(listen to episode on Spotify)
(music: falling beeps)
James Tiptree, jr. biography, non-spoiler discussion
Gretchen:
Hello everyone, this is Chrononauts, a science fiction literature history podcast. I'm Gretchen, and I'm joined by my co-host, Nate and J.M. This section is part of an episode looking at six short stories, two chosen by each of us.
Take a look at the previous sections to hear about Kylas Chunder Dutt's "A Journal of 48 Hours in the year 1945", Sakyo Komatsu's "The Savage Mouth", Gerald Kersh's "The Brighton Monster", Frederik Pohl's "We Purchased People", and Harlan Ellison's "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream".
You can find Chrononauts on all major podcast platforms, Spotify and Apple. We have a blogspot at chrononautspodcast.blogspot.com, where you can read a number of texts and translations. You can also follow us on Twitter @ChrononautsSF and facebook at facebook.com/chrononautspodcast or email us at chrononautspodcast@gmail.com.
James Tiptree Jr. was created in 1967. His signature attributed to a couple of stories sent to science fiction magazines. But the story of the woman behind his creation began half a century earlier. In 1915, Alice Sheldon, then Alice Hastings Bradley, was born on August 24th to parents who had already garnered quite a prominent reputation for themselves.
Her mother, Mary Hastings Bradley, was a successful author herself, writing travel books and popular fiction, particularly romance and, for her first published work, historical novels, as well as a socialite, an explorer, and a big game hunter. Her various facets accounted for some of her popularity in the press. One of her publicity shoots displays her in an evening down, seated on the skin of a tiger she had shot herself.
Sheldon's father, Herbert Bradley, had a like adventurous spirit. Alongside his profession as a lawyer, he also led three expeditions into then unmapped Central Africa.
The two married in 1909, expecting to raise a large family. Unfortunately though, in the five years leading up to Alice's birth, Mary had several miscarriages. They tried again after Alice was born, but though Mary gave birth again in 1919, the baby, Rosemary, only survived a day. These misfortunes left Mary quite protective and at times very controlling towards Alice, who also felt guilt as the only child who also had to present as the good daughter her family expected of her.
Though Sheldon spent the first six years of her life quite sheltered by her parents, this suddenly changed when the Bradleys were given the opportunity to fund and join an African expedition in 1921. Taking Alice along with them, they docked an ocean liner from Southampton to Cape Town in August of that year, not returning until spring of 1922. The trip exposed Alice to harsher aspects of life than she previously knew, to wilderness and death that left its impact on her for the rest of her life. Then when she returned, she was included in the spotlight her family gained in the press. She attended school for the first time a few weeks after her return, which didn't go well. She found it hard to relate to her classmates and vice versa. She also began around this time to suffer what servants called Alice's little uproars, bouts of depression that would occur throughout the rest of her life.
In 1924, the Bradleys took on another expedition. They planned to travel from Africa to India and further into East Asia, the Dutch East Indies, Indochina, China, and Japan. Returning in June of 1925, Mary wrote the travelogue "Caravans and Cannibals" about their time in Africa, which ran as a serial in the Chicago Tribune during fall of that year and came out as a book in 1926, as well as one covering their time in Asia, "Trailing the Tiger". She also took up public speaking, touring universities and clubs with her travel lectures, and joined the Society of Women Geographers, an alternative to the men's only Explorers Club, which went on to include figures such as Margaret Mead, Rachel Carson, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Amelia Earhart.
Alongside that, Mary also wrote two children's books that had her daughter as a separate character, "Alice in Jungleland" and "Alice in Elephantland". The books were illustrated by Alice herself. Sheldon did demonstrate quite an aptitude for art, a career the Bradleys expected her to pursue. However, she did also display an affinity for science, mathematics, and mechanics at an early age. She did gain also an early appreciation for science fiction during her adolescence, when a family friend, Harry Bigelow, brought her issues of Weird Tales, then later on Amazing and Wonder Stories. Though these interests were less seriously encouraged, likely in part due to her gender.
Mary, knowing firsthand how difficult having a career as a woman was, tried to help Alice and guide her, even though the latter wanted to do things herself. Regarding her education, though, Sheldon started attending the private institution, the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, in 1925 at the age of 10. Though at 14, Alice was sent to a boarding school in Lausanne, Switzerland, Les Fougères. During this period, she developed uneven sleeping habits, sleeping constantly or not sleeping at all and dealing with severe headaches. As Julie Phillips writes in her biography of Sheldon, between classes, she would go into the school bathroom and hit her head against the tiled wall to try to break whatever was hurting so inside. Similar to her depression, these were issues Sheldon faced in her later life as well.
Soon, Alice returned to the States. In 1931, the Bradley's went on another expedition. During this trip, though, the unmapped unexplored areas of Africa were now affected by colonialism. They witnessed the exploitation of Africans in labor camps for European corporations. It was because they saw too much that the group ran into danger. The Belgians apparently gave them false information, which led them unprepared through drought-stricken country. They survived their last couple of days in that region on a cup of water each.
After this voyage, she had illustrations she made during this recent trip displayed in a gallery exhibition in Chicago, selling her first and only artwork besides the ones she included in Mary's children's books. Though she was still on the track to be an artist, Sheldon was already starting to display leanings towards writing, submitting fiction to the literary magazine at the school she was currently attending, Andrebrook, in New York. She then attended the Women's Arts College, Sarah Lawrence, near New York City.
After she finished her degree there in 1934, she returned to her parents in Chicago. And it was also the year that Mary planned Alice's social debut, really the end of a girl's freedom, which stops at the point where she would become the chooser instead of the chosen. During said debut, Sheldon met a young man named William Davy and eloped with him shortly after. She recounted, "when I was made into a debutante, I thought that I was on the slave block to be married, so I married the first boy who asked me three days later. He'd been seated on my left at the party, he was certified as a poet and gentleman by the president of Princeton, and so I ran off with him to walk again."
The marriage lasted six and a half tumultuous, violent years. They attended the University of California and failed to complete their degrees. They tried an open marriage and had affairs, both of them later agreeing that their sexual experiences together were not very satisfying. In spite of that, during their first year together, Alice got pregnant and Mary arranged a legal abortion for her. Unfortunately, the abortion was botched and she nearly died of an infection from it, an incident that prevented her from getting pregnant in the future.
William also had a temper and directed his anger towards Alice, sometimes violently. One of these occasions led to Alice's hospitalization and influenced a period of separation between the couple, during which point she worked more on her art in New York and Bill worked on a novel in Santa Fe. They attempted to live together once more, but this attempt was equally unsuccessful. On April 26, 1940, Mary wrote in her date book, "Letter from Alice, finis to her marriage".
After the failure of her first marriage, with more interest in writing professionally and with the help of her parents, Sheldon gained a job at the Chicago Sun in December of 1941 as an art critic. Though, as the US became involved in the Second World War, she wanted to help support the war efforts. She got a chance with the establishment of the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps in 1942. By September of that year, she was assigned to Fort Des Moines in Iowa. However, in 1943, WAC was disbanded. By that point, Sheldon was a third officer, the equivalent of a lieutenant. Instead of quitting the army, she re-enlisted, seeking to be involved in the recent development of photo interpretation. Requesting a position dealing with this technique, she was transferred to Air Force Photo Intelligence. Soon, she was sent by her department to receive formal training in photo interpretation at the Air Force Intelligence School at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
As Alice was dealing with the same irregular sleep patterns and other issues as she had while at boarding school during this period, she was diagnosed with fatigue by an army doctor and prescribed the new miracle drug Benzadrin. Though she stopped taking the pills when she felt she was relying on them too much, she continued to struggle with amphetamine usage and addiction afterwards throughout the rest of her life.
After V.E. Day, Sheldon received orders to report overseas in London for a special assignment. She was among a group of people tasked with examining and interpreting information gained from the Germans after their defeat. Also included in this group was Huntington D. Sheldon, also known as Ting. Alice's superior officer, the two still grew very fond of each other during their assignment and by September 22nd, 1945, the couple were married. The two remained together for the rest of their lives, their marriage though being more of a friendship than a romantic or sexual relationship.
