Ten Thousand Light-Years from Home

james tiptree jr.

Collection of short SF stories. For instance:

AND I AWOKE AND FOUND ME HERE ON THE COLD HILL'S SIDE
Man seeks to get into bed with anything new and different, or die trying. But when the new and different was not human...would he die trying?

THE MAN WHO WALKED HOME - The first-time astronaut, stuck in the far future, slid ever so slowly toward a present whose past was his future and whose future was his past...

I'M TOO BIG BUT I LOVE TO PLAY - If genuine aliens are to communicate meaningfully, one must make himself into an analogue of the other. But how can you tell the difference between what is human - and what is merely identical?

Contents:
And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill's Side (1972)
The Snows Are Melted, the Snows Are Gone (1969)
The Peacefulness of Vivyan (1971)
Mamma Come Home (1968)
Help (1968)
Painwise (1972)
Faithful to Thee, Terra, in Our Fashion (1969)
The Man Doors Said Hello To (1970)
The Man Who Walked Home (1972)
Forever to a Hudson Bay Blanket (1972)
I'll Be Waiting for You When the Swimming Pool Is Empty (1971)
I'm Too Big but I Love to Play (1970)
Birth of a Salesman (1968)
Mother in the Sky with Diamonds (1971)
Beam Us Home (1969)

Genres science fictionshort storiesfictionspeculative fictionscience fiction fantasycollectionsanthologiesaliensclassicsamerican

374 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published March 1,1972

Literary awards

hugo award, nebula award, locus award,

This edition

Format: 374 pages, Mass Market Paperback
Published: January 1, 1973 by Ace Books
ISBN: 9780441801817
ASIN: 0441801811
Language: English

About the author

james tiptree jr.

"James Tiptree Jr." was born Alice Bradley in Chicago in 1915. Her mother was the writer Mary Hastings Bradley; her father, Herbert, was a lawyer and explorer. Throughout her childhood she traveled with her parents, mostly to Africa, but also to India and Southeast Asia. Her early work was as an artist and art critic. During World War II she enlisted in the Army and became the first American female photointelligence officer. In Germany after the war, she met and married her commanding officer, Huntington D. Sheldon. In the early 1950s, both Sheldons joined the then-new CIA; he made it his career, but she resigned in 1955, went back to college, and earned a Ph.D. in experimental psychology.

At about this same time, Alli Sheldon started writing science fiction. She wrote four stories and sent them off to four different science fiction magazines. She did not want to publish under her real name, because of her CIA and academic ties, and she intended to use a new pseudonym for each group of stories until some sold. They started selling immediately, and only the first pseudonym—"Tiptree" from a jar of jelly, "James" because she felt editors would be more receptive to a male writer, and "Jr." for fun—was needed. (A second pseudonym, "Raccoona Sheldon," came along later, so she could have a female persona.)

Tiptree quickly became one of the most respected writers in the field, winning the Hugo Award for The Girl Who was Plugged In and Houston, Houston, Do You Read?, and the Nebula Award for "Love is the Plan, the Plan is Death" and Houston, Houston. Raccoona won the Nebula for "The Screwfly Solution," and Tiptree won the World Fantasy Award for the collection Tales from the Quintana Roo.

The Tiptree fiction reflects Alli Sheldon's interests and concerns throughout her life: the alien among us (a role she portrayed in her childhood travels), the health of the planet, the quality of perception, the role of women, love, death, and humanity's place in a vast, cold universe. The Otherwise Award (formerly the Tiptree Award) has celebrated science fiction that "expands and explores gender roles" since 1991.

Alice Sheldon died in 1987 by her own hand. Writing in her first book about the suicide of Hart Crane, she said succinctly: "Poets extrapolate."

Julie Phillips wrote her biography, James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon