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The Underpeople, Cordwainer Smith

The Underpeople (1968, USA) follows directly on from The Planet Buyer (1964, USA), although four years separates their publication. In fact, both were published in magazines in 1964, but the second wasn’t published as a paperback until 1968, two years after Smith’s death. The two books were later merged and published as a single novel, Norstrilia (1975, USA) – and it is that version which has been reprinted a number of times since, including in the SF Masterworks series in 2016.

The Planet Buyer left Rod McBan, of Norstrilia, the wealthiest man in the universe, and the new owner of Earth, newly arrived on Earth, where he is met by C’Mell, a catwoman and girlygirl and one of the underpeople. McBan, incidentally, is disguised as a catman.

There’s no real plot to The Underpeople, just a series of incidents which sort of lead to a conclusion and an implied resolution. The latter is the freeing of the underpeople, who are little more than slaves (the callousness with which they are disposed of is quite disturbing). The former sees McBan back home on Norstrilia, happily married, and Earth no longer in his ownership.

There are things to like about Cordwainer Smith’s oeuvre. He certainly built a unique universe, and had a distinctive voice. And it worked well in his short fiction. But both The Planet Buyer and The Underpeople read like badly-welded together collections of short stories, and in that format they’re not so impressive. Also, I really hate poetry and songs in narrative unless they’re part of the plot.

I am… undecided about Smith’s fiction. Some of his short stories are very good, even if the language is a little cringeworthy at times. Norstrilia, ie, The Planet Buyer and The Underpeople, has some good ideas. But it’s all too haphazard and never really quite links together. I wanted to like The Underpeople more than I did. There is a book out there somewhere, possibly even The Instrumentality of Mankind (1979, USA), which is in the SF Masterworks series, which presents the best of Smith’s fiction in a way that displays what’s good about it. The Planet Buyer and The Underpeople do not. 

Which may well be why they’re no longer in print (although perhaps the corridor of naked bottoms played a part).


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The Ringworld Engineers, Larry Niven

This was a reread, although I don’t recall when I previously read the book. Some time in the 1980s, I suspect. Everyone knows Ringworld (1970, USA), it was even No. 60 in the SF Masterworks series. Niven admits he had never intended to write a sequel, but he’d received so much correspondence about the novel – a lot of it pointing out where he’d got things wrong. Earth famously rotates the wrong way in the opening chapter of the novel (updated in later editions), but the chief complaint was that the ringworld was unstable. It needed attitude jets to keep it in orbit. So Niven decided to write The Ringworld Engineers (1979, USA), which is all about the attitude jets. Mostly.

Twenty-three years after the events of Ringworld, Louis Wu is a wirehead. He and his kzinti companion on that trip, Speaker-to-Animals, now called Chmeee, are kidnapped by a Pierson’s Puppeteer. Who is actually the mate of the Pierson’s Puppeteer from Ringworld, and was the leader of the race, the Hindmost. He was ousted and now plans to win back his position by fetching a “treasure” from the ringworld, a transmutation device.

Which doesn’t exist and never existed. But that proves irrelevant because the ringworld has been knocked from its orbit and will impact the sun in a year or so. The City Builders, the most powerful race on the ringworld, had removed the attitude jets from the ringworld’s rim, the jets that kept it in orbit, in order to power their spaceships. Hence the current situation.

Wu decides there must be a Repair Centre, a sort of central control complex for the ringworld. If he can find it, then he can prevent the ringworld from being destroyed. But first he has to find it.

The humanoid races on the ringworld have created, and maintained, treaties and coalitions through “rishathra”, which is sex between people of different hominid races. Niven obviously likes writing about sex, or rather the easy availability of it to males, but this is commercial science fiction so it’s either alluded to or entirely off the page. Nevertheless, it leaves a bad taste.

