit, we can be Shameless Romantics and have fun in the midst of the Wasteland! came the clarion; never more was it needed (except of course when the original Romantics rose up against arid Neoclassicism, or the pre-Raphaelites against the grungy Industrialist Wasteland, or the Art-Nouveau/Symbolist/Arts&Crafts movers-and-shakers rose up against the dull Podsnappery of the Gilded Age, or...but it's all part of the same struggle.)
Anyone want a slightly-dinged-up first-edition paperback? I feel guilty about giving it back to the charity table, inflicting it on any other possibly-unsuspecting reader...
*I mean, come on - okay, sentient plant people, not a problem, no more than silicon-based life-forms; bipedal humanoid plant people, possibly plausible with enough of a convergent-evolution, form-follows-function, explanation; completely-humanoid, enough to "pass" on Terra, bipedal plant people derived from moss who nevertheless are sexually dimorphic (!) and behave in stereotypical he-manly-macho/protected-screamy-female ways-- and are interfertile with mammals -- nope. Not even with all kinds of handwaving about DNA and haploidy/diploidy and it [seemingly] being some kind of elaborate allegory about WASP colonialism anyway. Disbelief pulls up short, snorting and rolling eyes, and tosses Willing Suspension into the water-trap.
Cordwainer Smith, OTOH - I wouldn't have been surprised to learn that he was really she, and in fact when I first heard about Tiptree/Sheldon in that old-dusty-literary-scandals way, trying to put name to story title I half-thought that's who it was: the author of the unforgettable, haunting, haunted "Dead Lady of Clown Town," a story which when I read it in high school scavenging through the shelves of anthologies like a post-apocalyptic refugee seeking firewood, stuck even harder than "Game of Rat & Dragon," being one of the few things in there (along with Year of the Unicorn for another of those few) that at least hinted that there might be a different Way possible, another path of being human, even if escape to it was barred me.
Even at only $1, I feel shortchanged. (That "Houston, Houston, do you read?" won both the Hugo and Nebula in 1977 says a lot about the dismal state of pretty much everything in the 1970s. Unless you were there, it's hard to believe what a trumpet-blast of fresh air and wonder the arrival of Star Wars was. Yes, dammit, we can be Shameless Romantics and have fun in the midst of the Wasteland! came the clarion; never more was it needed (except of course when the original Romantics rose up against arid Neoclassicism, or the pre-Raphaelites against the grungy Industrialist Wasteland, or the Art-Nouveau/Symbolist/Arts&Crafts movers-and-shakers rose up against the dull Podsnappery of the Gilded Age, or...but it's all part of the same struggle.)
Anyone want a slightly-dinged-up first-edition paperback? I feel guilty about giving it back to the charity table, inflicting it on any other possibly-unsuspecting reader...
*I mean, come on - okay, sentient plant people, not a problem, no more than silicon-based life-forms; bipedal humanoid plant people, possibly plausible with enough of a convergent-evolution, form-follows-function, explanation; completely-humanoid, enough to "pass" on Terra, bipedal plant people derived from moss who nevertheless are sexually dimorphic (!) and behave in stereotypical he-manly-macho/protected-screamy-female ways-- and are interfertile with mammals -- nope. Not even with all kinds of handwaving about DNA and haploidy/diploidy and it [seemingly] being some kind of elaborate allegory about WASP colonialism anyway. Disbelief pulls up short, snorting and rolling eyes, and tosses Willing Suspension into the water-trap.