After completing their work, they returned to the U.S. and the Sheldons living in New York caught an ad on poultry farming and went to try getting into the industry. From 1948 to 1952, the two ran a chicken hatchery until the profits dwindled and the work felt less rewarding and they took on a starkly contrasting career. Alice and Ting, the latter of whom had previously helped draw up the National Security Act and established the CIA, decided to join the organization. While Ting remained in the organization, Alice found herself feeling stifled by the politics of it and the atmosphere of DC in general. Though not a communist, she felt herself to be a nonconformist and once apparently arrived at the McCarthy hearings with a pistol in her pocket, "to make sure one could still get close enough if it came to that.", which is a really great anecdote.
Eventually, fed up with her work and with her relationship with Ting, which was in a rough spot at this time, she disappeared, setting up a new bank account and renting her own place. Though Ting did find her within a few weeks of her disappearance, she lived on her own for a year between 1955 and 1956. Then she returned to Ting, committed to their relationship. While Ting remained in the CIA, Alice pursued a new path, psychology. She once again enrolled in college, attending American University and being passionate about her schoolwork, she graduated summa cum laude in 1959, then enrolled in a graduate program at George Washington University.
Her coursework finished in 1963, Sheldon worked for the next four years on her dissertation. During the time she worked as a graduate, she also was teaching psychology courses at both universities, though the effort of trying to connect to and inspire students she found draining. Finishing up her research in 1967, defending her thesis to become Dr. Alice Sheldon, she began to think of ideas for stories, science fiction stories. While she had submitted and published a number of nonfiction and fiction works between her time in the military, in this point, this was the moment writing became her profession. And she started this profession under the name James Tiptree Jr.
The name came to her when in the store with Ting, where she caught a glimpse of the Tiptree brand of Jam. The junior part came from Ting, but also stuck from Alice wanting to honor her father, who had died a few years previously.
JM:
It's a good name.
Gretchen:
It's a really good name.
JM:
It has a nice ring to it. I knew somebody once who had a cat named Tiptree, and I think they were thinking of the writer or something.
Gretchen:
It was this name that she used to send off stories to Campbell at Analog and Pohl at Galaxy. At the same time, Sheldon's thesis was being published in the prestigious Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology. Tiptree's first published story was "Birth of a Salesman" in the March 1968 issue of Analog, and between that year and the next, Tiptree submitted over a dozen stories. "The Last Flight of Dr. Ain", published in Galaxy in 1969, was a finalist for the Nebula, cementing Tiptree as an upcoming sci-fi writer to keep an eye on. People reached out to Tiptree, such as Pohl, who wanted to print the biography of Tiptree along with one of his stories, and other writers wanted to meet him in person, though Sheldon remained vague. Recalling her past in the CIA, she leaned on that for Tiptree, gaining him a reputation as a secretive government agent within the sci-fi circles.
Just as Ellison did, Sheldon submitted a script for Star Trek as an admirer of the series. She was also an admirer of Spock. Sheldon found him to be quite handsome, and Tiptree wrote both a fan letter to Nimoy and a letter to Harry Harrison, lamenting "if Spock had a sister". He called her script "Meet Me at Infinity". It was rejected as the show was then not accepting unagented material. She asked Pohl for help, but when he pointed out the effort and the exposure that would result in the script's acceptance, she gave up on the idea.
Speaking of Ellison, Tiptree submitted a couple fragments of reworked or older stories for his again "Dangerous Visions", receiving a message from him that read, "Dear Mr. Tiptree, your credentials precede you. The respect and admiration which you are held by other writers and at least two editors who have mentioned you as brilliant, allow me to return these stories without qualm. You are considered, even for a newly published author, quite a comer. And as such, I don't have any sadness about sending back what are obviously two quickies cobbled up late at night. You can do better than this, and I expect you to do so."
When Tiptree responded with a message saying he would try, Harlan told him to bust his ass that Tiptree shouldn't worry about time. I'm patient. Tiptree submitted "Milk of Paradise", which got another letter from Ellison. "Dear Jim, dear mother of God, I just tried to call you from LA. You aren't listed. Now listen to me, man, because this is where the bullshit stops. You are the single most important new writer in science fiction today. Nobody touches you. Not me, not Delany, not Blish, not Budrys, not Disch, not Dick. 'Milk' is so good, there are no superlatives. It goes beyond. It's absolutely new, absolutely fresh, unkind to everything that went before because of its own rara avis. You are another new wave. If each new wave is one man, as I contend, then you are what's coming, bursting, breaking, cresting now. And I am so fucking destructive by what you've allowed me to read. I don't know how to say thank you."
Nate:
Really pretty high praise there.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah, really.
Gretchen:
Yeah, Ellison was really taken by it.
Nate:
Surely one I'll have to add to my list to read in the future.
Gretchen:
Yeah, it was one of the stories I did manage to read for this recording. It is a really good story.
Nate:
So would you back Ellison up there?
Gretchen:
Yeah, I would back Ellison up.
JM:
I haven't read the one in "Dangerous Visions", but I've read a bunch of other stories. So maybe four or five stories in total, I guess. And I really enjoyed them.
Gretchen:
So yeah, I also read a couple other stories as well. And all the ones I've read have been really great. So I think, yeah, I think Ellison has a good point.
But yes, Ellison saved this particular story for last in the anthology because he claimed that it was the best for last and said "while Kate Wilhelm is the woman to beat this year, Tiptree is the man."
Tiptree didn't give Ellison a biography as he had requested. But in 1970, he accepted an interview over a mail by Jeffrey D. Smith, editor of the fanzine Phantasmicom. Sheldon gave Tiptree her own biography, utilizing her expeditions in her youth and her military experience as signs of Tiptree's masculinity. Along with these facets of her life, Sheldon also used Tiptree as an outlet for exploring her sexuality. Beginning a memoir of Tiptree, about his past loves, she faced her own crushes that she had on women in the past. She let Tiptree befriend other writers, too, striking up correspondence with a number of sci-fi writers, including Ursula K. Le Guin and Joanna Russ, who were two of the most constant people she wrote to.
Sheldon was involved in the growing feminist movement of the 1970s, joining the National Organization for Women, switching her membership in the American Psychological Association to its more specific Division 35, The Psychology of Women, and she subscribed to the magazine, Ms. In Tiptree, people saw a male feminist.
Sheldon wanted more freedom in her writing, however, and created another persona, Raccoona Sheldon, a schoolteacher and a friend of Tiptree who encouraged her to submit her own writing, and it's under this pen name that "The Screwfly Solution" was published. This new pseudonym allowed Alice to work outside of the growing shadow of Tiptree, who was really earning a reputation.
The pressure on Tiptree to reveal himself grew, and rumors over his identity increased. In 1973, people joked that he was involved in the Watergate scandal. This was exacerbated by the nominations of Tiptree's stories for Hugo's and Nebulas. At the DC Worldcon, where "The Girl Who was Plugged In" was a contender for the former of those awards, there were rumors that Tiptree was in the crowd, hidden in plain sight. "The Girl who was Plugged In" won the Hugo, and Jeffrey Smith accepted it on his behalf. While some believed he might be Tiptree, Ellison, who was there, remarked as he went to claim it that "it couldn't be that little twerp".
Three years later, Mary, who had been declining in health for some time, fell into a coma on October 23rd and died two days later. Tiptree mentioned the passing of his mother in one magazine editorial, and Sheldon got a letter from Smith in November asking if he was Alice Sheldon, having used the obituary of Mary to discover her identity. She responded, "How great, at last it's out, and you're the first to know, as I promised long ago you would. Yeah, Alice Sheldon, five foot eight, 61 years, remains of a good-looking girl vaguely visible, grins a lot in a depressed way, very active in spurts. Also, Raccoona."
She then revealed the secret to the people she was most closely corresponding with. Eventually, though, the news broke publicly. In the magazine Locus, within its issue for January 1977, there was a front page item headlined, "Tiptree Revealed".
Though Sheldon kept in touch with people like Russ and LeGuin, and to the former, admitted her attraction to women, and wrote some stories over the following decade, she did not find the same drive she had as Tiptree and Raccoona Sheldon. This was not just caused by the reveal, but also by Sheldon's emotional health and the physical health of Ting.
JM:
So she was not happy about this?
Gretchen:
Yeah, well this was not something that she did herself, she wasn't the instigator of it. It seems like she initially felt that people would look at her differently, and she did kind of take any sort of difference as the response to the reveal of who she really was.
