Meet Me at Infinity

by James Tiptree Jr.

  I published fanzines from 1969 to 1978. There were two main types of fanzines in the seventies, the large “genzines” (general interest fanzines, with a variety of contents; mine were considered “sercon,” SF-oriented serious and constructive, as opposed to the lighter tone many faneds adopted) and the small “personalzines” (which were mostly editor-written, sometimes by fans who proudly stated that they had stopped reading SF when they discovered fandom). To say that every fanzine fell into one of these two categories would not even resemble the truth, because we faneds had no one to answer to but ourselves, and any issue could be any size and contain any material that suited our fancy at any time. It was delightfully chaotic, and it made every day’s mail an adventure.

  My fanzines went under three names: Phantasmicom (#1/Summer 1969-#11/May 1974), Kyben (#1/December 1971 [included as pages 27-46 of Phantasmicom 8]-#12/September 1975), and Khatru (#1/February 1975-#7/February 1978). Phantasmicom and Khatru were my genzines, Kyben my personalzine.

  Phantasmicom was actually started by Donald G. Keller, who saw some fanzines I had received and decided on the spot that he wanted to do one himself. We had to pretty much write the whole sixty-eight-page first issue ourselves (this was true for most of the early numbers), but we were reading a lot of SF and fantasy and loved having the forum to talk about it. I was eighteen and Don seventeen when we started, and we became noticed for the “youthful enthusiasm” of our writing and of our ambitious publishing schedule. For our third issue, P. S. Price (an actual contributor!) wrote up a meeting he had had with R. A. Lafferty into a fairly substantial piece on Lafferty’s life and work. I approached Virginia Kidd, who was Lafferty’s agent, for help with a bibliography and ended up with an unpublished short story as well. Now we were feeling like real editors, and were commended for devoting so much space to a writer who deserved more attention than he had so far been receiving. Other professional writers noticed what we were doing, and Harlan Ellison and Dean R. Koontz in particular encouraged us to continue to spotlight less-well-known writers, and Piers Anthony emphasized the importance of the interview part of the feature.

  Well, we (especially me) weren’t up to the formal sit-down-with-a-writer-and-a-microphone kind of interview, but if there were a way to do it through the mail, that might be okay. We talked about several writers we might approach, and I decided that I would try for James Tiptree, Jr. I wasn’t particularly a Tip-tree fan, but I had read several of his stories and had liked some of them. What I was most interested in was the fact that in 1970, when there was a virtual war declared between the Old Wave and the New Wave in science fiction, Tiptree was being claimed by both camps. There had to be a story in that.

  My first attempt to reach Tiptree was through one of his editors, and included the line, “Piers suggested we try to find the writer first, and drag out of him whatever information he is willing to disclose.” That letter was forwarded to Tiptree, and not surprisingly went unanswered. A little later, though, I scored Tip-tree’s address and tried again: “What I am proposing is an exchange of letters—questions and answers—as few or as many as you would agree to—which would be combined into an interview-type article.” I of course did not know that Tiptree could not be interviewed in person or by phone, but in my shyness I had stumbled onto the only way he could be. (For her part Alii saw that if she did this, then anyone else asking for information about Tiptree could just be forwarded a copy of his one interview.)

  We spent two months sending the interview back and forth, another couple months arranging the bibliography and short story to accompany it, and just kept writing to each other after that. I have no idea how it happened, but a deep friendship developed that still sustains me, all these years after her death. (Putting this book together, rereading all the letters, immersing myself in our relationship again, has been a wonderful experience.)

  I asked Tip to write articles for my fanzines, and I got a lot of them. Sometimes there were pieces on specific topics, sometimes more general remarks, mostly on her travels. (These went into a column in Kyben, the personalzine, under the title “The 20-Mile Zone,” which she named after a Dory Previn song.) Some of the travel pieces were written as letters to me, but designed to be published. Some letters contained both public and private pages, and often the two bled over. In the informal world of fanzines this didn’t matter at all, but it makes some of the “essays” look odd in this book, with their asides to me and their “best to Ann”s. In the public parts of the letters, Alii said, she was “speaking to the SF world embedded in you,” that she couldn’t write to a faceless audience but could to one person.