The other problem is the distances – the ringworld is huge. Absolutely fucking enormous. With a surface area equivalent to three million Earths. Most of the action in The Ringworld Engineers takes place around the Great Ocean, an ocean so large it features archipelagos which are full-size maps of various planets in Known Space (including Earth, Mars and Kzin), and which are hundreds of thousands of miles apart. After a while, the distance gets wearying, it’s almost like some sort of scale fatigue sets in. It becomes meaningless, just words. Niven uses the right words, but there’s no sense of wonder attached to the vast scale of it all.

The Ringworld Engineers fixes the issue with the ringworld’s unstable orbit, and even identifies its builders – linking back to an earlier novel by Niven. He returned to the ringworld seventeen years later with The Ringworld Throne (1996, USA), and then again eight years after that with Ringworld’s Children (2004, USA). Five prequel novels, the Fleet of Worlds series, then followed.

The ringworld is a great creation, one of science fiction’s most memorable. The plot of the novel which introduced it doesn’t really matter. Same for its sequels. Dune (1965, USA) had great world-building, but its plot helped bring it to life. The plot of Ringworld is irrelevant, the Big Dumb Object exists in spite of it. And so it is for The Ringworld Engineers. Which presents a disappointing, and unconvincing, explanation as the answer to the question of who built it, and never really manages to really evoke the scale of it all.


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Gráinne, Keith Roberts

Winner of the BSFA Award in 1988. There doesn’t appear to have been any shortlist that year, so I’ve no idea how it was chosen. The Eastercon in 1988 took place in Liverpool and was three years before my first Eastercon.

Gráinne (1988, UK) is the name of a princess from Irish mythology, who at their betrothal party dumped the man she had been promised to and ran off with Diarmuid instead. In Roberts’s novel, it’s the name of a young woman the narrator, Alistair Bevan, meets, has a mostly platonic relationship with, and who then leaves him… and several years later appears on television as the presenter of a documentary series on the brand new Channel 5. By this point, Bevan works for an advertising agency, which Gráinne hires to promote a series of “clinics” to empower women.

This narrative is framed by, and interspersed with, short scenes of an old man in a hospital bed, explicitly telling the story of his life to a doctor and nurse. I’ve no idea if the resemblance was intentional, but there’s a lot in these sections that reminded me of John Fowles’s Mantissa (1982, UK)

Most descriptions of the novel classify it as semi-autobiographical, and while I’ve read a lot of Roberts’s fiction, I know little of his life – but perhaps enough to for the classification to ring true. (His careers in illustration and advertising, for example.) Other aspects, especially the gender politics and attitude to women evidenced in the novel, are definitely the same as in Roberts’s other writings (cf ‘The Natural History of the P.H.’).

Roberts’s main thesis seems to be feminism and women’s lib are a waste of time because women should not be trying to fight for equality with men but simply fighting for their own variety of rights. Which sort of ignores the fact of the patriarchy, a concept Robert never appears to have taken onboard. And it does render the central element of Gráinne’s plot, the empowerment centres, somewhat moot. On the other hand, they do make Gráinne something of a messianic, or a Valentine Michael Smith-type, figure.

Of course, it all ends badly. It always does for such figures. The narrative hints at unsavoury backers who helped Gráinne financially, perhaps hoping for the social and economic disruption she eventually causes in the UK, but it doesn’t go any further. The final section also implies a post-apocalyptic Earth, perhaps after a nuclear war, but it’s only a single sentence and ambiguous.

The reviews of Gráinne I’ve read online seem mostly to have missed the point of the story. It’s not a fantasy about a Celtic goddess who has a love affair with a human man. Gráinne may be more than human, but that’s from Bevan’s point of view. Her later influence is a mixture of clever television (much cleverer than Channel 5 ever proved to be, or indeed the bulk of British tv in the mid-1980s), deep pockets and a mishmash of Eastern religions. Even then, her empowerment centres proved more disruptive than intended.

Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land (1961, USA) follows a similar story although, given it’s American, it reads like a carnival novel, and its central protagonist, Valentine Michael Smith, is a thinly-disguised carnival freak. Roberts’s novel, however, uses Irish mythology rather than US carnival folklore, and focuses on female empowerment and not free love. Heinlein wrote prose that was extremely readable and smooth, but Roberts’s style is more literary. British sf produced a number of excellent prose stylists in the 1970s, not part of the New Wave but almost certainly adjacent to it, such as Coney, Cowper, Compton, Lee, Saxton, Watson…

I’ve no idea why Gráinne, published by small press Kerosina Books, was given the BSFA Award. Other notable sf novels published in the UK in 1987 include Banks’s Consider Phlebas (1987, UK), Mann’s The Fall of the Families (1987, UK), Wolfe’s The Urth of the New Sun (1987, USA), and even Haldeman’s Tool of the Trade (1987, USA). Certainly, a shortlist could have been drawn up. Perhaps it was.


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Oka Rel 1: The Courtesan Prince, Lynda Williams

I bought a copy of this book back in 2009 but never got around to reading it. I don’t even remember why I bought it. I’ve a vague memory of corresponding with the author, but that may be confabulation. I was interested in writing space opera, and had been for a number of years, and The Courtesan Prince (2005, Canada) is the first in a ten-book space opera series, so it may have been no more than that.

It could be argued that space opera, more so than any other branch of science fiction, succeeds or fails more on its world-building than its story. They all pretty much use the same story, anyway. Oka Rel starts from a future history and a, mostly, hard-ish sf universe, but by the time this first novel opens, Earth is lost and there are two mostly antagonistic human polities, which lost touch 200 years earlier. The Oka Rel universe plays off on the difference between the two polities – the Reetions are technological and progressive, the Gelacks are a semi-feudal empire ruled by the descendants of genetically-engineered humans.

After two centuries of separation, and all the two groups know of each other is legend and rumour, they finally meet up at a neutral space station. Von is a courtesan and dancer ordered to impersonate a member of the aristocracy during the first Gelack meeting with the Reetions. Ann is a hot-headed Reetion pilot who falls for Von, and then becomes involved in Gelack politics. Because Von is really a long-lost son of the emperor, although he doesn’t know it.

The Courtesan Prince tries hard with its world-building, but doesn’t quite make the grade. Possibly because the two groups are too much the opposite of each other. It’s all a bit too binary. It doesn’t help that Von is simply far too good a character to be entirely credible, despite the violence inflicted on him. Some of the sensibilities haven’t aged particularly well in the last twenty years but, to be fair, there is worse being published even now. It all feels, in many respects, a bit like Cherryh, but the details seem harder to visualise. In fact, now I think about it, there’s a lot of Cherryh in there. Which is no bad thing, of course. I’m a big fan of Cherryh’s fiction.

I’m not sure if I’ll continue with the series, although I’m a sucker for a series. I’ll read anything if it comes in three or more books with a single over-arching story. But, as I said earlier, space operas succeed or fail on their world-building more than their story, and I’m not all that taken with the Oka Rel universe, to be honest.


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The Corporation Wars 1: Dissidence, Ken MacLeod

This was a reread – I read it back in 2017 – but never got the chance to read the two sequels before I put the books in storage when I moved. Earlier this year I bought an omnibus edition of the trilogy, intending to finally finish all three. 

I actually wrote a review of Dissidence (2016, UK) on my blog back then. For some reason, I wrote that it took place on a moon of Jupiter, which was complete rubbish – the author even called me out on my mistake. I’ve no idea why I wrote that. The terms exoplanet and exomoon are used throughout the novel, and it states several times that it takes place in a planetary system 25 light years from Earth. So sorry, Ken: I’ve no idea why I wrote that and I’d like to make it clear the novel is set in another planetary system.

Anyway. Two companies are exploring the mineral wealth of an exomoon using robots. One of the robots, through a sequence of events, becomes self-aware. And so causes other robots, in both mining companies, to become self-aware. They rebel. So the AIs which run the mining companies unöeash their legal AIs on the “freebots”. Everything in the planetary system is run by AIs, based on a mission profile originally sent from Earth at sublight speeds.

Carlos the Terrorist was responsible for killing thousands in London during the undeclared war between the Acceleration (left-wing, basically) and the Reaction (right-wing, basically). He finds himself reincarnated in a simulation running on an AI in the same system as the aforementioned freebots. He, and several other resurrected and uploaded war criminals from the Acceleration, is there to fight those freebots on behalf of the legal AI that represents the mining company to which the robots belonged.

Except, it’s slightly more complicated than that. Is the simulation Carlos and his team experience really a simulation? Why does the legal AI representing one of the mining companies break off relations and start a war?

The story is surprisingly fast-paced, given all the ontological discussions, but MacLeod keeps the focus tight on Seba, the first robot to gain self-awareness, and Carlos. There’s a few bait-and-switches before the novel finally reveals its plot, but it’s the first of a trilogy. There are few authors I’d trust with political science fiction, but MacLeod is definitely one of them. True, I have more in common with him politically than most sf authors (especially US ones, past and present), but also because he writes sf to his politics, not despite them.

I’d happily recommend any novel by Ken MacLeod. Some are better than others. If you read them all, there may be a few disappointments, but on the whole you’ll be impressed. The Corporation Wars trilogy, based on just this first novel, seems to be somewhere near the middle, so definitely worth reading.


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A Fire Born of Exile, Aliette de Bodard.

Or, de Bodard does Dantès. Not that A Fire Born of Exile (2023, France) is the first science fiction novel to be inspired by The Count of Monte Cristo (1846, France). Gwyneth Jones’s excellent space opera, Spirit (2008, UK), also borrowed the plot from Dumas’s novel.

In A Fire Born of Exile, a naive scholar was tricked into expressing sympathy with the rebels during the Ten Thousand Flags Uprising and promptly executed by being thrown out of an airlock. But against all odds she survived. Ten years later, using the name Quỳnh, the Alchemist of Streams and Hills, she arrives at the Scattered Pearls Belt to exact her revenge. The official who sentenced her to death is now prefect of the Belt, and Quỳnh’s lover of the time, who did nothing to save her, is now a general.

Minh is the daughter of the prefect and completely under the thumb of her overbearing mother. She is being groomed to become a scholar and follow in her mother’s footsteps, but she doesn’t really want to do that. In the panic following an incident at the Tiger Games, bandits try to kidnap Minh but she is saved by Quỳnh. The two become tentative friends.

Hoà is a technologist, low caste, who bumps into Quỳnh at her dead sister’s shrine, and it turns out Quỳnh knew her. The two are immediately attracted to each other. Hoà has been contracted by Minh and her friends to fix the mindship Flowers at the Gates of the Lords (or rather, Hoà’s sister has, but she’s ill so Hoà, who has no skill in mindship repair, has to do it instead – with help from Quỳnh). Flowers at the Gates is actually Minh’s Great Aunt and the head of the family lineage, meaning she has control of all the family funds. But she was badly damaged during the Ten Thousand Flags Uprising.

Quỳnh easily unseats the general by revealing an ex-lover who was a serial killer known to, and ignored by, the authorities. The prefect is a much harder target. Quỳnh has evidence of punishments that were over and above what the law decreed, such as execution instead of exile, including her own execution, but that’s not enough. She tries to manipulate Minh into declaring unfilial piety, but Minh is too browbeaten. There’s Flowers at the Gates too, of course, who is head of the family, but will she be fixed in time?

Quỳnh underestimates the prefect’s power, but the prefect in turn underestimates Flowers’, er, power. It comes to a head when an Imperial Censor visits to make the prefect the head of the lineage.

Dantès had it much easier than Quỳnh, and not just because the prefect comes across more like Malificent than Danglars. There’s plenty more going on in A Fire Born of Exile, and it’s all built up from the relationships between the various characters. As in the other Xuya novels and stories, there’s lots of food and drink, and lots of detailed descriptions of heavily-decorated clothing – this is a lush and lushly-described universe. I liked the novel preceding this one, The Red Scholar’s Wake (2022, France), a great deal, but I liked this one more. I’m frankly surprised A Fire Born of Exile didn’t make any award shortlists in 2024. Recommended.


