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Worlds Without End Blog

WoGF Review: Up the Walls of the World by James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice B. Sheldon) Posted at 8:07 AM by M. Fenn

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WWEnd Women of Genre Fiction Reading ChallengeM. Fenn (mfennvt) has been reading speculative fiction for so long, she can’t remember what her first taste was. It could have been The Hobbit; it may have been A Wrinkle in Time. There’s been a lot more since. Recently, she’s fulfilled a lifelong dream of getting her own speculative fiction published. She blogs about what she reads and writes at M. Fenn – skinnier than it is wide.


Up the Walls of the WorldI came to Up the Walls of the World knowing very little of James Tiptree, Jr. I knew that the author’s real name was Alice Bradley Sheldon and that her publisher kept her identity secret until 1977 (the year before Up the Walls of the World was released). The science fiction community argued over who Tiptree was (some sort of government spy perhaps) and what gender (both Robert Silverberg and Harlan Ellison assumed male).

But that’s all I knew. I’d never read her stuff, even though several of her books have been on our bookshelves for ages. So, it was with a lot of curiosity and excitement that I started reading what was Tiptree’s first novel for my next WOGF challenge book. It held up to that approach, I’m happy to say.

Up the Walls of the World is a complicated tale, starting in the brain of the Destroyer, an entity larger than a solar system moving through space in existential pain. It considers itself evil and a betrayer of its kind.

Tiptree introduces us next to an entity that can pick up on that evil. She is a Tyrenni, part of a race of creatures resembling manta rays who ride the winds of a large gas planet’s atmosphere and communicate telepathically and through the changing colors of their bodies. Something is destroying the Tyrenni’s planet.

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