  We start, after a brief note from a private letter, with the postal interview I conducted with Tiptree from December 3, 1970, through January 29, 1971, which was published in Phantasmicom 6, June 1971.

  Having done all this idiotic stuff about ME has put me in a very strange mood. (Have you ever tried talking about yourself for 6 hours straight—into a mike held by a pleasant stranger?) Jeff, I am so sick of ME-E-E—it’s indescribable. I have all the normal ego, and often use my life for (hopefully) funny stories—hut, I don’t know, is it possible not to believe in one’s biography?… And also I’m nostalgic for the old simple days—somehow my “Interview” with you—remember, how it all started? Anyway, I think that was “realer” (for god’s sake, won’t I ever learn to say “more real?”)—anyway, more true & spontaneous and unselfconscious than all this Alice B. Sheldon malarky… Maybe it has something to do with women changing their names so much—and also in my work I once had to use extra names; I’ve lived under, let’s see… at least six, for longer or shorter. Try changing your name someday, Jeff, just for the experience. Oddly refreshing—but too much is disorienting… .

  Anyway, I just wanted to tell you that none of this current stuff can blot out our old good first Interview of all.

  10 Sep 82

  If You Can’t Laugh at It, What Good Is It?

  Smith: Your friends and associates are unaware that you are a science fiction writer, so you don’t want SF people finding out who your friends and associates are. But how about telling us what you are willing to let us know about you?

  Tiptree: Well, I was born in the Chicago area a long time back, trailed around places like colonial India and Africa as a kid (and by the way, I knew in my bones that they weren’t going to stay “colonial” any more than I was going to stay a kid, but nobody ever asked me). I’m one of those for whom the birth and horrendous growth of Nazism was the central generation event. From it I learned most of what I know about politics, about Human life, about good and evil, courage, free will, fear, responsibility, and What To Say Goodbye To… And, say it again, about Evil. And Guilt. If one of the important things to know about a person is the face in his nightmares, for me that face looks much like my own.

  In some ways it is easier to live with a Devil who is clearly different, black or white or yellow, old, young, female or male, or such. Them, the baddies; Me (wholly a different animal), the good guy. Easier; but maybe not so instructive.

  At any event, by the time I had finished the decade’s worth of instruction in How Things Are provided by this event—you know, joining organizations, getting in the Army, milling around in the early forms of American left-wing sentiment, worrying about Is It Going to Happen Here (an occupation I haven’t given up), getting out of the Army, doing a little stint in government, trying a dab of business, etc. etc.—I realized that my whole life, my skills and career, such as they were, my friends, everything had been shaped by this event, and rather derailed from what I’d intended to be in a vague way. So ensued a period of more milling (I’m a slow type) including some dabblings in academe. And now the story grows even vaguer for the time being, Jeff, since I’m against lying on principle. (Life’s too short, it takes all one’s time to get a finger on some truth.)

  But y’know, the other day It came to me, all I write is one story. There’s this backward little type, and he’s doing some gray litt
le task and believing like they tell him, and one day he starts to vomit and rushes straight up a mountain, usually to his doom. Human or alien, mountain or rocket, it’s all the same. Next year I’m trying a real departure: There’s this girl, see, and she rushes down a salt mine. But they always vomit. The amount of sheer puke in my stories is staggering… What more do you need to know?

  Does a writer ever stop telling you who he is?

  Smith: But it’s dangerous to try and guess at an author’s feelings from just his writings. He may use five thousand words to see how a new lifestyle feels, decide he doesn’t like said lifestyle, but still have a publishable short story with his name on it. Or: Try an experiment. Here is an unwritten short story of mine. (Part of it is written and is excruciatingly bad, I’m afraid.) Can you interpret my feelings about marriage from the outline of the story “The Marriage”?