JM:
I mean, it's not as though other writers hadn't done this before, but it seemed like the identity really meant something to her, and she didn't want it to be undermined. I don't know, you know, about some of the other famous cases, like, I know we've tangentially mentioned George Elliot before on the podcast, I'm not sure if it was Nate, you probably know, whether it was common knowledge at some point during her life that she was Mary Ann Evans?
Nate:
Oh yeah, I think she only published her initial novel anonymously, but yeah, she was friends with pretty much all the English authors that she was contemporaries with. I'm actually reading one of her novels now, "Felix Holt", it's pretty engaging.
Gretchen:
Yeah, yeah, I do think also that along with wanting to present as a man so that she would have, I think, more authority, which is usually something that one of the reasons that a woman would have a male pen name, I think it also was something she used to differentiate herself from her parents, especially with Mary having been an author, and I think she really wanted to get out from under their shadows.
JM:
That makes sense, yeah. It's interesting to me, like her/his, I guess you could almost say, because we can almost say it's like a double identity, right? Yeah, their attitude about a lot of things, especially in this story, like it's, I feel like that could have been written in the 90s with the technology that people had then and thinking about the future and stuff, apart from a couple of contemporary references, which we'll get to, because one of them kind of confuses me. But apart from that, it feels like it reflects an attitude that's like really ahead of the time and does totally remind me of like early 90s cyberpunk kind of and all the stuff about identity and stuff really does make me think, too, of the power that being able to like communicate, I guess you could say cybernetically, seem to give a lot of people at the start of the whole thing. And now it's something interesting to look back on because like now everything is so corporatized, you have to give your real name and identity to Facebook and stuff like that. And it's like, that just wasn't a thing what I started using the internet, right? That it wasn't like people nobody really knew who you were, except maybe the company that you paid to give you your internet service.
It's really interesting reading something written from the early 70s point of view, that's reflecting a lot of concerns that would be really serious 20, 30, 40 years onwards and now, right? It's like, it feels really, really, really now with a lot of the things we're experiencing. And I mean, we can talk about that. I think you've got a few more biographical things to say before we get into the meat of the text, but yeah.
Gretchen:
Afterwards, she didn't produce as much due to the health of herself and of Ting. Ting's health and vision deteriorating over this time by the end of 1986. Ting had gone blind and suffered a stroke. Not only did Alice have to care for him, but he could no longer care for Alice who relied on him during depressive episodes and is someone to rely on for mental health.
On May 18, 1987, Sheldon milled a Smithsonian article to Le Guin with the note, "Dearest Starbear, which is a name she uses a lot for LeGuin in their letters, can't resist sharing the enclosed with you. Apologies for the long silence. Life here is on the way down and out. Not to condole. It's been a great one for both."
That night, Alice shot Ting while he was sleeping and then herself.
A collection of Sheldon's work, "Crown of Stars", was published posthumously and a few years following her death in 1991, writers Pat Murphy and Karen Joy Fowler, wanting to draw attention to the potential in science fiction for exploring gender, created the James Tiptree Jr. Memorial Award. Of course, Sheldon is mentioned, won and was nominated for a number of awards herself.
"The Girl who was Plugged In", mentioned earlier, is winning the Hugo as well as being a finalist for the Nebula, is the story we're covering tonight. Initially written in 1969, it was rewritten and published in Robert Silverberg's anthology, "New Dimensions 3" in 1973.
And relating to what you said, JM, about its relevance in its cyberpunk reminiscence and how it feels, it has been cited as one of the first cyberpunk stories, and William Gibson has mentioned it as inspiration for his work.
Nate:
Yeah, it definitely feels very forward thinking in that way, as far as a lot of the elements go with how the corporations are kind of manipulating everything, getting their agenda across not by explicit messaging, but I guess by subtle influence and using technology to achieve those goals. Yeah, it definitely feels like something that you would see later on in the 80s and 90s, especially getting into what you were talking about, JМ, with how the internet is functioning now and how corporations are exercising a heavier hand over how computer networks are laid out and interfacing with our lives and all that.
I did think the comment on celebrity and influence was interesting too, both in terms of some of the stuff that we've covered on the podcast before, like the Fritz Leiber "Deskfull of Girls", and kind of comparing how that looks at celebrity and fame versus this one. But also, I guess in today's internet world of overcommercialization and influencers and things like that, always shilling products and things like that, not necessarily like saying, here by this, here's the reasons why it's great, but just more product placement, advertising brands by wearing them and things like that.
I tend to avoid it a lot, but every now and then on YouTube, I'll see drama videos about BookTok and things like that and how it's commercializing reading and how a lot of people just treat them as trinkets to be shown off rather than, I don't know, text that you can get something out of.
JM:
Yeah, they don't even know they're being advertised to.
Nate:
Right, yeah.
JM:
That's the whole point.
Gretchen:
Even the controversy sometimes around people who won't say that they're creating an ad when they make a video and like having to label that or not doing so and being disingenuous is something that feels very connected to this text. I feel like Sheldon would have seen that.
Nate:
Yeah, definitely. And I mean, certainly they had celebrity influence back then in the 60s and 70s, but I don't know, it just feels like it hits different now with how prevalent it is, the product placement and branding and all that, versus I guess what you would see in 60s and 70s advertising.
JM:
Yeah, we talked a lot about that during discussion of Frederik Pohl and how advertising pulling apart dissecting and satirizing and criticizing the whole industry was a big part of his thing. And here we have Sheldon/Tiptree sort of hypothesizing a near future where it seems like sensibility got the upper hand and people like me who despise advertising like almost instinctively jerk away and don't want to listen to it.
One, it seems like we're on top because you're not allowed to advertise anymore, not openly, but they have a way of doing it that's already in practice now that your ad blocker will never stop. Yeah, it's the influencers and stuff like that. And now we have people talking to AI bots that convince them that they just got this really awesome thing and you should try it too. I can show you where you can get a discount.
Nate:
Yeah, right.
JM:
Oh, really? Yeah. Now it's like we have to even ask ourselves, is it a real person we're talking to?
Nate:
Yeah. I mean, what's the future going to be for influencers? Are we going to have AI influencers at some point or something like that? I mean, it seems like it's a possibility.
JM:
Well, we already do.
Gretchen:
Yeah. I feel like that's something that probably has already happened.
Nate:
Yeah. Yeah.
JM:
I mean, it's not quite the same because they're not necessarily on YouTube and all that stuff, but like people have been tricked by like text messages and posts and stuff like that. Yeah. It's become really insidious and with all the way that everybody's been linked now with their smartphones and stuff and the company's working deals together, I know this is sounding like I'm going down the conspiratorial rabbit hole here, but it's like you and me and so many of the people around us actually walk around advertising the fact that we belong to this and that service and we're open to being catered to/advertised to/pushed in one direction or another by all these corporate entities. You see it all the time now that we're working deals together and colluding with each other. It's like it's happening right under our noses.
Nate:
Yeah. The whole smartphone thing always made me uncomfortable. I've never had a smartphone and I never want one. I mean, hopefully I can live the rest of my life without having one and they've tried to phase out earlier generations of cell phones and stuff like that. But when you get down to the basics and describe what you're actually doing is you have a device on a closed source operating system that you don't really know what it's doing, that has a GPS transponder, an audio recorder, a video recorder that's connected to the internet that you keep on your person and that's plugged into how many different telecommunications companies that you're entrusting all this data with. It's just kind of crazy to me that a lot of people are not thinking about these issues from that perspective and that are just perfectly willing to adopt this en masse. Like I've met almost nobody in my life who has rejected having a smartphone entirely. I can't blame other people for wanting one. They're certainly convenient in certain ways.
But I mean, the privacy issues to me and the amount of control that we're giving these telecommunications companies over our personal data to me just seems insane. I mean, when we talk about dystopian surveillance states that we might see in some works of science fiction or we think of like communist China or something like that with their facial recognition technology. Well, it turns out you don't need a government to do that. All you need is some app that turns your face into a cute cat or a cute dog that's willing to map out your entire facial features and you can just create the database on your own. I mean, you know, you market something in a certain way and you can achieve these really eerie dystopian results and have it just be like totally normal and accepted. And this does plug into that if you will, definitely a lot in the story. And yeah, it's really awesome to read that kind of stuff in the 1960s, early 70s and looking at how forward thinking it is.