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Sideshow, Sheri S Tepper

This is the third novel in a loose trilogy, and I have to wonder if it was originally intended to be a trilogy, even though the three books were published one after the other. The first book, Grass (1989, USA), is considered a genre classic, and was No 48 in the original SF Masterworks series. Tepper, who came to her career late, appeared frequently on the Clarke, Tiptree and Campbell Awards during the late 1990s and early 2000s, and with good reason – she wrote a number of excellent sf novels. Her feminism grated with some genre commentators of the time (men, of course), although these days it mostly seems notable for being not very intersectional.

Grass was followed by Raising the Stones (1990, USA), and then Sideshow (1992, USA), and all three are linked by the Arbai, an ancient race of dragon-like aliens who created a galaxy-wide network of Doors, which provided instantaneous travel between worlds. In Sideshow, an alien visits Earth in the late twentieth century and persuades a pair of joined twins to destroy an Arbai Door moments after it arrives on Earth. While doing so, they accidentally fall into the Door.

The story then jumps ahead several thousand years to the world of Elsewhere, which is the only planet left in the galaxy inhabited by humans not “enslaved” by the Hobbs Land Gods (an alien fungus which has created a hive mind out of all the infected humans, as described in Raising the Stones). But the founding philosophy of Elsewhere is a perversion of the term “diversity”, where a thousand or so cultures are protected despite their depredations on their members, such as sacrificing babies, treating women as property, abusing children, and generally allowing the privileged to treat the poor as less than human… 

Elsewhere is administered from Tolerance, which uses Enforcers to, well, enforce Elsewhere’s distortion of diversity, by ensuring people do not move between cultures, the cultures do not change, or do not use technology of a higher level than is mandated for their culture. The Provost in Tolerance once a year consults a hidden computer holding the minds of the thousand academics from the galaxy’s greatest university (before the Hobbs Land Gods), but those uploaded minds, especially the four most powerful, are now quite insane and have been masquerading as “gods” and interfering in many cultures.

A team of three Enforcers, the joined twins from the twentieth century (they ended up in Elsewhere when they fell through the Door), and a mysterious old woman and her equally aged male companion (and an even more mysterious not wholly physical companion called Great Dragon), travel to the uninhabited centre of one of the continents, on the run from the mad uploaded “gods”, and eventually discover the secret of Elsewhere and the Arbai.

It makes for an odd novel. The cultures are perversions, but then Tepper has been deliberately perverse before – in Raising the Stones, for one – and it’s clear she’s arguing against the philosophy which governs Elsewhere. Even so, “diversity” was a bad choice of word to use. It makes something reprehensible of something that should be admirable. And it sometimes seems Tepper delighted in doing just that. There are also weird tonal shifts between the various sections – the opening chapters with the conjoined twins reads like some sort of US carnival novel (sadly all too common in twentieth-century US science fiction) flavoured with a little Ray Bradbury. But then Sideshow turns into a Jack Vance novel, although the wit is considerably more heavy-handed than Vance’s. The final section is pretty much explanations, but relies a little too much on close knowledge of the preceding novels, which, to be fair, I read in 2020 and 2018.

And yet, this is Tepper. You expect certain things, a certain angle of attack, so to speak,  and in Sideshow she delivers it. A bit too much in places, I think. The main characters are mostly sympathetic, but the rest are grotesque, often more like caricatures than characters, especially the villains. It’s a book that’s slow to start, picks up pace in the middle, before slowing down once again for the grand finale. Which is, to be honest, a little disappointing.

Tepper is always worth reading, and in Sideshow she’s as inventive as ever, as extreme as ever, and as readable as ever. I’m not convinced you need to read Grass or Raising the Stones first, but it would probably help.


