Meet Me at Infinity

by James Tiptree Jr.

  Then too there is the danger of science fiction’s being analyzed to death and made compulsory in universities, the perfect killing effect.

  But I have a great deal of faith in bright kids. Some way or another some comic magazine or what have you read only by spooky little boys and girls will spring up with a new kind of genre and it’ll be born all over again.

  CA: Do you do any writing while you’re on your long trips?

  Sheldon: Yes. As soon as I get to where I know my way around an environment and settle down. It can be difficult, because a new environment to me is fascinating. In New Zealand, for example, where I could actually understand the language, I ran across so much novelty that I kept chasing it and taking notes and got very little done. But I took my writing along. I always take a big pad and expect to come back with at least a plot, if not a whole story or two written up.

  CA: Are you glad to be back writing stories again?

  Sheldon: Well, yes—the dear old familiar nausea. (I don’t know any writers who love writing—maybe there are some.) The taking oneself by the scruff of the neck and the march to the typewriter and the plonking down before the sheet of paper. There is something great, about one particular blank sheet—the one where you first write in the title of a story that you’ve got drafted. I think that’s one of the most exciting moments in life there is. But aside from that it’s just plain work. In my case there has to be a lot of work; the old adage that what is written with pleasure is read with pain and you must write with pain to be read with pleasure, was never so true. But to me, the magic of seeing a story in print that I’d written by hand is still indescribable. I can’t believe it’s my same story. I keep the magazine and go around with this kind of pop-eyed excited look as though I’d swallowed an egg that was trying to hatch.

  CA: Would you do anything differently if you were to do it all over?

  Sheldon: Yes. I’d kill all the writers who wrote all those good things that I suddenly realize I am rewriting when I think I’m writing something new. Theodore Sturgeon—I wish to God his parents had practiced birth control. He is so good! And Ursula Le Guin and Joanna Russ, that wild meteor—Oh, uncountable numbers of other people! Cursed be they who’ve said all our good things before us, as was so well said by Amnesia Strikes Again. You see, I’d been reading and loving SF and fantasy for forty-five mortal years before I started writing it. And I just pigged, without keeping track of authors’ names or story titles or anything. I’m only now laboriously tracking down those great tales I remember. Yesterday, for instance I found it was Damon Knight who put out one of the most terrifying images in SF, in his grievously mistitled A for Anything.

  Which is all by way of saying that the discovery that the gorgeous plot you just thought of and lay awake all night working out, is a well-known classic you read thirty years ago can be fairly shattering.

  A rewrite of “The Cold Equations,” anyone?

  Well, enough of all this.

  But I’d like to mention that while Tiptree’s good pen-friends were—and of times still are—a real joy of my life, since poor old Tip got himself blown away for good, I’ve met some wonderfully nice people.

  —1980-1982

  Here is the original ending to the telephone interview, before it was rewritten:

  I think that Tiptree’s death was long overdue. I had considered taking him out and drowning him in the Caribbean, but I knew I couldn’t get away with that. It’s a little frightening to find oneself almost being possessed by this personality that one isn’t or that only one part of one is. It was an extraordinary experience. He had a life of his own. He would do things and he would not do other things, and I didn’t have much control over him. But I wasn’t faking it, really. As I said in my little autobiographical piece, I never wrote anything that wasn’t true, and my letters were written straight off the way I talked. I never calculated a masculine persona. I think in the very first letter I wrote I asked my husband if a man would use a certain expression, and after that I just wrote as I pleased. It’s pretty funny being somebody else for ten years. But since poor old Tiptree got himself blown away in smoke, I’ve met some very nice people.

  And here is her original response to the last question, a succinct answer written on the sheet of paper with the advance questions. To “Would you do anything differently if you had it to do over?”, she replied:

  Re Tiptree? No.

  S.O.S. Found in an SF Bottle

  Save us. Save me! Save our—is it souls?

  (The desperation that calls to you does not

  Readily define itself so. No matter.)

  Save us your sisters. Salve!

  I pray not to the public pink-candy-cunted madonnas of our shame,

  Loving so our tears.

  No.

  I carry to the secret caves the secret hope

  As women, women, women before me have carried, smuggled,

  Grubby hopeless hope to the irregular hidden Shes,

  The powerful-powerless; of the blood.

  Save us.

  I bring my stolen candle stub,

  I light it before your images, reciting no man’s name.

  Salve: Joanna of the rocks; Ursula of the Waters; Kate burning, burning;

  Salve: Fierce Vonda; Quinn indomitable; desperate Suzy; wild Kit;

  Carol-almost-beyond-humanness; dead Shirley; And to all others named and nameless, unknown and lost: Save us. Accept our praise.

  I read by the candle the words shining from your images,

  Daring to believe: This is a strong new magic. Thus and thus

  Will the lies die.

  Thus and by this

  Will the usurped truth return upon the usurpers

  And return the world to light.

  And the candle gutters, but I still believe, will believe.

  Hearing only faintly the smooth voice from the rocks outside

  Where Clio—no woman but the great Drag Queen of all—

  Smirks; saying, Write on, dears. Write well! Write your hearts out

  In the sand.