In addition to it being a really, really good story, that's incredibly, incredibly well written. I was really blown away by this one and how good it was. And I think a big part of that is Tiptree's prose style. I mean, if this had been your typical sci fi author with the exact same story, all right, it would have been pretty good, but she really, really brings it to life with how she writes it.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I love the style of this story. I think also in Phillips' biography, I can't remember, it's a quote from somebody, I can't remember who said it, but they said that Tiptree is just able to capture in just a few sentences, like a concept that other writers would take several pages to explain. And that is kind of how it feels like she really throws ideas at you in the way that like, we have talked about some other writers that do it, but like Tiptree does that as well, of just really managing to condense a lot of ideas and a lot of really interesting sci fi concepts into like a really short space.
JM:
Yeah, I don't think the two of them are necessarily like, I don't think, but apart from the fact that they're both really amazing prose stylists, I don't know that they have that much in common, but one of the people that Sheldon mentioned when it came to people that she liked in the genre was R.A. Lafferty. And I definitely see some parallels besides from the fact that Lafferty was like, kind of a bit of a conservative Catholic and it does show through sometimes in his work, not in a bad way, but just like, can see some of that, those messages coming through a little bit, generally very, very open and funny and very insightful and just incredibly powerful writer. Both of them got started in their thing kind of later in life than a lot of the writers that we've been talking about who wrote for the magazines and stuff like that. I can't remember when Lafferty was born, but it was probably like within five or six years of Sheldon and they both started writing over 10 years after the Second World War, which they both participated in. And they both have this really sophisticated style that sort of feels like it's coming from somewhere else, aside from like the past of the magazines, which they may like, but it seems like it's not really the primary influence on like their prose and stuff like that.
And yeah, this is really amazing style, definitely. Gretchen, do you know if so?.. I kept seeing like different dates for the publication of this story and it says 1969, 1973, I think I saw a later one at some point, but you know how much the story was rewritten for the 1973, I think I think it was a bit because at the end there's a reference to an actual...
Gretchen:
At least from what was mentioned in the Phillips, I just know that the version that was originally written in 1969 was rewritten. I don't know to what extent, it doesn't really elaborate on how extensive the changes were.
Nate:
The ISFDB record lists the New Dimensions 3 and 73 as the initial publication, so I don't know if the 69 version was only in manuscript form or whatever.
Gretchen:
I think what happened from what I remember, I should have taken the note of this one, I think she had submitted it to one of the magazines and gotten notes back and she just like put it on the back burner.
Nate:
Sure, yeah, yeah.
JM:
So the headline, the newspaper headline mentioned at the end of the story is a real headline from 1971. It's not exactly, I think she paraphrased it a little bit, but it's too close. It was a thing published in the New York Times about Nixon and I'm sorry I can't remember the details of what the article said, but I was like talking about his something, something about his campaign or something like that and it's like.
Gretchen:
Was there anything about like his economic ideas?
JM:
Yeah, that's right. Yeah, so the headline in the Times is very, very similar to what she wrote there.
Nate:
Yeah, and I assume that was intentional. I mean, given, we'll get to that at the very end. It's a weird final punch there, but yeah, I assume she was intentionally playing on that due to how she frames it.
JM:
Yeah, so she obviously made some changes to it, I guess then.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
It'd be interesting to compare the two versions, I guess, to see how much was actually, but you see, it's not that much of a difference. It's only four years, right? So it's not like the technology would have advanced that much. It's incredible that the story basically talks about all these concepts of remote control of a physical body, right? It's like how many internet people wish they could do that, right?
Nate:
Yeah, I kind of wonder how much her military experience played in here if she got a chance to work with high tech computers or machines or something like that, because certainly by the 60s, computers were not in the home as they are now with like personal computers and things like that. But there were large systems that did have like remote terminals, like the PLATO system is incredibly, incredibly sophisticated for the 1960s and was pioneering in a lot of ways for both gaming and applications and education and stuff like that. So I kind of wonder if she was plugged into that universe if that gave her any ideas for this particular story. And if so, what she was interfacing with.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
And likewise, like you said, with the literature influences, I'd be really curious to know what kind of non-science fiction stuff she was reading, as this one definitely feels very modernist almost in style. Like I feel like if some of those early 20th century authors wrote science fiction, it might turn out something like this.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I'm trying to remember if they referenced any sort of influences besides like the science fiction influences that she mentions and the people that she admired while writing as Tiptree. I do believe that one of them was Kipling. That's really the one I remember the most. I can't remember any other specific writers that she mentions.
Nate:
Yeah. I mean, Kipling, I could definitely see for pretty much everybody we've covered on the podcast. He's such a huge, huge writer in the field. But yeah, I mean, it kind of makes me wonder what some of the other stuff these people were reading are. And, you know, unfortunately, unless they explicitly note it down, it's kind of hard to guess and speculate at. But it wouldn't surprise me at all if she was into more, I guess, "literary" authors in addition to the science fiction stuff.
JM:
Well, definitely some of the Tiptree story titles are paraphrased from like, not modernist stuff. But like, "And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill's Side" is from, is it Keats, I think, or something?
Nate:
I'm not sure. I really haven't read much of Keats.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I remember that being mentioned as well in the biography, but I can't remember. It might be Keats, but I'm not certain.
JM:
I'm going to do the thing that I did last time and say, all right, so the style is really important to this and definitely is a massive part of the reading experience. So I'm actually going to say nine out of 10, read this story first, before you listen to us go through it. I did actually manage to, well, I was able to persuade a few people to actually read this before we did it on the podcast so that they would be able to listen to it afterwards. And one person actually did not like the style and thought it was too chatty, I think, mostly. And I can kind of see how it might not work for everyone. Maybe especially you're not used to like, I guess, this kind of style of like, when you read this, you definitely hear a voice in your head. I do anyway. I feel like somebody is talking to me. And it also feels not only that, but that they're being a little bit intense, like a little bit taunting and sort of like, getting in my face a little bit. And I think that's, obviously, that's on purpose.
Nate:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
Yeah, it's like kind of snappish, you know, you get that sort of idea of someone kind of really grabbing you by the shoulders and telling you the story.
JM:
Yeah. Their personality really comes through and they're wanting to make me like uncomfortable by, by reminding me of things a lot, like reminding me how ugly the girl is in the beginning of the story, right? When you go back to her, you're always reminded of how horrible she looks and stuff like that. And you're supposed to be like, I feel sorry for her, but like at the same time, why is she making out to be such a disgusting object, right? Making you think about that and making you like think about how many people who you don't have a smart writer telling you about that you meet in your everyday life that you might actually have that kind of reaction to. And it's definitely trying to confront you. And it's interesting too, because yeah, she's not like just some young rebellious writer. She's been around a bit and she's seeing all this stuff. And she's telling you this, she's obviously created the identity of the person that she wants to, maybe she's making you think of this person named James Tiptree, but she's a woman that was born during one world war, lived through another one, did all kinds of traveling and stuff like that, and has been starting later in life to develop these really confrontational stories.
And an interesting thing about Tiptree for me is that I've read like maybe four or five of the stories now, like I mentioned earlier. And I don't know about all of them, but maybe most of them, I always feel like I might have missed something. Like I might have just missed a little something. And it's not a bad thing. It's cool, because you know, it makes me think about them. It makes me think maybe I should reread this. Maybe I should come back to it because I might have missed something here. And I love this story. I think it's really good. But I'm completely bewildered by the ending. I don't understand the ending. So we'll talk about that when we get there. But whatever she does, she does it on purpose. I know that. So I mean, Gretchen, I know we talked about this before. And this isn't the subject of the episodes. We're not going to talk about it now too much. But the story, "The Last Flight of Dr. Ain", and I know you read that. And when I read that story, I felt the same thing. I felt, okay, am I missing something? Is there really a woman that we don't see? And that's funnily enough, the name of one of her other stories is "The Women Men Don't See". And I'm like, okay, that's the whole point, right? We're not sure if we're seeing this woman or not. But like, it's just really interesting how there's always something that I feel like, okay, maybe I need to come back to this someday. I might have missed something. It's not like this feeling that bothers me. It's more like, okay, that's kind of interesting, right?
