Warm Worlds And Otherwise

Author: James Tiptree Jr.

James Tiptree appeared as if from nowhere in the late 1960s with a series of beautifully realised stories that yet revealed a dark imagination, particularly when it comes to matters of sex and violence. In "The Last Flight of Doctor Ain", for instance, a concern for the well-being of the Earth leads Doctor Ain to destroy the human race. In "Love is the Plan, the Plan is Death", which won the Nebula Award for Best Short Story, an alien creature recounts resorting to cannibalism to survive winters that are becoming longer, only to reveal that the mate for whom he is storing the food is already slowly eating him. In "The Girl Who Was Plugged In", a badly deformed girl becomes a media celebrity through controlling a beautiful female avatar. And in "The Women Men Don't See", survivors of an air crash in a South American jungle encounter aliens, and the women realise that they are better served by joining the aliens than by staying with the men. All of these stories and more were included in Tiptree's second collection, Warm Worlds and Otherwise. Why it's on the list: Although not normally counted as a new wave writer, Tiptree certainly benefitted from the new wave. Her stories are suffused with images of sex and violence that had become possible through the new wave; there was a detached almost clinical examination of the foibles of human personality that was again an offshoot of the new wave; and it was familiarity with the work of contemporary new wave writers that led her earliest readers to appreciate what she was doing with her fiction.