The Inspiration for 'Equus parvus' · 9:55pm Feb 23rd, 2014
I hope you like you some James Tiptree Jr., because I like me some James Tiptree Jr.
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James Tiptree Jr., artist's conception.
My latest, Mating Customs of Species Equus parvus, is loosely based on James Tiptree Jr.'s short story, "And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill's Side." It's not Tiptree's best work, but as soon as I read it, I started thinking about how I could ponify it.
James Tiptree Jr. (real name Alice Sheldon) is an influential sf writer who for a time was largely forgotten. I first encountered her work in some old volumes of collected stories from the '70s, back when she was still fooling people into thinking she was a man, so, upon my first reading of her, I had the privilege of being similarly fooled. She was an unambiguously radical feminist writer, but wrote in a convincingly masculine style. When I visited the Science Fiction Museum in Seattle, I saw preserved there a letter from Robert Silverberg, explaining why he believed it was impossible that the stories of Tiptree could have been written by a woman. I read the letter with interest and amusement.
Admittedly, perhaps because I know the truth now, or perhaps because I've read a larger body of her work, Tiptree's writing no longer seems "masculine" to me. Instead, it seems like the writing of a feminist who's trying too hard to imitate a man, which might go a long way toward explaining her tendency to explode into moments of pornographic vulgarity without warning.
At her worst ("With Delicate Mad Hands" or "The Women Men Don't See"), Tiptree's stories read like the meanderings of a doddering and especially raunchy grandfather who can't get to the point. At her best ("Love Is the Plan the Plan Is Death," "The Screwfly Solution," or "The Psychologist Who Wouldn't Do Awful Things to Rats"), her stories are like mallet blows, punches to the face, the twanging of a taut bowstring against your skull. Reading an anthology of Tiptree is like panning for gold in a sewer: you have to go through a lot of nasty stuff, but there's something valuable in there.
Tiptree's science fiction fascinates me largely because of her weirdly paradoxical philosophy: she is both a feminist and a biological determinist. Now, it seems to me that you can be one or the other of those, but not both, since the feminist says that men ought to behave better, but the determinist says men are meat robots who can't help themselves. Indeed, Tiptree appears to say both things: males in her stories are, with some exceptions, lust-ridden and cold-hearted rapists and killers yanked around by their dicks like puppets on a string, whereas her female characters (sometimes exempt from the determinism but not always) dream of escaping to some world where there are no men: in "The Women Men Don't See," a couple of women escape men by catching a hitchhike with some extraterrestrials; in "With Delicate Mad Hands," a female space pilot brutally murders her commander after he brutally rapes her, and then she flies her ship out into the unknown; in "Your Faces, O My Sisters! Your Faces Filled of Light!" a woman goes insane and dreams that she lives in a peaceful future utopia where all the men are dead . . . but gets raped and murdered when she walks through a bad neighborhood.
Over time, it becomes clear that this perfect man-less world can only be reached through death, so her stories, especially the later ones, evince a fascination with suicide. Unfortunately, Tiptree practiced what she preached: she eventually murdered her husband in his bed and then took her own life with a shotgun. Michael Swanwick, true to Tiptree's determinism, blames this entirely on her clinical depression, but that attempt to defend her actually dishonors her: unless she was truly insane at the end, then she was responsible for her own actions. If Tiptree was lucid enough to write her skillful fiction, she was also lucid enough to make her own decisions about bigger things. Depression doesn't pick up shotguns, load them, and pull their triggers, nor does it write good skiffy.
Also, quite frankly, I can't help but wonder if she was depressed exactly because she had depressing ideas. It's the fashion now to consider depression an entirely chemical problem, but I have my doubts: if they think depressing thoughts, how could people help but be depressed? There is, I am told, a higher rate of clinical depression amongst atheists, for example. I suppose this is a chicken-or-egg problem: does depressing philosophy cause depression, or the other way around? Or do they go together because of some third factor?
Anyway, I freely admit that most of Tiptree's corpus I can take or leave, but of what I've read, she has three stories I consider excellent, and one of those absolutely should not be missed.
Her third best story is "The Screwfly Solution," which is probably the most chilling horror story I've ever read. The concept is silly if examined closely, but elegant in its simplicity: men all around the world have begun murdering women en masse because a chemical in the atmosphere has screwed up their hormones. Probably more than any other, this story displays Tiptree's view of humans as meat-puppets, and she has to pull a few writer's tricks to handwave the implausibility of men who are sane, oriented to place and time, and in control of themselves, brutally killing their wives and girl-children. The story accidentally displays exactly what's wrong with determinism even as it uses it as a plot device. It's also damn scary.
Her second best is "The Psychologist Who Wouldn't Do Awful Things to Rats," a tale very much in the Romantic tradition. It adds a bit of nuance to Tiptree's worldview, which is usually so outrageous as to look like self-parody; but in this story, Tiptree the determinist attacks other determinists. The story is a satire of radical behaviorist psychology: in a lab that looks like a concentration camp, psychologists sadistically torture animals in order to "discover" things that everyone already knew anyway. One man is too compassionate for this environment, and his attempt to be humane to his test subjects ends up threatening his career. At the climax, the story becomes fantastical and surreal, and Tiptree delivers a masterful employment of the Romantic concept of personality fragmentation. Giving any further details would give too much away.