Nate:
Yeah, I read this one twice, the initial time when we finished up with the last episode we did. And again, in the past week. And yeah, definitely great both times around. I would give this a 9.5 actually, I'd rank it a little bit higher. I thought there's a total masterpiece. And absolutely love this one. Definitely one of the best things we've done on the podcast.
I was going to say that before we had covered this, I had never heard of her before, but that's actually not true because I had read "Your Haploid Heart" quite some time before we did the podcast. I had one of those World's Best Science Fiction anthologies from 1970, which is actually stories from 1969. But yeah, as before, I was reading a lot of science fiction, and I was kind of, I don't know, snobbish looking down on it maybe. So not a lot of the stories in that anthology kind of stuck out to me. And I definitely like to reread that one. But that anthology also contained "A Boy and His Dog" and a Larry Niven story, which I really liked. And yeah, looking back at the contents of that anthology, there's a lot of authors and doing the podcast. It's like, Oh, yeah, I remember talking about this person. I remember talking about that person and having, you know, context of their writing. It would be cool to revisit.
But yeah, this one was totally, totally great. And I think it is interesting that she did write this later in life, it probably presents a more mature look at things. And again, interesting tie in with some of the other authors we've covered this time around, like Pohl, and we mentioned Blish earlier, people probably born around the same time, and have their works being something wrote like later in their life, the most well known rather than stuff that they wrote in their 20s or whatever. So yeah, kind of an interesting literary career and certainly a very fascinating career outside of her literary endeavors.
Gretchen:
Yeah, she did quite a lot, very eclectic life. Yeah, it was interesting reading about her. I agree that this I would say definitely like nine out of 10, I agree with 9.5 out of 10. It's definitely my, I will say it is my favorite of the stories that we read for this episode. And I think it is just so well written. I love the way that it the prose works. I do think that other stories more so from Tiptree that I read, are the type that feel sort of like puzzles to be solved. This one a little less so but I still think it is one that benefits from rereading just because it feels so rich and like there's so many details and concepts. So yeah, I would say nine out of 10 and I recommend reading this before the summary here.
JM:
Yeah. And there's so much world building done and it's like done in a way that's like just naturally like being told to you in a way that's not, it doesn't feel like exposition. It's just part of the chattiness, I guess that it really works. It builds up this picture and I don't know, I was deeply upset by this story.
Nate:
It's a sad story. It's definitely a sad story.
Gretchen:
Yeah, it is.
JM:
Yeah, it feels so relevant right now what we're doing to ourselves and like how we're actually going. It's like real science fiction in terms of of getting us to question not only the social change, but yeah, the technology and how it's directly affecting that. There's this idea of computers and stuff is not really gone into that much in the story. For all we know, everybody's watching her on TV pretty much, which is like kind of the way it sounds. But at the same time, that aspect, it's delivered in a way that's so casual that we don't get to see somebody sitting down at their computer or picking up their mobile phone and watching Delphi on the latest, I don't know what you want to call it. I picture kind of one of those like Instagram people that gets on there and is like, Hey, I'm wearing this new thing. Check it out. Like, here's what these people said about it. That's totally what I'm picturing, right? More than a television broadcast. And that might be because yeah, here I am in 2025. I haven't actually had TV in like over 20 years. So try to watch what I want to watch and nothing but but every now and then you go on the YouTube on your phone and you're going to like pick up something, right? It's just like, I don't know.
It's just and yeah, obviously, emotionally, the way this girl is being used is really upsetting, right?
Gretchen:
We have talked during the other stories about how they all seem to be very either very horrifying or very upsetting. And this one fits into that tradition.
Nate:
It certainly does. Yeah.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
(music: bouncing circuits)
plot summary and spoiler discussion
"Listen, zombie. Believe me. What I could tell you—you with your silly hands leaking sweat on your growth-stocks portfolio. One-ten lousy hacks of AT&T on twenty-point margin and you think you’re Evel Knievel. AT&T? You doubleknit dummy, how I’d love to show you something.
"Look, dead daddy, I’d say. See for instance that rotten girl?
"In the crowd over there, that one gaping at her gods. One rotten girl in the city of the future (That’s what I said.) Watch."
Thus opens "The Girl who was Plugged In". The rotten girl is P. Burke, a 17 year old, one of the narrator claims the ugly of the world. And her gods are celebrities, inhumanly beautiful models who function as living advertisements in this future, a future without traditional ads. I did note essentially influencers when I was writing the notes for this.
Nate:
Yeah, it is really uncanny.
Gretchen:
It is. It's really, again, very relevant still to this day.
JM:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
After watching them depart, Burke attempts suicide by overdosing on pills. She is taken to a hospital and revived. While questioned before police arrive, public suicide is a felony. The man interviewing her notes for admiration of celebrities and stars and tells her she can meet them, but that she'd have to completely sever herself from her old life, accepting being legally dead. She takes this opportunity.
P. Burke first is nursed back to health, fitted with cybernetic implants and trained to move and act gracefully. She's then taken to a chamber where, once inside and hooked up, she finds herself in a new body, one that is perfect, "porno for angels". The body was grown, and without someone like her in control, it has no life of its own.
Burke adapts quickly to this new body and the higher ups at the company Global Transmissions Corporation, who are responsible for the creation of Burke's new body and others that belong to celebrities, now plan to have her appear on a hollow show and give her the name of Delphi. Before her first public exposure, she has a meeting with them, including a Mr. Cantle, who reveals to her the real reason the stars exist here, when there exists a law prohibiting advertising. He tells her that she has the job of showing off products while shopping and going to parties and meeting other celebrities, and that it's for the good of the public and for the workers making those products, but that she must never tell anyone that's what she's really doing, and Delphi agrees.
Soon Delphi, rising as a star, heads to Barcelona, where she is courted by an influential, rich 80-year-old man, though during their wedding she shuts down. P. Burke, down in her cabinet, has been refusing to leave it to eat or sleep and let Delphi rest, until it finally wears her down. Delphi gets a long rest while P. Burke recovers, warned of the dangers of her reckless behavior. Eventually, Delphi's rest is finished and she goes back to her parties, traveling and shopping. Though while she sleeps, the life gone from her, Delphi starts to mouth words, something which should be impossible when she's turned off.
When it's determined in that Delphi has more mainstream popularity than expected, it is decided that she'll start acting in one of the mainstream shows for GTX. She's a hit, but there's an issue. Taking to heart Cantle's sentiment during their meeting that she's supposed to be helping people find and use the best products, Delphi refuses to use some of the ones that the corporation has invested in. In response, Delphi will be indulged until her relevance dips below a profitable point.
Then Delphi meets Paul Isham, the son of one of GTX's executives who is appalled by the company and is producing his own program that is rebelling against it. She falls in love with him and so does P. Burke, and Burke wants to truly become Delphi to be with him.
Paul sees Delphi as a victim of his father and his company and wants to help her. Paul's father and the others on GTX's board see this budding romance and want to prevent them from seeing each other, attempting to do so gently at first but growing more insistent as they spend more time together. Delphi sleeps in Paul's arms and nuzzles into him while she sleeps.
GTX deliberately messes with Delphi's connections and Paul believes that she's had implants from the company, not realizing the full extent of the control she's under, not knowing of the artificial bodies GTX makes.
The two are forced to spend time apart and Burke, miserable, is languishing from heartbreak in her chamber. Paul returns to Delphi though with plans to run away and free her from the company's control. He sets out with her to the lab where Burke is thinking that they can remove the implants and the company tracking them down can't risk disconnecting Burke from Delphi, which could kill the latter.
They arrive at the lab and Paul tries to convince the doctor there to remove Delphi's implants, who tells him it's impossible, then he encounters Burke hooked up to wires and reaching out to him. Horrified by her appearance, he knocks her wires, disconnecting ones linked to her brain and killing her. The doctor tells Paul that that was Delphi, the person controlling her body, but Delphi is still impossibly alive. She is however fading and after a while dies as well, Paul by her side.
Paul himself, the narrator informs us, eventually takes over from his father at GTX and likes to believe he's working from the inside.
But then the narrator says that one man involved in tracking him in Delphi himself of course winds up back in time, wakes up lying on a newspaper headline "Nixon Unveils Phase Two". He ends the story, "believe it zombie, when I say growth I mean growth. Capital appreciation, you can stop sweating, there's a great future there."
JM:
So that ending, I was really going along excellently with this story until like literally the last few paragraphs and I'm just so confused by why that's in there. I have some ideas. Paul didn't just go back to the time before Delphi or Philadelphia Burke decided that she was going to commit suicide. He went back to the time when the story was written, a time when people were inundated with advertising that's open and public, right, other than the one that's hidden and sneaky so much. And again, there was a narrator to the story. We don't know who that narrator is. Do you guys think maybe the narrator is Paul?
Gretchen:
They mentioned that it's a sharp-faced man whose Paul's father's kind of like right-hand man. I can't remember exactly what he's called, but I think that's the narrator. I don't think Paul goes back. I think it's him that goes back in time and is telling the story.
JM:
Yeah, because it's somebody from then, well, the future that is, talking to somebody now and telling about this glorious future with more than a hint of sarcasm, right? And it sounds like even though he refers to Paul in the third person and he kind of is a little bit contemptuous of him, apparently, or bad as the narrator might be, I don't know, like, I just kind of thought, well, maybe, I mean, if there, if it's not that important to assign the personage to the narrator necessarily, maybe, but if there is one, maybe Paul is in, right, because when he came back, he seems to want to enact some kind of change, but is it a good change necessarily? I'm not sure. Everything made total sense to me. Then the end, and I'm just like, I'm really not sure. I don't dislike it. I think it's kind of part of the intriguing quality of the story. I'm just like, all of a sudden, this element's introduced. And I think we can only kind of guess at what it means, right?
Nate:
Yeah, I was assuming that it's just another trait of him accidentally breaking stuff through possibly good intentions. The road to hell is paved with.
JM:
Yeah, I think he might want to make things better. But at the end of the day, I'm wondering if he's actually responsible for creating this part of this future that's coming to pass, because we've seen so many time travel stories where somebody's like, I don't like this horrible situation. I'm going to put this right, right? And they go back and they try to fix something. And their attempt to fix what's happening in the future is, in fact, what creates the future that they don't want in the first place.
Nate:
Or they make it worse, which is possible too, because he definitely makes things worse for everybody around him. So I don't see why that would have to change with this.
But yeah, this was a great story. Again, really tragic at the end. Ending was really emotional. I mean, you could feel that scene where she's rushing at Paul with all of the wires and electrodes in her head. And it's just such a powerful image. But yeah, very, very tragic.
Gretchen:
It is really calling out for him. But it's like, he can't really understand what she's saying. And it is really sad that idea of her reaching out and no one being able to reciprocate that.
Nate:
Yeah. And the commentary on class and wealth and social status and stuff like that, I think it's very intentional that she describes her as being ugly in the beginning before she adopts this personality and prestige.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
It's like living the Cinderella fantasy or whatever. And then that bubble is suddenly popped and she's back in the real world and it's all gone. But that's probably one of the reasons why she takes to the fantasy so well, more than anybody else who goes to this program is because she's from that background of being nothing in the society, people like literally trample all over her.
Gretchen:
She's lower class and also disabled. She has Cushing's disease is what the pituitary camera once called originally, but now is known as Cushing's disease.
Nate:
Yeah. I mean, it definitely deliberate commentary on class and how that plays into social influence and how that can be used to sell products.
JM:
And see the view where I look at it, right? And we see and we see like the Delphi life and we say, okay, yeah, it sounds cool. She's yawing around everywhere. But we can tell that it's very restricted. And it doesn't sound all that appealing, but to somebody like P. Burke, they made it seem very appealing, right? So it's like, I don't know, like maybe some people would think like, Hey, I wouldn't need to be remoteed. I could just be that person, right? Because I'm beautiful enough. And I'm just that. But I don't think most people wouldn't want that kind of life. At least I hope not.
Nate:
No. And I mean, again, it ties in really eerily to the modern day, I'm thinking in particular of the K-pop music industry where it's pretty much corporate ownership of celebrity and image and people's entire lives who sometimes work their talent to death. It's really kind of crazy how intense and just awful the industry is to its talent. But again, as they're portraying them as living this glamorous lifestyle.
Gretchen:
Yeah, it's the like parasocial relationship of being able to see only that one side of it and thinking that's all of it and wanting that and wanting to meet those people and be them.
Nate:
Yeah, exactly. And I mean, certainly that stuff was there in the 60s and 70s with celebrity culture and the Beatles were huge and all that. But yeah, the corporate ownership.
JM:
The group that she was into reminded me of that.
Gretchen:
Oh yeah, Beatlemania.
JM:
Except it's interesting because they're kind of described as the way she describes them almost makes me think of like melodramatic late 90s. I don't know if I'm showing my biases here, but like those kind of bands like...
Gretchen:
The boy bands?
JM:
Yeah, yeah. But like, the ones that kind of have this like "dark vampire" vibe to them, like, I don't know, yeah, like Linkin Park or something like that. It's just like, nobody understands me. I'm such a terribly angst teenager. And like...
Nate:
Well, they just released a new album where they're saying nobody understands me, I'm such an angsty teenager. I think they're all in their fifties now. So it's a winning formula.
JM:
It is. Yeah. And it just seems like in the nineties to again, showing how contemporary this story feels in the nineties, it really feels like they started to exploit that like they started to corporatize goth music and corporatize like rebellious subcultures and stuff like that in a way that I think they did before, like in the 80s, that was a thing too. But I think in the nineties, it took on a new thing. I don't know. It feels like it took on a new more all encompassing aspect where like all of a sudden, yeah, like you go to the mall, and you'd find like, I don't know, like GG Allen shirts or something like that. Yeah, that's so weird, right?
Nate:
Yeah, hearing the Ramones, and the Dead Kennedys in car commercials and things like that. Yeah, it's pretty amusing. But I guess that's the way to defeat subversive ideology as kind of co-op that as your own, rather than pushing against it, trying to claim it as yours, but this like sanitized whitewash version of it.
JM:
Right.
Gretchen:
That's how Paul does end up when he's working for the company. It's like he had all of that revolutionary, subversive ideas. They just sort of became incorporated into the company when he was at least the head of it, when he was boring from inside, as he says.
JM:
Yeah, when we wish Paul would be better, right? Like that he would be more, I don't know, I guess he's sincere in his way. But I mean, he's obviously compromised, right? It's too bad. It's too bad.
Gretchen:
It feels kind of like a warning where people can be revolutionary, but still be too naive to know what they really need to be rebelling against.
JM:
Right.
Gretchen:
I mean, the entire idea of him completely misrepresenting or misinterpreting the situation is because he doesn't know really what's going on.
Nate:
And even as an insider to the company kind of, he doesn't really have that knowledge of these super secret projects, which I guess is another interesting point. The true nature of it reminds me of some of the other stories we've done, in particular "A Steel Husband", but it's present in a lot of those other robot stories where the creature doesn't know it's true nature. And when it finds out, it's like a catastrophic blow to the psyche.
JM:
But this is a reversal in the sense that it's actually the other person that doesn't realize the true nature. And it's like, it's funny because yeah, it makes me think of a person who wants to do the right thing, maybe for the wrong reasons, almost like, there's what I talked about this anti corporate stuff and all that. And sometimes you talk to people who are vehemently anti corporate, you realize, Oh, you're not really thinking about this in the same way that I am, right? Like, you're not really wanting to stop exploiting people necessarily, you just want to be able to like, go off on your own private island and do whatever the hell you want and not be bothered, right? And I can relate to that too. Because I would like that too, who wouldn't, right? It's especially somebody who has the potential to be in a position of power that actually thinks that they could enact those things, right? And I know at the end his escape into the past almost suggests that too. Like, why are you doing that? What are you hoping to achieve? Right?
Nate:
Yeah, he's an interesting character that he's well intentioned, but it's kind of hard to be sympathetic for him just because he just does make a total mess out of like, literally everything that he comes across.
JM:
Yeah, it's so weird, because you can see so much of that stuff now, like you can just go online and you look up anybody's writings about how they think the world works, right? Whenever you read some of that stuff, you'll see that a certain amount of it will make sense to you. And you'll be like, Yeah, I get that, you're right. And then at some point it starts to go off and you start thinking like, I'm not sure that's really it. It's not mind control. It's something else, right? And here he is, wants to believe this so badly that this beautiful girl is being manipulated by this evil corporation and she's being mind controlled and forced to do things she wouldn't otherwise do.