  For a couple hundred years there has been no marriage. Everyone sleeps around with whomever he/she pleases. Either coincidently or not so coincidently, the society is decadent, stagnant. The people have not yet reached the level of Wells’s Eloi, but they’re on the way. There has been no progress in any art or science. Everyone sits around doing a lot of nothing. Now this couple decides to get married. They have a big ceremony, and everyone wonders if marriage will be the New Thing. They don’t wonder if marriage will be the savior of society, but the reader does. But after a year or so of monogamy the husband takes on a lover, and another olde praktise—divorce—is reinstituted.

  Well, you know how simpleminded plot summaries are. Assume that the whole story is there; do I feel marriage is good or evil? Is my writing (quote unquote) telling you who I am?

  Tiptree: First, I fling the query back at you. Whether you feel marriage is good or evil is not who you are. It is a superficial Nixon-debate type formalism of no psychic weight or penetration. No-no-no! If you think your scanning-process occupies itself with such flak, listen deeper to it.

  Listening: Who is this guy? Is he for real? Does he live in the same world I do? What scares him? What does he love? Is he threatening me? Can he endure the messiness of being Human or is he building some neat unreal escape scheme? I hear his verbal argument, pro or con, but what’re his reasons? What kinds of points is he making to support it?

  For samples, you could have a Jeff Smith who showed his marriage position entirely in terms of society’s good. Or a sad-case Jeff Smith appealing to some conventional mystique. Or a happy Jeff Smith playing around with some Trobriander analogy. Or a hard-nose Jeff Smith who would thump it out in terms of Ordnung or the patriarchal power structure or, godhelpus, economic efficiency. Or a psychological-cynical Jeff Smith who lays it on us in the name of alleged primate instincts. Or a psychological-weepy Jeff Smith wringing our hearts about children’s need for nuclear family role models. Or a hotnuts Jeff Smith breathing hard over unlimited-sex-access fantasies. Or a revengeful-brat Jeff Smith producing bloody gobbets of his parents’ marriage… had enough?

  So—when you hear this rather quiet account of a social state in which a pair of individuals follow their own bent, producing an “innovation,” which is followed by another “innovation,” you get an immediate impression of a curious, probably orderly mind testing a social generality by showing what real people might do… and the cycle form (history returning on itself) gives unmistakable evidence of a mild ironic trend. The author notices and enjoys history’s little ways of presenting the same old meatballs as Hash du Jour. The fact that he asks the question he does hints that he is not a black-white crusader. More subtly, the reference to self suggests that he is one who uses self as an experience laboratory, no sacred wall around the sealed black box of Me (such as you meet often in, say, Analog). The way the story goes, A leads to B which leads to etc., suggests a process-type thinker, interested in social causality (spends extra words on relation of marriage to “decadence”). Wells ref. suggests author reads around on the subject, probably still in the shallows (uses terms like “decadence”) but will go deeper (tone of thoughtful curiosity about that “coincidentally or not”)… and a gentle guy, forgive it.

  Now there’s my try at describing what comes over in a flash as I read the bare summary. Don’t tell me you don’t do it too.

  And that was all at the surface or content level (Do pay attention, children) without any digging into the effects of choice of words, cadences, that eel-bucket known as style.

  (Of course the fact that the author omitted a whole encyclopedia of stereotype words tells us something right off. For example, imagine a summary with the words “purity of bodily fluids” or “joy of life” or “so-called liberals” in it.)

  And it occurs without reference—correction, with almost no reference—to whether the story seems “good” or “bad.”

  In other words, what an author leaks at every sentence is not his formal argument alone but what he sees as real, how deeply he’s into life… and himself. What kind of companion he’d be to run out of gas with in the Mojave Desert, maybe. (And some fine writers you’d rather not, right?)

