Meet Me at Infinity by James Tiptree Jr

Author:James Tiptree Jr. [Tiptree, James Jr.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SF, Short Stories
Publisher: Tor Books
Published: 2015-04-18T16:00:00+00:00

Smith: You publish a wide variety of fiction, from hardcore SF in Analog to “new wave” stories in Venture and Amazing to light fantasy in Worlds of Fantasy. Do you have any particular preference among these? Is there any we can expect to see more of in the future than of the others?

Tiptree: At the moment I’m in and around the Chicago area, partly attending to family matters in the shape of an aged and ornery mother—more damn people seem to have catastrophically aging relatives in Chicago than you’d believe. This is a theme in my life that seems to be going on and on, as Virginia Kidd that warm heart can tell you, I’ve been sobbing on her shoulder about this for years. Tried putting it in a story that Galaxy has been sitting on, called “Mother in the Sky with Diamonds,” in which this insurance adjuster in the Asteroid Belt has his aged mother—who was once a space explorer—parked illegally and is trying to keep her supplied and still meet the demands of his cruddy boss. And so one day it all blows up together and he vomits and rushes straight out—or words to that effect. I like the tale, but the effort to wrest the purely personal misery into objectively readable form has been difficult. Campbell said it was a compressed novel, and he didn’t want a novel. Damon Knight said it was repulsive. (It is.) Even if Jakobsson likes it I may want to rewrite it a bit. I wish I’d sent it to White. Ted is extraordinarily sensitive to my wavelength and I feel he would have taken the trouble to judge if it should be reworked. (Editors… Fred Pohl befriended me in the most fantastic manner when my ears were still drying. Real encouragement; part of it I found out by accident. Quite a guy.)

From this you can see that Learning How to Write is the big thing with me. I don’t have any illusions of genius. Nobody writes for me, what’s printed is what I wrote (aside from a little cleaning-up of words unsuitable for, I guess, Mom), but I’m very eager for critical reaction, and very willing to put it back in the oven. For example, Harry H. has twice pushed stories back at me for fix-ups; one was the original, “And I Have Come Across This Place by Lost Ways,” which He bought for Nova 2. (Notice the Freudian slip in capitalizing “He” back there, Harry really is one of my gods.) It had too much social chitchat at first and the doom wasn’t spelled out clear enough at the end. (I tend to make all my points indirectly, you know, somebody just mutters that the world ended yesterday, etc.) Sure enough, he was right; I spent a week of nights revising. Again, that wolf story from Venture, “The Snows Are Melted, the Snows Are Gone.” When he bought it for the Best anthology he objected to the wolfs showing no sign of strain, being a mutant and all.

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