Gretchen:
Yeah, and even the reference to "Green Mansions", I believe it is, that is referenced the book where he says he cries over the like martyred woman in it, which I believe is like a colonialist narrative. I remember looking it up a while back. So kind of that idea of I want to save someone like I want to be the savior and I want to free this person when it's like, you don't know how to do that, you don't know what you're talking about.
JM:
Yeah, you don't know what they're really going through. Yeah, a lot of people have that the same complex, right? So they really want to do that. And I think a lot of, I don't know, things things that come up, like especially around people who are... getting into like sort of delicate subject matter here, but sometimes you meet somebody who you see has been terribly abused and has been through a lot of negative stuff. And you feel like I can take them away from all this and I can give them something better. And to the other person, this seems like a really good thing too. It seems like it's what maybe it seems for a while, like it's what they need. But it might not be, right. And it might be naive of you to think that you can be everything that this person needs. And you can save them from hell. And I think that a lot of us fall victim to that kind of mentality. I don't know if specifically men do, maybe women do too, but I definitely noticed this pattern in a lot of men that I've known over the years, including myself, that sometimes I kind of feel like that's the thing to do. And you realize sometimes that it's a mistake. But there's a power dynamic at work here. I don't know, Paul's not like an older man, but he is the son of the CEO of the company.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
Yeah. Though I guess he doesn't perceive a power imbalance, although there definitely is a very real one. He probably perceives her as being like a legitimate, rich celebrity, or whatever. And obviously doesn't realize that she's in the middle of a computer somewhere.
JM:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
Yeah. He does, of course, believe that there's implants in her, but he probably believes that even without those, she'd still be in the same position she was before.
Nate:
Yeah, they're just, in his opinion, anyway, there to make her enforce the corporate line or whatever and maybe give her a zap or two if she says the wrong thing or something like that.
JM:
Yeah. We think the rich and powerful, they could be drawn to somebody like what Delphi appears to be, which is like basically, how else can we say it? Like a doll, right?
Nate:
Yeah. Yeah, that's just what she is. Yeah.
JM:
And the real person inside that is something else, right? And we kind of figure like, okay, like a lot of people who are not rich and powerful should have more sympathy for others who are not in as fortunate situation as the rich and powerful, like we should relate more to those people. I mean, all right, we can be like Alice Tiptree and say the ugly people, right? Like those are the people that actually mean something, not plastic, not somebody wearing the latest fashion and exhibiting themselves in this ultra... he sees a completely different person behind that corporate facade than what she actually is. And it's just really, really interesting, the layers of identity and complexity in this whole situation, right?
Gretchen:
Yeah, especially when taking into like near the end, it is like Delphi is kind of becoming her own person, or at least there's this sense of consciousness outside of Burke that's really interesting.
Nate:
It feels like she comes alive when she becomes Delphi. She doesn't really talk about her life before that point as P. Burke as being anything really worth living.
JM:
Basically just very depressing from what it sounds like.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
Although she did go to school and she did study languages. So if she had gotten over that and gotten the help that she needed, despite being described often in the text just to bring the point home as being physically unattractive specimen, she could have led an interesting and cool life maybe, but then she's got those things to deal with like her class that she can't overcome. And her looks, which as as a woman of a certain class, she also probably couldn't overcome even in this wonderful future that they have in whatever year it is.
Nate:
Yeah. And I mean, I think that's deliberately the point. I mean, not everybody's gonna look like Marilyn Monroe or whoever the celebrity that Tiptree was thinking about at the time. Real people come in all shapes and sizes and look differently from the, I guess, ideal standard of beauty that is portrayed in magazines and films and TV shows and is deliberately kept that way.
JM:
And I do think men get a little bit of it too, but women definitely get it worse.
Nate:
Oh yeah. Yeah. No question.
Gretchen:
The first time I read this was a few months ago. I'm rereading it. It was right after I had watched this film, "The Substance". And it very much feels similar to this work in that there's in the film, which is a commentary on the film industry in Hollywood and its attitude towards women who are aging, so not necessarily women who even initially weren't conventionally attractive, but are losing what people consider their looks. It's about this woman who is kind of being overlooked because she's past her prime, apparently, as soon as she hits 50, who takes this substance, this medication that allows her to create another version of herself that looks youthful. And when watching that film, I was thinking about this story, which feels like they both have very similar themes.
JM:
And I want to see that movie, definitely.
Gretchen:
Yeah. Yeah. And part of me wonders if this story may have even been an influence on that.
Nate:
Yeah, I mean, it's definitely a common theme and some of the more modern science fiction, apparently, I think Black Mirror has covered similar themes in certain episodes. But yeah, I definitely like to check out more modern science fiction film, especially stuff that seemed well written and less like, I don't know, military actiony type stuff. I've really been not plugged into that world at all. I should probably try to catch up with more modern science fiction films. So yeah, I definitely like to check that one out too.
JM:
"The Substance" is supposed to have some pretty intense body horror as well. So yeah, I don't know. I think Gretchen, you're the only one that's seen it. So, but it's been compared with Cronenberg in his prime, but like even more so, maybe. So yeah.
Gretchen:
I think the Cronenberg comparison is pretty apt.
Nate:
Cool. Yeah, I mean, I like Cronenberg a lot.
Gretchen:
Yeah, me too.
Nate:
So yeah, definitely have to check that one out.
JM:
This is a story that I really think that you should read it and then read it again and tell me what you think of that ending. Leave us comments. Leave us comments, people. What do you think of the ending? Does it make sense to you? Again, I don't want to make it sound like it's a negative, like I'm criticizing this story because I know that she did it on purpose. She didn't just throw in this random time travel thing at the last minute, right? Like, it means something. And I think we've sort of touched around the issue and maybe we have some ideas. But maybe yeah, leaving it ambiguous seems to be a thing like again, you know, they've mentioned the other story that the "The Last Flight of Doctor Ain" where like I'm not 100% clear, but I guess I don't have to be. I can read it again. The Nixon headline seems a very clear attempt to tie it to when the story is written and when it appears.
Nate:
Yeah, nice little punch at the end there. And I like when the stories do that. But yeah, no, this one was totally great. Really loved every aspect of it, the story itself, the prose style, the messaging and just the powerful emotions that it conveys. And yeah, cool focus on computing and networks and how that all plays together. And I did like the brief touch on global satellite communication systems, which was starting to become a thing in the 1960s, but obviously extrapolated way more out here, which is always cool to see.
JM:
Yeah, very much so. I think the story is more relevant now. I mean, then it would have been even in the 90s because now, yeah, we're are in the world of influencers and AI bots tricking people into trying stuff because they think they're talking to a real human being and all this stuff. And like, yeah, we're not remotely controlling actual bodies yet. But maybe that's a project Google is working on right now.
Gretchen:
First Meta and then we'll see where to go from there, I guess.
Nate:
It wouldn't surprise me.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah, this is a story that did affect me greatly because I've been thinking about a lot of this stuff lately. I mean, I discovered the online world in the 90s. And I mean, I kind of spent my time on and off and over the years. But I guess, yeah, starting in the pandemic time again, suddenly I'm paying attention to things that I didn't really bother with before. And I understand some things that I didn't really think about that much before. And because everybody had to kind of, I mean, I still do a lot of my work remotely. So it's a thing that's in all of our lives now. And it just feels like, yeah, this is the culture we're in now almost and reading about recently, Spotify and how they like destroy creativity and stuff like that. And again, I'm not going to give on a rant about that now. But it's just one of these things that like, wow, we're really in this time now, like everything feels so corporatized. And how do we get like this? Like, it's like the way that people live. And like you said, Nate, they don't think twice, like they just, it's just part of life. And you're like, well, I accept it because it's very convenient. And I haven't done anything wrong. So I don't really mind that everything that I do is being surveilled. My entire life is uploaded to the cloud. And I didn't read the terms of service, which tells me that actually, a lot of my data is being sold. And it's just, oh, wake up people.
I'm sorry, I had to go there. But yeah, at least I didn't say the s word.