  The same holds in the case you cite where a guy publishes a temporary essay into some lifestyle. If he’s a fast-developing, changing person you could be put off for a while on a specific piece, but even then I bet his very mercurial-serious quality would give itself away. You’d hold off judgment. This is a useless argument without a concrete example.

  But it does bring up the other variable. No generalizations hold, not even this one—and I claimed above that your radar brings in this sort of stuff too. Well, I think that holds for you, Jeff Smith, and for most of you—whew!—sensitive, intuitive, creepy-quirky-feely learning-type minds out there… But:

  Readers differ. Some people’s radar is tuned down to basics like Can I beat this bugger or do I have to listen to him? (And don’t we all do this jest a leetle?) The type I mean is the fellow who takes unfamiliar words as a threat, an attempted intimidation. Whereas the learning-type reader takes them as lures or exciting displays. (Unless they are an obvious threat-pose or squid-cloud.)

  Now look, Jeff, you lured me into an embryo essay on the nonverbal level of verbal communication.

  Which has doubtless been done better by the experts, so let’s abort this mission and get on with it.

  Smith: Why don’t you want your friends to know about your “second career”? Don’t you think that perhaps someday someone will stumble across one of your stories? Will you then deny being the same James Tip-tree, Jr., or what?

  Tiptree: I can answer that easily: I haven’t a clue.

  Let me tell you how all this got started.

  Couple of years back under a long siege of work and people pressure, I set down four stories and sent ‘em off literally at random. Then I forgot the whole thing. I mean, I wasn’t rational; the pressure had been such that I was using speed (very mildly), and any sane person would have grabbed sleep instead. Obviously, one more activity was sheerly surreal. So some time later I was living, as often happens, out of cartons and suitcases, and this letter from Conde Nast (Who the hell was Conde Nast?) turns up in a carton. Being a compulsive, I opened it. Check. John W. Campbell.

  About three days later I came to in time to open one from Harry Harrison.

  Now, you understand, this overturned my reality-scene. I mean, we know how writers start. Years, five, ten years, they paper a room with rejection slips. It never occurred to me anyone would buy my stuff. Never. I figured I had the five years to get my head together. I had a list of the places I was going to rotate the things through. (Methodical, even when stoned, see above.)

  Three years later I still haven’t got it together. The thing has gone on and on, twenty-one as of now, and I still don’t believe it. I don’t deny I love it, but I deny being happy. It’s too weird. As I told David Gerrold, if these guys only knew it, I’d have paid them for their autographs. I mean, years, years and years, I’ve been the kind of silent bug-eyed Rikki-Tikki-Mongoose type fan who thinks those guys who wrote them walk around
six inches off the ground with private MT channels in their closets, step in and Flick!—Gal Central.

  Moreover, Jeff. When someone like Barry Malzberg, who can write rings around me (I unknowingly wrote a fan letter to “K. M. O’Donnell” through Malzberg when he was editing Amazing/Fantastic)—When such guys claim they have drawers full of unsold manuscripts it proves to me something is wrong. What’s the matter with me, they don’t reject mine? Can only be ‘cause I’m not really really original? See?

  You better believe it, people mention how they get rejected, I flinch… Of course I occasionally do get reject letters, and then I not only flinch, I roll up in the rug, bawling. Maybe it all goes to show that writers are unfillable hungry voids of ego, like black star gravity-warps. Or maybe it’s me, I dunno.

  At this point I note I’ve been ducking your question “Why?” Ah indeed, why? Somewhere Freud is said to have observed that every action is overdetermined, that is, that there is usually more than one sufficient cause, that acts occur at convergence points where many causes meet. (I wish I could locate this quote, I may be overinterpreting; it’s a very useful concept.)

  At any event, I could give you a set of plausible reasons, like the people I have to do with include many specimens of prehistoric man, to whom the news that I write ugh, science fiction would shatter any credibility that I have left. (Sometimes I think SF is the last really dirty word.)

  Or that I’m unwilling to tarnish my enjoyment of this long-established secret escape route by having to defend it to hostile ears. (Coward!)