The Starry Rift

This book is a delightfully insightful compilation of stories aimed for the thinking reader. Tiptree uses the vehicle of futuristic lives and mechanisms to delve into human actions and reactions to what they encounter in life. Rather than bludgeoning with violence throughout, Tiptree tantalizes the reader's thought process leading us on an adventure of discovery.

James Tiptree, Jr., burst onto the science fiction scene in the late 1960s, either under the Tiptree pseudonym or another (Raccoona Sheldon), writing many award-winning short stories that explored the War Between the Sexes in terrifying and graphic terms. However, Tiptree loved and really wanted to write space opera and space adventure tales, and toward the end of her career (she and her husband died in a suicide pact in 1987), that's precisely what she wrote. This volume, first published in 1986, contains three long short stories all taking place in the same imaginary galactic region, around a starless rift. On one side are the known races of human and alien, the other side is unexplored. In the first story, a teenage girl is given a "Space Coupe" as a birthday present, and shortly sets off on an unauthorized journey into unexplored space. She becomes infected with a mind parasite which is shortly going to eat her brain. The problem she must solve is getting the word back about the danger, without infecting the rest of the human race. Tiptree doesn't make me believe for one second that there could exist a planet where natural evolution could result in all mind and intelligence being carried by microscopic parasites, while all large animals are mindless, brainless hulks who function only when the parasites create brains for them. Or that the parasites must be carefully trained as children in "parasite day school" to avoid killing their hosts. That's not the point. Her aim is to take that bizarre situation as a given, and work out the logical consequences. In this, she is somewhat like one of her obvious influences, Murray Leinster. The second tale is more conventional space adventure. A solitary man who makes his living salvaging space junk finds himself in a situation where he must rescue the most beautiful woman in human space (and her clone!) from insanely vicious space pirates. Tiptree's delight in describing the mechanics and details of her imaginary interstellar space ships, space communications, and resulting space puzzles to be solved by the characters, is obvious throughout. In the final tale, explorers encounter a hitherto-unknown, technologically advanced galactic empire of three-sexed kangaroo-like aliens. The aliens are religious fanatics who practice sacrifice of their own kind, and who have good reason to destroy any humans they encounter instantly and with no questions. [It's those pesky space pirates, see story 2, again.] The explorers face the problem of avoiding an interstellar war, by somehow making the aliens understand that the human race doesn't consist entirely of pirates. This story is the only one of the three that contains fantastic/supernatural elements, and they don't help either the reader or the plot in any way. Again, Tiptree can't make the three-sex system plausible, and that's not her goal. It's typical of Tiptree that the mind parasite we get to know in story 1 has the personality of a small fe

"The Only Neat Thing to Do" (a story in this book) is a major literary achievement, deserving to stand proudly, as a very female and very SF counterpart, alongside Hemingway's "Old Man and the Sea", or Melville's "Billy Budd": equally deserving to be considered a classic.

I found the stories here a beautiful collection. Each story is original and different from many science fiction works, concentrating not on epic battles and races and wars, but instead on noble characters who are, despite their heroics, still human at their core. This collection is about characters with incomplete desires, who are empty at their heart for something found in the stars, and while they find what they are searching for it draws a sacrifice from each. They are very easy to connect with on different levels for different reasons, and Tiptree is a master at putting such well-developed characters into so few pages. My favorite part of Tiptree's writing is her style. It was strange to get used to at first, because her stories here are told in a tense not many toy with, but the words are so powerful and strong and contain the same type of yearning with which her characters are wrought. All the works in this collection are extremely bittersweet and sentimental, so I wouldn't suggest it for fans of purely happy endings.