Customer Reviews

Out of the Everywhere: And Other Extraordinary Visions

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Of the 10 stories included in the collection OUT OF THE EVERYWHERE, exactly 5 are also included in Tiptree's "best-of" anthology, HER SMOKE ROSE UP FOREVER, the only Tiptree collection currently in print. So you only need OUT OF..., if you need it at all, for those other 5 stories. They aren't, needless to say, very good. All were written between 1974 and 1980.

"Angel Fix" has one of Tiptree's usual charming and faintly comical aliens offering all the "good people" of earth a vital relaxation resource... and if a "bad guy" tries to use it, he is disintegrated. But there's another catch, too. "Beaver Tears" has abducting aliens treating earthlings in the same way earthlings handle the relocation of animals from one habitat to another. "Time-Sharing Angel" has another alien "kindly" and by request solving the problem of the earth's increasingly unbearable overpopulation... and the solution has at least two big catches. "A Source of Innocent Merriment" reveals what the very, very bad science fiction novel SOLARIS could have been, if Stanislaw Lem had had literary ability and imagination.

There are two stories which appeared for the first time in print in this collection, and the only one which hasn't been reprinted elsewhere since then is "Out of the Everywhere." This is a strangely, disconcertingly unpleasant story, and it's difficult to state precisely why, although it doesn't help matters that incest between a father and his pre-teen daughter is treated lightly, almost comically. An alien living mainly in space is being stalked by a predator when both wind up embedded in the earth's north polar ice cap. The alien sends out three splinters of its consciousness to three closely associated humans, an engineer, his newborn daughter, and a female administrator in the engineer's company. What's going to happen when the encysted alien is reunited, a decade and a half later, with the three not-quite humans, and the predator makes its pounce? You may not care very much.

If you think you need everything written by James Tiptree, Jr., you will need this long-out-of-print paperback. Otherwise, you won't be missing anything not easily obtainable elsewhere. [I give this three stars for the relatively poor since-unreprinted five stories; the other five stories would earn five stars.]

Most of Tiptree's (Alice Sheldon's) short fictional works have appeared earlier and elsewhere. This is a new mix. All of her stories are excellent. The title story is almost a novella and one of her more hopeful stories, about an energic life form that takes refuge in various shapes on earth to escape a predator and so learns a little about human life and materiality. Tip has a delightful sarcasm in her comments on American culture. Her grasp of scientific possibilities is always amazing. Her writing is poetic and subtle and beautiful, much like that of Ursula LeGuin.