I read this collection of short stories fifty years ago, when I was eighteen. I knew then that it was exceptional. Re-reading it for the first time, fifty years later, I can see that it still is. 
Not all of the stories are perfect. 
Two of them THE PEACEFULNESS OF VIVYAN and MOTHER IN THE SKY WITH DIAMONDS, didn’t work for me at all.  
Many of them are funny, with humour that ranges from slapstick to satirical. I’LL BE WAITING FOR YOU WHEN THE SWIMMING POOL IS EMPTY stuck with me. It still makes me smile and its sharp-toothed satire has become more relevant rather than less. 
But the stories that kept this book alive in my memory are the ones that made me think about what it means to be alien or to be human or to be male or female or neither. Science Fiction is the only mind-expanding drug I’ve ever needed. I believe that absorbing these stories when I was in my teens and early twenties shaped how I thought about the world. 
Four of the fifteen stories in this collection are ones that opened my mind and stayed with me. 
The most powerful (and the grimmest) are the stories that start and end this collection: AND I AWOKE AND FOUND ME HERE ON THE COLD HILL’S SIDE about aliens and sex and the ability of human culture to survive contact with the truly different; BEAM US HOME about the hopes of a young man trapped in a bad place. The other two stories are lighter in tone: MAMA COME HOME and HELP. They both feature a CIA Psyops team (although I didn’t know what Psyops was when I first read this. Now, with Cambridge Analytica running a psyops campaign to get Brexit through, I’m more familiar with it than I’d like to be.) their both humourous, clever and uplifting. One is a First Contact story with a twist around gender politics and one is about the damage done by colonisation and religion. 
I recommend this collection to anyone looking for Science Fiction stories that will make them think, laugh and cry. 
Below, I’ve reviewed each story in the order they appear in the collection.

---

AND I AWOKE AND FOUND ME HERE ON THE COLD HILL’S SIDE

It must be fifty years since I read this story for the first time. I found it exciting and shocking and irresistibly different – rather like the reaction of the humans in the story to the aliens. The core idea, that our exogamous nature might doom us if aliens arrived, pushing us into the same decline that the Polynesians experienced, etched itself into my memory.

This time around I knew what was coming so I was able to appreciate the well-crafted brutal honesty of the storytelling.

THE SNOWS ARE MELTED, THE SNOWS ARE GONE

This is a bleak story from start to finish. It’s a sparsely told post-apocalyptic story.. All action and observation. No interior monologues. Emotions and motivations are left to be guessed at. An empty world. An armless girl who is, nevertheless, hunting. No infodumps. No explanations even. It’s a story that’s as unforgiving as the world the girl is trying to survive in. It says to the reader: “This is what’s happening. Work out for yourself what it means.”

And yet… it gets under your skin. The grim practicality. The sweat and toil powered by a small pellet of hope. The determination to overcome limitations. All surrounded by an echoing, lifeless emptiness.

THE PEACEFULNESS OF VIVYAN

I gave up on this halfway through. I couldn’t connect with the mystery or the main character.

MAMA COME HOME

This was clever and fun. It was a First Contact story with an ingenious twist that I relished: the casual disembowelling of male dominance by the arrival of beautiful human-looking female aliens who are over eight feet tall and think human males a cute playthings.

It was startling to see a CIA expert in Fake News in a story published in 1973, especially when the story was written by a former CIA agent.

I loved the ingenuity of the ending, It was smart, unexpected, just about plausible and showed that the pen (or at least the video) can be mightier than the sword. 

HELP

We’re back with the CIA unit from MAMA COME HOME, this time with a different set of aliens and a different analogue showing the catastrophic effect of colonisation on the people being colonised. This is quite subversive stuff. It’s entertaining and easy to read but, beneath the surface, it’s a muscular attack on the cost of colonialism and a reminder that we not only fail to learn from history but we whitewash it out of existence. 

PAINWISE

This was very strange. A sort of thought experiment but about the nature and effect of sensation. Our hero has been altered to feel no pain. He’s used to sample worlds on a long-range, long-term mission. He is often damaged and rebuilt but never feels the pain associated with it. He loses the will to live. Wants to return home. Then encounters pleasure-seeking empathic aliens who love his lack of pain and take him away in a spaceship version of a hippy bus. It could have been heaven but this is a Tiptree story so of course that didn’t last. Our hero was brought down to earth in a painful way.