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The White Dragon, Anne McCaffrey

The White Dragon (1978, Ireland) is the concluding volume to the original Dragonrider of Pern trilogy, but having now read the book it doesn’t much feel like the conclusion to anything. So I suppose it’s fortunate McCaffrey continued to churn out Pern novels for a few more decades…

The White Dragon follows directly on from Dragonquest (1971, Ireland). It focuses on Jaxom and Ruth, the teenage heir to Ruatha Hold and his undersized dragon, which is white if you hadn’t guessed. Ruth, the dragon, proves to be better at some things than the other dragons, despite being undersized and not sexually developed. He is faster and more manoeuvrable in the air, he has an excellent memory which is useful when travelling between (which is always italicised), and fire-lizards love him. Fire-lizards were introduced in the previous book and are sort of ferret-sized (I think) pocket dragons, about as smart as cats, and have been adopted by many on Pern as pets. They also seem to remember events that happened in the distant past.

The dragonriders, hold lords and master craftsmen have determined that humans first settled Pern on the southern continent, but they can find no record of why they fled north. The oldtimers – dragonriders from 400 years previously who helped save the day in the first book of the trilogy, Dragonflight (1968, Ireland) – were given land on the southern continent because they were causing problems with the present-day dragonriders and holds. But it looks like there’s lots more, and more desirable, land available on the continent.

And The White Dragon is more or less about that – exploring the southern continent, uncovering the ruins of the first human settlement on Pern, some political wrangling between an ambitious hold lord on the southern continent and the established holds on the northern continent, and Jaxom’s romance with the sister of said ambitious hold lord… There’s no plot per se, just a series of events which develop the characters and the background, and hint at the actual history of the planet.

Which doesn’t mean it’s not an entertaining read. Jaxom is an engaging character, as are the immediate supporting cast, more so at least than in the earlier two books, and Ruth can be amusing at times. Things happen… but there’s no real plot, no climax, no closure, no suggestion the story has concluded. Looking at the Pern books, it doesn’t seem so much a series as a collection of linked trilogies, and I’ve no idea which novel actually continues the story from The White Dragon.

I’ve enjoyed reading the trilogy, far more than I expected to, but I’ve no plans to read any more. If there is a book that follows on directly from The White Dragon, perhaps I might give it a go. But Wikipedia is no help, and I don’t intend to read umpteen books on the off-chance I find it… So, for now, I shall bail – but I will no longer malign the Dragonriders of Pern series as it’s actually not that bad.


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The Years of Rice and Salt, Kim Stanley Robinson

I’m a big fan of KSR’s fiction, because of the subjects he tackles and his treatment of them just as much as the stories he tells. He doesn’t just make use of common sf tropes, he interrogates them. A lot more sf authors should do that.

The Years of Rice and Salt (2002, USA) may be an alternate history, but it’s not a story set in a world which differs from ours due to some change in the past; it is in fact several stories – ten of them. Nor is it the book promised by its back-cover blurb, which posits a story set in a present-day world in which the Black Death in the fourteenth century killed 99% of the population of Europe instead of one-third. As a result, other civilisations flourished. Obviously, they flourished in real history – but in KSR’s novel they ended up dominating the world. The Years of Rice and Salt is not that either. It’s not a history of the world following on from the jonbar point. Which I suppose would be almost impossible – and huge! – to write. Like Laurent Binet’s Civilizations (2019, France), it is a series of vignettes which skip forward through the centuries, and around the world, from the Black Death to the present day. 

The linking conceit is that there is a group of people, connected eternally as a “jati”, who are repeatedly reincarnated. They die, spend time in the bardo, and are then reincarnated – as humans, or as animals. Allowing KSR to provide a focus point from which to hang to ten different stories taking place over the centuries in his alternate history. Sometimes the members of the jati remember their earlier lives, but usually they don’t.