But yeah, I don't know. This is a really powerful story. I agree that yeah, I mean, this is like a revelation. I read this before and I remember liking it. But you know, there's now just having to really like dive deep into it and think about it and pay attention to it and stuff like that. It seems so powerful. And yeah, I'm glad we went there. I'm glad that you chose this story. It's really awesome. It might make you angry. It might make you sad. But that's good. That's the way it should be.
Gretchen:
Yes, I'm really glad that I had the chance to revisit this story, even though the first reading I had of it was still relatively recent. But yeah, I highly recommend reading this and rereading this to get a fuller extent of it. We had been saying there is still so much left even after the first reading to still think about and to question about it.
JM:
Yeah. Yeah, I love stories that want me now they want you to come back and they invite you to do that. And I don't know I've commented on that before on the podcast and something Zelazny said, this is like, he doesn't want the story to be a one night stand, you got to come back, right? So definitely the Tiptree stories are all about that because yeah, there's so many layers and there's so much to think about and go into. And sometimes things are a little deliberately kept slightly uncertain or unclear. And I think it's done in such a way that it doesn't seem like an oversight. It seems more like that that's deliberate. And that's like, again, it's like a sneaky little doorway opening up and being like, hey, you're going to come this way again, because you won't be able to stop thinking about it. So pretty much every Tiptree story that I've read has a little bit of that aspect to it. And I almost feel like I can't really describe it after the first reading. And I think that was a really good, short, concise, but very accurate summary that you did Gretchen of this story. And that's exactly how I want my summaries is to be most of the time because I feel like they get too rambly sometimes. But the point is all this talk around it, and all the things that we've been covering around it is the most important thing aside from the story itself, which I think we all think that anybody listening to this podcast really ought to read. And yeah, decide for themselves what they think.
Gretchen:
And especially with this story, I wanted to provide that kind of bare bones sort of summary, just because so much of the details is where it really shines. And like not just the writing, but some of the offhand comments and you have been saying the world building is what's really interesting in this story.
JM:
Yeah. And so much of the stuff that makes you think in the story is not like just one thing happening after another thing. It's all the asides that you're given and all the confrontational things that Tiptree is saying, and that make you like question how you the reader think about things and how you look at people and how you think about phenomena and now thinking about the things that I've been rambling about and talking about how we should be thinking about our lives and the way we're going with our submitting to the algorithms and submitting to all the things designed to track us and target us with whatever the companies think we want to buy and we want to subscribe to, because apparently we can't do without any of that. So yeah, it pushed my buttons and feeling a lot of this stuff lately in the last few years. So you might be sensitive to that. And the story will really affect you like that.
For now, though, I think that's it for us. And we've concluded this batch of six stories. That's been a really fantastic time. We all picked, I think, some really interesting and good stories. I don't know if we want to talk about how we feel about a little bit how this went. I feel like there was a lot of dehumanization in our themes here.
Nate:
Maybe it says something about our personalities that we all picked really bleak and grim stories.
JM:
Yeah, I mean, I guess when you get down to it, a lot of science fiction, that's not maybe the more optimistic type has this theme to it, right? It's like basically the loss of our humanity through various means. It can come in different political sides, right? Like it could be a little overboard sometimes with, oh, yeah, we're heading into this modern technological age and it's going to destroy our humanity. And we're not going to be able to communicate with each other anymore. Or it could be like more nuanced or it could be like looking at things in a different way like this type of reading story that we've done tonight, which is very relevant of the times we live in now. But that definitely seems to be a theme that comes up again and again in all of our stories. And it seems like everyone almost has been, except for maybe the narrator in "The Savage Mouth" who did it all by himself without any outside influence, basically, robbed of their humanity one way or the other by forces well beyond their control. And it's really interesting that our minds all went that way. It definitely wasn't intentional, because this was a total random host choice where we didn't consult anybody else about what stories we were picking.
Gretchen:
We just sort of stumbled into a theme, I guess.
JM:
I'm not going to bother trying to ask what everybody's favorites were. I think we made it pretty clear we might come back to this during a bonus episode, but I don't know. I think these were all pretty awesome. So I'm really happy with the way we conducted this. We hope you listened and enjoyed it as well.
All right, so yeah, next time on Chrononauts.
Nate:
Yeah, next time on Chrononauts, we'll be talking about the end of the world.
JM:
Yes. It's high time we addressed the end of the world. It's going to end up in everybody's face for so long, the end of the world. And there's so many different versions of it. We are going to talk about apocalypses. We're really only going to be scratching the surface in this next batch, but we'll be coming back to the theme, I'm sure, on many occasions in the future because, yes, science fiction has definitely gone over this topic many, many times in many iterations, almost since, pretty much since the very beginning.
Nate:
Yeah, definitely since the very beginning.
JM:
Yeah. I mean, we already covered "The Last Man" on the podcast, right?
Nate:
Yeah, right. I know we've mentioned them on the podcast before, but there's another podcast out there. They're not too active now. They might be defunct for a couple years, but the Apocalist Book Club, who is one of the other podcasts that cover a lot of 19th century stuff when we were doing that in the early days of the podcast.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
And they decided to cover every apocalypse novel in chronological order, so they do focus a lot on that early 19th century stuff, both the novels called "The Last Man".
JM:
And sadly, they seem to have stopped in the 1930s, but I don't know, maybe they'll pick up again one day.
Nate:
Yeah, we'll see. But yeah, there's definitely a lot out there, but we'll be covering five stories next time.
We'll be taking a look at Amado Nervo's, "The Last War," from 1906.
JM:
We did cover Nervo before on one episode, right?
Nate:
Yes, we did, yeah.
JM:
"The Soul Giver".
Nate:
Yeah, so this story I translated earlier than the novella that we covered previously. It's been up on the blogspot for like a couple years now. We don't forget about these. We always have them in the back of our mind, but there's like so much stuff out there that we want to cover. Some stuff gets pushed ahead of others. But yeah, really excited to be covering this one. It's like totally, totally different than the novella that we covered previously. And it's definitely a precursor to a major sci-fi franchise that is still somewhat active to this day. So that's a lot of fun there. So we'll definitely be talking about that when we cover that.
Then we're going to be taking a look at Simon Belsky's "Under the Comet" from 1910. This is another original translation, this one from Russian. This was done in the same block that I did those Soviet stories that we looked at a couple months back. This is a little bit before the revolution, from 1910. But Belsky was publishing in some of those pulp magazines we talked about like World of Adventure as well during that time. So some times with that episode and it's going to be an interesting one to cover. There's some stuff I really like in it. There's stuff I really don't like about it, but it's definitely pretty heavy in it's social commentary. So it'll be a lot of stuff to dig into.
Then we have another comet apocalypse story. This one from W.E.B. Du Bois, "The Comet" from 1920. Again, it'll be another really interesting one to cover as he's had a very, very lengthy career not related to genre fiction at all. So it's always cool when these intersect and we can cover a story by an author like that.
JM:
Well, we're definitely going to tie it around to science fiction in a major way, so be prepared for that.
Nate:
Then we're going to be taking a look at two very well-known authors, one we've covered before and that is Isaac Asimov and his classic story "Nightfall" published in the September 1941 issue of Astounding.
And we'll be covering Philip K. Dick for the first time on the podcast and his story "The Last of the Masters", initially published in Orbit over two issues from November and December of 1954. So pretty stacked episode next time of a couple obscurities, a couple really well-known ones, and I think it's going to be a lot of fun, watching the world fall to pieces.
JM:
Yes, I'm definitely really looking forward to that. So many different ends of the world we could possibly see. There's whole anthology is dedicated to this topic and for this batch we'll be doing short stories. There's definitely a lot of longer works that we might cover in the future as well.
All right, well, with that though, I must encourage you all to keep your firewalls up and make sure you use an ad blocker on the internet. It's good for you, even if it won't stop all the surreptitious hidden advertising that you might only be aware of through your intellect when you know that it's happening.
Gretchen:
By the way, this episode is sponsored by Squarespace. Just wanted everybody to know that.
JM:
Yes.
Nate:
Not really though.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Well, it's been a great time, guys. We really had fun with these and we are Chrononauts and we'll be back again, well, in 2025. We'll be back. It'll be next year by the time we return. Hopefully, we all make it through the holidays. Good luck and good night.
Bibliography:
Phillips, Julie - "James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon" (2007)
