Up The Walls Of The World by James Tiptree Jr. (epub)

James Tiptree Jr. - Up The Walls Of The World (epub)


Up the Walls of the World is a 1978 sf novel by the American Alice Sheldon who wrote under the pen name of James Tiptree, Jr. It was the 1st novel she published having until then worked & built a reputation only in the field of short stories.
The book explores the possibility that telepathy & other psychic phenomena are real. It sympathetically describes an Earth invasion attempt by beings with telepathic abilities from the planet Tyree. It considers the subject of sentience in different lifeforms inhabiting widely different environments, in computers & in a vast sentient inhabitant of deep space formed of a network of widely spaced nodes. It's her skill to be able to write convicingly of the experience of such beings.
The story takes place in 3 settings which unfold together:
-On Earth, at a US Navy telepathy lab.
-On the planet Tyree, a life-rich gas giant inhabited by intelligent beings resembling manta rays or cuttlefish which ride the air currents of its vast atmosphere.
-In deep space, The Destroyer, an intelligent entity larger than a solar system but only slightly denser than the vacuum of space & composed of countless linked nodes.






"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 travelled 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. An award in Tiptree's name has celebrated science fiction that "expands and explores gender roles" for ten years now.

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."