The Black Death wipes out Europe. The Islamic Empire is never dislodged from the Iberian Peninsula. The Chinese continue to war on their western border, but also explore east and eventually settle the western coast of North America. A progressive empire develops in southern India. A league of Native American nations in central North America form a federation and keep their independence. There is a decades-long war which involves all three of the major world powers – the Indian empire, the Islamic empire, and the Chinese empire. Once the dust has settled, a new world order prevails. The various members of the jati are present, or pivotal, in some of the more important events in this 700 year history. Which also take place all over the world – Samarkand, Beijing, the Great Lakes, an Islamic city in western France, a Chinese San Francisco, and so on…

It’s fascinating stuff. The linking text is, to be honest, a not especially interesting mechanism to give the novel structure, and the ten “books” in The Years of Rice and Salt would be equally engrossing without them. KSR’s research is impressive – but not perfect: at one point, he states the Islamic punishment of cutting off the right hand of criminals is worsened because it forces criminals to use their left “unclean” hand when eating. That’s the whole point of the punishment. But the invented history KSR has created is astonishing. It feels all too real, which I guess is the point of the novel. Recommended.


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Brightness Falls from the Air, James Tiptree Jr

The second of only two novels published by Tiptree, and opinions on it are somewhat divided, chiefly I suspect because of one element of the book that has aged very badly – and was questionable to begin with.

The world of Dameim is home to an alien race who were illegally tortured and maimed in order to harvest a chemical they exude, which was then distilled into an extremely expensive drink called Star Tears. (The drink is mentioned in an earlier story by Tiptree, and the later collection The Starry Rift (1986, USA) takes place in the same universe.) Dameim is now overseen by three guardians, who live in a sort of safari lodge (which Tiptree admitted was inspired by her childhood safaris with her parents). They’re visited by a group of ten tourists, there to witness the wave-front of the Murdered Star pass over the planet. But two other men also disembark, apparently through some error, as does the supercargo who looked after the passengers while they were in cold sleep.

There are two plots – the last survivor of an alien race has tracked down the person who fired the shot which destroyed their sun, ie the Murdered Star; and three of the visitors are planning to make themselves some Star Tears – by torturing and maiming Dameii, of course. The latter plays out pretty much as you’d expect – the villains reveal themselves, and seize control. The first plot presents more of a surprise. It wasn’t the genocide everyone believed, and the alien’s “vengeance” is… complicated.

So far, so not especially a science-fictional story. There are real-world analogues to the two plots. However, the novel’s resolution depends in part on “time flurries” caused by the Murdered Star’s wave-front, and that’s pretty much sf. Tiptree also hints the cause of the genocide has, through the wave-front, altered everyone’s perceptions of Damiem and the Dameii.

Unfortunately, there’s one misstep the novel can’t recover from – among the tourists are four actors ranging in age from thirteen to sixteen, and they’re porn actors. Even in 1985, readers struggled to accept this, and it’s even less acceptable now than ever before, post-Yew Tree, post Trump and Epstein and the Andrew formerly known as prince… The actors are engaging characters, but the teen pornography leaves a bad taste.

I’ve seen Brightness Falls from the Air (1985, USA) described as Tiptree best-known but least-liked novel. She only wrote two and is much better known for her short fiction, so it seems a dumb way to refer to the book. And yet, except for the under-age sex, there’s a lot to like about Brightness Fall from the Air. The main plot is perhaps not intrinsically sf, although Tiptree makes the setting entirely genre, and the many plots and subplots she handles with admirable deftness. It’s perhaps the most colourful and yet bleak novel I’ve read.

The Starmont Reader’s Guide to James Tiptree, Jr (1986, USA) by Mark Siegel, one of only two critical works on Tiptree’s fiction I’ve managed to find, suggests a common theme to much of her fiction: she believed mortality, or the acceptance of mortality, was necessary to create art; it is the shadow of death, oblivion, hanging over us that drives creativity. Brightness Falls from the Air certainly illustrates this theory.

I’ve read a lot of Tiptree this year, and the more I read the more I like it. I’ve always regarded a handful of her stories as stone cold classics of the genre. It’s also true many of her stories have not aged particularly well. I’ll happily recommend her works to people, but with the caveat they should probably stick to her short fiction.