FAITHFUL TO THEE, TERRA, IN OUR FASHION

A boisterous, riotously imaginative story about a world where all the planets of the galaxy come together to compete in races. Most of the story feels like a backstage tour of an exotic circus given by a pressured-but-loving-it ringmaster who leads the troubleshooters who wrangle the acts and keep them honest. It’s fast, colourful and fun. Under all of that is a more serious idea about the nature of identity and the preservation of a culture under threat. I liked that this idea was revealed as the solution to a tense problem rather than waved as a banner.

THE MAN DOORS SAID HELLO TO

This was whimsical. So whimsical that I have no idea what the point of it was. 

THE MAN WHO WALKED HOME

This was a Science Fiction story that I admired but didn’t enjoy. It is driven by a clever, science-based ‘What if?’ question about an experiment that goes wrong and causes global devastation. It’s well-written. It turns complicated physics into a first-hand experience. It has a human tragedy at its heart. BUT it spans centuries – too long for it to feel real to me. It left my emotions untouched.

FOREVER TO A HUDSON BAY BLANKET

This was a playful time travel paradox story with a little lighthearted romance thrown in. Much is made of the niceness of the young Canadian man who is the star of this story and, despite the lightheartedness and the romance, it is ultimately his undoing. This is one of the most original meet-cute setups I’ve ever seen. It has a mix of innocence and lust and zest for life that I’d normally associate with 1940s RomComs.

I’LL BE WAITING FOR YOU WHEN THE SWIMMING POOL IS EMPTY

When I read this fifty years ago, it made me laugh. This time, it only made me smile. Nevertheless, it had stuck in my memory all that time. It’s a satirical piece that imagines a privileged young man on his Wanderjahr landing on a blades-and-bows world in the middle of a battle and politely but firmly trying to ‘improve’ things… while respecting the local culture, of course. It’s an object lesson in why the Federation in Star Trek imposed the Prime Directive. The phrase hadn’t been coined when this was written but it shouts “Check Your Privilege”.

I still have no idea what the title means.

I’M TOO BIG BUT I LOVE TO PLAY

This story thinks BIG about aliens. It imagines an alien so different from us that it initially sees life on planets as tiny pockets of dense anti-entropic energy and becomes fascinated by how they work. This almost non-corporeal being floats a solitary path between stars, amusing itself by playing games of Maxwell’s Demon with energy fields. That description was fun in a Hard Science Fiction Thought Experiment way. But Tiptree took it further than that. Much further. Firstly by letting the alien become obsessed with (but not initially good at) copying humans and taking their place. This quickly gets messy both for the alien and for the humans it is playing with. Secondly, by adding an italicised top and tale to the story that I didn’t understand the significance of until right at the end when a memorable city was named. THEN, I saw that while I’d been focusing on our impact on the alien, the real story was about the alien’s impact on us. It was a stunning idea. 

BIRTH OF A SALESMAN

This frenetic story was like watching the Marx Brothers organising a testing and shipping department: chaotic, exotic, filled with action but only funny if slapstick makes you laugh. I’d admired the creativity and the relentless application of Murphy’s law but I thought it went on for too long. 

MOTHER IN THE SKY WITH DIAMONDS

Nope. This didn’t work for me. I felt like it was written in code and I wasn’t sure that cracking the code was going to be worth the effort so I skipped it. 

BEAM US HOME

This is another one that I remember from fifty years ago. It made me cry then. It still does. I won’t spoil the story by talking about the plot except to say that it’s about a young man in a bad place who is hugging to himself the unvocalised hope of his generation – that someone would come and take him away from the insane brutality of his world and let him live in somewhere clean and rational where everyone tries to do the right thing – like in Star Trek.

Reading this fifty years ago it felt like a hopeful prayer. I added a mental amen and wondered why everyone didn’t see the world this way. Reading it now, it feels soaked in sadness. I also read the final scene differently. Back then I thought ‘salvation’. Now, I think ‘delusion’. The story hasn’t changed but my belief in hopeful prayer as anything other than a necessary emotional relief is long gone.

---

James Tiptree Jr. was the pen name of Alice Bradley Sheldon, whose radical and pioneering science-fiction stories were matched by her extraordinary life.
As a child, she travelled widely with her parents and featured in several African-set travel books written by her mother. After attending a finishing school in Switzerland, she embarked on an early career as an artist and art critic. During the Second World War she joined the US Army Air Forces, attaining the rank of major, and then worked for the CIA before moving to a chicken farm in Virginia with her husband.
She turned to science-fiction writing as an escape from her PhD thesis on experimental psychology, and chose her pseudonym from a pot of jam.
She later explained that: ‘A male name seemed like good camouflage … I’ve had too many experiences in my life of being the first woman in some damned occupation’. Her true sex was kept secret for years. She died in 1987 in what appeared to be a murder-suicide pact with her husband.