Tiptree, whose real name was Alice Sheldon, not only convinced the science fiction world she was a male writer for much of her career, she also wrote a number of stone cold classic science fiction short stories. I am definitely a fan of her short fiction. She only wrote two novels, however: Up the Walls of the World (1978, USA), and Brightness Falls from the Air (1985, USA). This was my first read of Tiptree at novel-length.

The title refers to the “walls” of a vast maelstrom in the atmosphere of a gas giant, Tyree. It is inhabited by huge manta ray-like aliens, who communicate using light but also seem to experience some radiation as “sound”. It takes a while before the synaesthesia Triptree uses makes sense, and I’m not entirely convinced it, and the fact the males nurture the young, makes the aliens as, well, alien as Tiptree intended.

Meanwhile, on Earth, Dr Dan Dann (yes, really) is the medical support for a US Navy-sponsored experiment in ESP involving a handful of varied subjects – a pair of identical twins, two teenage girls, a a matronly housewife, an embittered dwarf, and a somewhat dim-witted young man. The experiment is moved to a remote Navy camp, when the twins are used to test telepathic communication between land and a submarine.

A third narrative, written entirely in CAPITALS, which proves really irritating to read, is the stream of consciousness of some sort of distributed interstellar intelligence, which has been destroying stars.

The Destroyer’s attack on Tyree’s star prompts the aliens to attempt to take over the minds of Earth’s humans, and a “test mission” results in some of those involved in the Navy experiment finding themselves in alien bodies on Tyree. One of the experiment’s staff, however, a POC computer programmer instead becomes part of the Destroyer. Which she tries to control, using her knowledge of programming.

There are things to like in Up the Walls of the World, but I’m puzzled at the praise given to the novel around the time it was published. I get that a novel from Tiptree, a controversial figure and a well-known writer of top-notch science fiction short stories, is worthy of serious consideration… But I suspect time hasn’t been especially kind to the book. The descriptions of Tyree are good, and its inhabitants are original and well-presented – but not all that, well, alien. Dr Dan Dann (yes, really) is very much a typical narrator for US science fiction of the time (and Tiptree does well at channelling her inner Jubal Harshaw), and her POC character is unusual for the late 1970s and handled sensitively.

As I read Up the Walls of the World, I couldn’t help wondering if CJ Cherryh’s Voyager in Night (1984, USA), published six years later, was partly written in response. It’s another novel that hasn’t quite survived the millennium. Nonetheless, I still recommended reading everything Tiptree wrote.