"James Tiptree Jr. - Houston, Houston Do You Read" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tiptree James Jr)

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JAMES TIPTREE, JR.

Houston, Houston,
Do You Read?

James Tiptree, Jr., aside from the award-winning story that follows this
introduction, has been justly lauded as one of the excellent writers to appear
in science fiction in recent years. Precise biographical data, however, have
been difficult to come by. However, with the author's assistance, the
following facts have at last been collected and are hereby presented to the
reader.

James Tiptree, Jr., was born in September 1967, in the import section of the
McLean Giant Food Store. His birth occurred in front of a display of Tiptree's
English Marmalade, which appeared to him to be a nice inconspicuous name that
editors would not recall having rejected. The subsequent acceptance of his
next thirty or forty stories shocked and nonplussed him, but gave him the
opportunity to form many genuine epistolary friendships, since he had the bad
habit of writing fan letters to writers he admired. In the course of a
correspondence with Jeffrey D. Smith, a fanzine editor in Baltimore, he gave a
biographical interview, in which he mentioned having been brought up by a pair
of explorer-adventurers who alternated life in the Congo and the Midwest. He
also reported that he had enlisted in the Army Air Force in World War II,
becoming a photo intelligence officer, and subsequent to what was then hoped
to be the outbreak of World Peace, he went in for a little business, a little
government work, and finally settled upon a doctorate and a short research and
teaching career in one of the "soft" sciences. (A "soft" science is one where
you bounce back when you trip.) He refrained from mentioning to his friends
that he had started life as a serious painter, because a companion
personality, Racoona Sheldon, then being slowly born, seemed to need that as a
biographical touch. Tiptree's writing career took a parabolic form, the
downside of the curve being accounted for by a depression which caused his
stories to grow blacker and more few. The coup de grace was given him in
October 1977, when it was revealed that he did not exist. He feels that it
was, though brief, a wondrous existence. He is survived by a short story or
two in press and a novel to be published by Berkley as well as one Hugo, for
THE GIRL WHO WAS PLUGGED IN, and two Nebula Awards for LOVE IS THE PLAN, THE
PLAN IS DEATH, in 1973, and for HOUSTON, HOUSTON, DO YOU READ?, in 1976.

Lorimer gazes around the big crowded cabin, trying to listen to the voices,
trying also to ignore the twitch,, in his insides that means he is about to
remember

something bad. No help; he lives it again, that long- t
ago moment. Himself running blindly-or was he
pushed?-into the strange toilet at Evanston Junior