  In the wave-washed sands.

  —July 19, 1975

  Originally published under the name Raccoona Sheldon in The Witch and the Chameleon 4 (undated, 1975), a feminist fanzine edited by Amanda Bankier.

  Note on “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?”

  When she was asked for reprint rights for “Houston, Houston” for an anthology of lesbian/gay SF (Worlds Apart, edited by Camilla Decamin, Eric Garber, and Lyn Paleo, Alyson 1986), she wrote this note as potential source of material for the editors’ introduction. At the end she noted that she might copyright the piece for use elsewhere.

  This story shows, in glimpses only, seen through the mind of the male narrator, what an all-female society might be really like—in contrast to the usual “Queen of the Amazons “-type masculine fantasy. In this world the love and sexuality are by definition all between—or among—women only. (There is a minor, uncommented-on exception, involving those very few women who receive androgen treatments to build muscle necessary for certain jobs; if there is any “unwomanly” sexuality there, it plays no role.)

  The main purpose in constructing this all-women world was not specifically sexual, but rather to contrast its relaxed, cheery, practical mood with the tense, macho-constricted, sex-and-dominance-obsessed atmosphere of the little all-male “world” of male-dominated culture in the Sunbird spacecraft. These men are meeting for the first time a world in which men qua males simply do not matter. They cannot absorb the fact that the women aren’t excited by them—neither hate them, love them, or fear them—have only a mild interest in them as object lessons in history, and a much more vivid practical concern about what to do with them in a society in which the male mystique appears as a bizarre illness. (Their reaction is very much like that of the harried mother of four, preoccupied with practical matters, to their mate’s fantasies and demands. In such situations I’ve often seen the man become simply another child with peculiar
needs.)

  Another “author’s interest”—which I didn’t have time to explore as fully as it deserves—is in the unique culture of a world of clones, where each person has perhaps two thousand living versions and extensions of herself. I saw this as permitting great relaxation, almost a playful response to life—since what “I” don’t accomplish may be—or has been—accomplished by another Me. Each clone keeps a special place, and a record—e.g., “The Book of Judy Shapiro”—where they go periodically and learn about all the different potentials and experiments her “self” has explored. It was my feeling that such an institution would be quite congenial to women, but by definition rather horrifying, or meaningless, to traditional males. (Self-examination is “unmanly”—but is in fact a source of great interest, and incidentally a preventer of loneliness.)

  The are a couple of specifically sexual references; in one, the narrator judges—we may assume correctly—that some sex play goes on in the cubicles at night. We are left to visualize it as exactly that: play. The other is somewhat more serious, though not tragic—it is known that certain clones are attracted (“fated”) to each other. Deep and serious and abiding interwoman sexual love is suggested here. But it isn’t “tragic,” because, quite practically, if one member of a clone doesn’t reciprocate, another, identical member may!

  There is another feminist theme briefly touched on: In the narrator’s memories of his wife and other women it is suggested, by contrast with the woman’s world around him, that (a) he didn’t understand them at all; and (b) that these women were warped and trivialized by the male-dominant culture. Whatever his wife’s true concerns may have been, to the narrator they were simply registered as endless chatter on the telephone.

  Finally I had a very real model for my woman’s world—the world of Fort Desmoines in 1942. This was the first installation of what became the Women’s Army Corps, and I lived among twelve thousand women. (There were, I believe, three senior commanding males somewhere; I never saw them and had the impression they emerged only for parades.) This was the most exciting experience of my life; after a workday of eighteen hours, I trotted from barracks to barracks all night—where all twelve thousand of us were washing our one (1) uniform for the next day—meeting, talking, getting to know the rich and infinite complexity of my sisters. From a fifteen-year-old whose only work experience was delivering singing telegrams, to a fifty-year-old opera singer, women from the mountains of Kentucky who had never worn shoes, $60,000 per year sales managers and executive assistants who in all but title ran big corporations, traveling saleswomen, fatigued debutantes, army widows—what a range! (Including the fifty whores from Dallas some idiot recruiting officer sent us under the impression that the WAC [like its German counterpart] was a comfort station for the male troops. They came in swinging their shiny purses and emerged, most of them, as excellent top sergeants.)

  Well, as you can see, the story of the WAC is a rich one, never yet told—and one I hope to tell some day. But I did see a real “women’s world” not too unlike the one hinted at in “Houston.”

  —August 25, 1984

  How Do You Know You’re Reading Philip K. Dick?

  She was often asked to provide introductions, blurbs, or reviews for various projects. Here are two of these: the introduction to volume 4 of The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick (Underwood/Miller 1987) and a review of a novel for USA Today, April 3,1987, one of her last pieces of writing.

  I think, first and pervasively, it was the strangeness. Strange, Dick was and is. I think it was that which kept me combing the SF catalogs for more by him, waiting for each new book to come out. One hears it said, “X just doesn’t think like other people.” About Dick, it was true. In the stories, you just can’t tell what’s going to happen, or happen next.

