Brightness (1985) doesn't suck quite as much as all the other Tiptree stories I've read. (Granted, this isn't hard.) There are some real characters, not just cardboard cutouts to which have been hung speech-bubbles filled with examples of penis-envy such as would make Freud get all tingly inside, had he lived to see them. Stuff happens, and you can ( Read more... )

Here's the main passage from "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?" which lays out the conservative gender-essentialist view of masculine=creative, feminine=nurturing which Sheldon/Tiptree embraces:

In every other way their reception couldn't be more courteous. [Ed. They feel ill-done-by because they have not been hit upon by the Gloria's crew, and are ( Read more... )

The conceit of "All The Men Are Gone, Except For Gary-Stu!" is not exactly a new one in sf - and it goes all the way back through Baroque and Renaissance pop culture to the Classical original exurban legends which inspired the conquistadors to fear being kidnapped by sexually-insatiable warrior-women (with or without man-eating gryphon-cavalry); ( Read more... )

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 ( Read more... )