Her absolute best, not-to-be-missed story is "Love Is the Plan the Plan Is Death." It is a perfect gem, a flawless crystal.
There are two short stories I can read straight through with pleasure, and then flip back to the beginning and read through again with pleasure undiminished. Perhaps coincidentally, both stories are by feminist writers, and both deliver deliberately disgusting depictions of extraterrestrial reproduction. The first is Octavia Butler's "Bloodchild," which imagines how things might go if the Xenomorphs from the Alien movies were rational and capable of compassion. Incidentally, I based some of Queen Chrysalis's grotesqueries in "Chronomistress" on Butler's story. The second story I always read with pleasure is Tiptree's "Love Is the Plan." I can tell you nothing at all about it, because that would give away the ending. Admittedly, you might see the ending coming (I already knew it myself because somebody told me about it ahead of time), but knowing about it actually does nothing to lessen its impact. I cry while reading this story. If I could tell you what it's about, you'd realize how absurd that is, and how well it must be written to elicit tears, given its subject matter.
So . . . where was I? I think I just wrote my own version of "With Delicate Mad Hands," because I failed to get to the point in a timely fashion. My point is that Mating Customs is based on "And I Awoke and Found etc.," a story with a title that's longer than it is. Tiptree's story nicely skewers the fantasies of fanboys dreaming of hawt alien love: the premise is that humans, biologically geared for exogamy, are enamored of extraterrestrials, who are not so constituted. The result of this is that the aliens think we're ridiculous, and the only aliens humans can woo are the dregs of extraterrestrial society—the deviants and perverts. Meanwhile, Earth is being gutted because humans and human goods are moving outward while nothing significant is moving in.
Thus my premise, more or less, except with ponies. Otherwise, I am basing the story, especially its pretentious tone, on some anthropological essays I've read (readers may be aware that my degrees are in Anthropology). I originally intended the story as another of my silly blog posts, this time bringing together all we've seen in My Little Pony's love stories and offering an interpretation, but then I thought of incorporating Tiptree's themes from "And I Awoke," and I thought of an actual narrative structure, so I figured I could get away with writing it as a story instead.
The other two of hers:
I always remember are "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?" and "A Momentary Taste of Being," but yeah, a fascinating and disturbing author with some fascinating and disturbing stories.
Mike
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Both those stories have their good and bad points. "Houston, Houston" also meanders on and on. Interesting ideas, but it manages to be a decidedly unpleasant read, at least to me, and the ending is probably the worst of her examples of trying to make a character "manly" by making him excruciatingly vulgar.
"A Momentary Taste of Being" has a super cool idea, but takes hecka long time to get there. Plus we have the protagonist having sex with his own sister for no other reason than because Tiptree likes to write some sick stuff sometimes.
Alas, I've never read any of the stories you mention here. Listening to their description, I'm almost too afraid to want to.
On your latter note, this post highlights one of the critical differences between our approaches to the FIM universe. To me, the ponies are humans in disguise; they're people, set in a different context and situation, but ultimately there's nothing alien about them. Where there are necessary differences between the two species, I attempt to minimize them.
You've do the opposite, highlighting their non-human nature whenever you can. This makes for some fun reading about their interesting customs (sniffing each other's muzzles, mutual grooming, etc), but I wonder if, even with that emphasis, you're really managing to write about non-humans.
There was a famous sci-fi writer (I want to say Bradbury, but I might be mistaken) who said that we are incapable of writing about true aliens -- that in the end, regardless of our outre our subjects, our writing still springs from human experience. That Bradbury, a master writer of aliens, would say such a thing is telling to me.
Anyway, this topic makes me worry for the hero of The Life of Brad, who I don't think would appreciate your latest story very much :)
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That was indeed Bradbury who said that.
I am in agreement with Bradbury and yet not in agreement. I consider "alien psychology" an author's trick, a game the author plays and in which the reader participates through willing suspension of disbelief. The author creates an alien way of thinking only by exaggerating some human way of thinking, or by drawing on a human culture he can expect the reader to find exotic.
I agree with Bradbury that it's not really alien because it's actually a human being writing it. However, I also believe real aliens would not be really alien, because if they were both intellective and sane, they would have much in common with us anyway. Perhaps the most "alien" thought I've encountered has not been in skiffy stories, but in talking to homeless schizophrenics, who cannot connect one idea to another except in a vague, dreamlike stream of consciousness.
I do not, however, believe it is therefore not worthwhile to play the game. The aforementioned "Love Is the Plan the Plan Is Death" is about as alien as a story can get, a passionate romance between spiders, but it is really a reflection on the human condition, at least as Tiptree perceives it.
A wonderful writer. I've always loved "The Girl Who Was Plugged In."
Have you read Alan Elms' "The Psychologist Who Empathized with Rats"? It describes her time as a research psychologist and gives a summary of her work.
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I will have to read that, as it will no doubt give some insight into one of my favorite of her stories.
Huh. It's always neat to see how an author arrived at Point A of a story, which is also Point Z of a long, strange journey of ideas, the author's and others, coming together in wondrous ways. Also, I learned of an author with whom I'd been unfamiliar, which is always nice. Thank you for this quasi-introduction.
I don't know who this Alice Sheldon woman is, but she's a better feminist than most modern ones.