  And yet his characters are seemingly designed to be ordinary people—except the occasional screaming psychotic females who are one of Dick’s specialties, and are always treated with love. They are ordinary people caught up in wildly bizarre situations, running a police force with the help of the mumblings of precognitive idiots, facing a self-replicating factory that has taken over the Earth. Indeed, one of the factors in the strangeness is the care Dick takes to set his characters in the world of reality, an aspect most other writers ignore.

  In how many other science fiction stories do you know what the hero does for his living when he isn’t caught up in the particular plot? Oh, he may be a member of a space crew, or, vaguely, a scientist. Or Young Werther. In Dick, you are introduced to the hero’s business concerns by page one. That’s not literally true of the short stories in this volume (I went back and checked), but the impression of the pervasiveness of “grubby” business concerns is everywhere, especially in the novels. The hero is in the antique business, say; as each new marvel turns up the hero ruminates as to whether it is saleable. When the dead talk, they offer business advice. Dick never sheds his concern that we know how his characters earn their bread and butter. It is a part of the peculiar “grittiness” of Dick’s style.

  Another part of the grittiness is the jerkiness of the dialogues. I can never decide whether Dick’s dialogue is purely unreal, or more real than most. His people do not interact as much as they monologue to carry on the plot, or increase the reader’s awareness of a situation.

  And the situations are purely Dick. His “plots” are like nothing else in SF. If Dick writes a time-travel story, say, it will have a twist on it that makes it sui generis. Quite typically, the central gee-whiz marvel will not be centered, but will come at you obliquely, in the course, for instance, of a political election.

  And any relation between Dick and a nuts-and-bolts SF writer is a pure coincidence. In my more sanguine moments, I concede that he probably knows what happens when you plug in a lamp and turn it on, but beyond that there is little evidence of either technology or science. His science, such as it is, is all engaged in the technology of the soul, with a smattering of abnormal psychology.

  So far I have perhaps emphasized his oddities at the expense of his merits. What keeps you reading Dick? Well, for one, the strangeness, as I said, but within it there is always the atmosphere of striving, of men desperately trying to get some necessary job done, or striving at least to understand what is striking at them. A large percentage of Dick’s heroes are tortured men; Dick is an expert at the machinery of despair.

  And another beauty are the desolations. When Dick gives you a desolation, say after the bomb, it is desolation unique of its kind. There is one such in this book. But amid the desolation is often another one of Dick’s characteristic touches, the little animals.

  The little animals are frequently mutants, or small robots who have taken on life. They are unexplained, simply noted by another character in passing. And what are they doing? They are striving, too. A freezing sparrow hugs a rag around itself, a mutant rat plans a construction, “peering and planning.” This sense of the ongoing busyness of life, however doomed, of a landscape in which every element has its own life, is trying to live, is typically and profoundly Dick. It carries the quality of compassion amid the hard edges and the grit, the compassion one suspects in Dick, but which never appears frontally. It is this quality of love, always quickly suppressed, that gleams across Dick’s rubbled plains and makes them unique and memorable.

  —November 1986

  Review of Kayo

  Kayo: The Authentic and Annotated Autobiographical Novel from Outer Space

  by James McConkey

  First of all, be warned: Kayo, etc., bears no more relation to serious science fiction than Gulliver’s Travels does to The Origin of Species. It is a spoof, a happy sendup of a number of items that have annoyed James McConkey, from the New Criticism to the Strategic Defense Initiative. The only science-fictional element consists of a note floating down in a little lighted parachute, so gently that the narrator can intercept it barehanded.

  It is intended for a Professor Duck, a nearby astronomer who has spent his life at
tempting to communicate with extraterrestrials, and who never reappears in the book. The narrator takes over and unfolds a missive written in a “code” that is simply English turned backward, the message being “DEAR FRANK WHY CONTACT ME I TOO AM A MURDERER SANCHO.”

  The writer is revealed (by undisclosed means) as an alien named Kayo Aznap, on a faraway planet bearing a marked resemblance to Earth—turned backward. He lives, for instance, in the ASU, or Assorted States United, and he is anxious to tell his life story, or stories, provided he can ever stop digressing. So far, so good, and the ASU idea is mildly funny.

  But the yarn, taken up by Kayo, is soon inexplicably dominated by references to an extraterrestrial version of Don Quixote, written by an ancestral Aznap who seems to have been traumatized in his cradle by too-liberal doses of Nabokov’s prose style. In the ASU version, the Don is Nod, a disreputable and supposedly lovable nature tramp, and the central event is a recreation of the shootout at the O.K. Corral—a happening which to me lost its kinetic energy some time ago.

  The villains are the academic purveyors of “the New Deconstruc-tionism,” and the Aznap dynasty is transfigured by the success of Aznap-Cola, so that Kayo is the confidant of presidents—or rather, of the president, since the ASU has been reelecting the same, surgically transformed man for all time; “Frank,” “Oz,” “Teddy,” etc., are all one man. Kayo’s alleged murder of Nod (who has told part of the tale in his own voice) is the culminating event, being too complicatedly motivated to unravel easily.