Amazon.com Review
Flying Cups & Saucers collects 13 winners and finalists for the
James Tiptree Jr. Award, named for science fiction's ultimate gender pioneer, the woman writer everyone thought was a man. Accordingly, the Tiptree Award (est. 1991) honors the best science fiction and fantasy to explore and expand gender roles. As you might expect, these stories are feminist; non-heterosexist; focused on sex and desire; and sometimes androgynous (a few stories feature three sexes, and one even stars Freud's nightmare, the woman with a penis). But this list hardly begins to describe the contents.
Kelley Eskridge's terrific and gender-bending And Salome Danced is the perfect opening story: it not only examines oft-ignored aspects of desire, it operates on several levels to explore how what we expect to see defines and limits our perceptions. Science fiction's founding mother Ursula K. Le Guin contributes two brilliant stories: Forgiveness Day explores the intricacy of gender roles in a society where they are further complicated by slavery and war, while The Matter of Seggri is set on a world with near-absolute segregation of the sexes. L. Timmel Duchamp incisively delineates how men react to a woman who doesn't fit the feminine role. James Patrick Kelly's seemingly traditional idea-SF story Chemistry just might be the most radical in the book, for it explores the purely chemical nature of love. The other contributors--Eleanor Arnason, Ian McDonald, Carol Emshwiller, Graham Joyce, Peter F. Hamilton, R. Garcia y Robertson, Lisa Tuttle, Delia Sherman, and Ian R. MacLeod--also contribute strong, insightful, well written, challenging, and often threatening fiction. --Cynthia Ward
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
Selected for their provocative takes on sexuality, these 13 gender-bending tales of outre amour shock, amuse and call on basic human sympathy. The anthology collects the winners of the (James) Tiptree Award, named for the SF great who, in the mid-1970s, revealed himself to be a she, Alice Sheldon. Represented here twice is Ursula Le Guin, with "A Matter of Seggri" and "Forgiveness Day." The protagonist of the noteworthy latter story experiences "disgender-ment" on a new continent where only members of the upper class ("owners" as opposed to the sub-class of "assets") are referred to as men and women. In James Patrick Kelly's "Chemistry," science has reduced love to mere "neuromance" and emotions are "reproducible brain states." Kelly Eskridge's "And Salome Danced" features Jo/Joe Sand, the ultimate actor who can change gender at will. In L. Timmel DuChamp's witty "Motherhood, Etc.," a 19-year-old, transformed by sex with an alien, ushers in the Age of the Hermaphrodite as government officials stand by, baffled. A fantasy-tinted look at human relationships and identity, this collection, though burdened by a poor choice of title and subtitle, nimbly traces the charting of new territory.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
