Two novellas: Souls by Joanna Russ (1982) (88 pages) and Houston, Houston, do you read? by James Tiptree Jr. (1976)(92 pages) Houston, Houston The astronauts had the "right Stuff" to deal with . . . almost anything... Houston isn't there any more Lorimer comes through to the command module in time to hear a girl's voice over the speaker, "—Dinko trip. What did Lorna say? Gloria over!" He starts up the Lurp and begins scanning. No results this time. "They're either in line behind us or on the sunward quadrant," he tells Dave and Bud. "I can't isolate their position." Presently the speaker holds another thin thread of sound. A hard soprano says suddenly, "—should be outside your orbit. Try around Beta Aries." The first girl's voice comes back. "We see them, Margo! But they're so small, how can they live in there. Maybe they're tiny aliens. Over." Bud chuckles. "Dave, this is screwy, it's all in English. It has to be some UN thingie." Dave massages his elbows, flexes his fists; thinking. The three astronauts wait. In thirteen minutes the voice from Earth says, "Judy, call the others, will you? We're going to play you the conversation, we think you should all hear. Oh, while you're waiting, Zebra wants to tell Connie the baby is fine. And we have a new cow." "Code," says Dave. Souls The Vikings thought the pickings would be easy—but the Abbess was more than she seemed. The woman who had been Radegunde did not change; it was still Radegunde's gray hairs and wrinkled face and old body in the peasant woman's brown dress, and yet at the same time it was a stranger who stepped out of the Abbess Radegunde as out of a gown dropped to the floor. This stranger was without feeling, though Radegunde's tears still stood on her cheeks, and there was no kidness or joy in her. She said in a voice I had never heard before, one with no feeling in it, as if I did not concer her or Thorvald Einarsson either, as if neither of us were worth a second glance: "Thorvald, turn around.: Far up the hall something stirred. "Now come back. This way." There were footsteps, coming closwer. Then the big Norseman walked clumsily into the room—jerk! jerk! jerk! at ever step as if he were being pulled by a rope. Sweat beaded his face. He said, "You—how?" "By my nature," she said. (From the blurb in each novella)
Author
"James Tiptree Jr." was born Alice Bradley in Chicago in 1915. Her mother was the writer Mary Hastings Bradley; her father, Herbert, was a lawyer and explorer. Throughout her childhood she traveled with her parents, mostly to Africa, but also to India and Southeast Asia. Her early work was as an artist and art critic. During World War II she enlisted in the Army and became the first American female photointelligence officer. In Germany after the war, she met and married her commanding officer, Huntington D. Sheldon. In the early 1950s, both Sheldons joined the then-new CIA; he made it his career, but she resigned in 1955, went back to college, and earned a Ph.D. in experimental psychology. At about this same time, Alli Sheldon started writing science fiction. She wrote four stories and sent them off to four different science fiction magazines. She did not want to publish under her real name, because of her CIA and academic ties, and she intended to use a new pseudonym for each group of stories until some sold. They started selling immediately, and only the first pseudonym—"Tiptree" from a jar of jelly, "James" because she felt editors would be more receptive to a male writer, and "Jr." for fun—was needed. (A second pseudonym, "Raccoona Sheldon," came along later, so she could have a female persona.) Tiptree quickly became one of the most respected writers in the field, winning the Hugo Award for The Girl Who was Plugged In and Houston, Houston, Do You Read?, and the Nebula Award for "Love is the Plan, the Plan is Death" and Houston, Houston. Raccoona won the Nebula for "The Screwfly Solution," and Tiptree won the World Fantasy Award for the collection Tales from the Quintana Roo. The Tiptree fiction reflects Alli Sheldon's interests and concerns throughout her life: the alien among us (a role she portrayed in her childhood travels), the health of the planet, the quality of perception, the role of women, love, death, and humanity's place in a vast, cold universe. The Otherwise Award (formerly the Tiptree Award) has celebrated science fiction that "expands and explores gender roles" since 1991. Alice Sheldon died in 1987 by her own hand. Writing in her first book about the suicide of Hart Crane, she said succinctly: "Poets extrapolate." Julie Phillips wrote her biography, James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon
