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“Strange Wine” is a very short story, but it’s a great example of Ellison’s measured style. Originally published in 1976 in Amazing Stories, it’s about a guy with a really shitty life who believes that he’s an alien trapped in a human body. Also, he believes his being on Earth has to do with something he did in his alien past that resulted in his embodied imprisonment. The story features a relativist narrative with a twist at the end tied in a bow. It reflects the mid-1970s American experience on several levels involving incidental characters and intentionally mentioned comments by the narrator. It’s a quick read, and would probably be suitable as a subversive bedtime story. You can find the story in The Essential Ellison and The Norton Book of Science Fiction.

“The Last Flight of Doctor Ain,” James Tiptree, Jr.’s 1969 Nebula nominated short story, reads like an FBI or CIA operative report (reflecting her earlier work in intelligence) establishing the movements of a “target.” However, the unidentified narrator has a limited omniscience after the fact (i.e., while everyone is dying and therefore, would anyone really care how it happened?). It’s a powerful story that is prescient for it’s “biotic” or biological weapons technology. Not to say that it was anything new, but the first thing that came to mind when I first read the story was how it serves as a model for the conspiracy theories surrounding HIV in the 1980s–that it was a biologically engineered virus to eradicate a group of people (unlike Dr. Ain’s virus that kills any warmblooded animal). Also, her linking it with leukemia is interesting:

“The big security break came right at the end, when he suddenly began to describe the methods he had used to mutate and redesign a leukemia virus” (66).

Again, some of the early theories about HIV was that it was a form of leukemia, because it subverted the body’s immunoresponse system. Additionally, Dr. Ain uses his own body as a carrier and he infects wild bird, which are known carriers of the “A” variety of influenza.
This is a must read story, particularly if you’re interested in biological warfare and viral plagues. The use of sex and gender in the story is also striking, because of the Dr. Ain’s overt lack of any public displays of sexuality (e.g., attraction, PDA, etc.). And, there is his supposed lover that no one really knows about, but that he “possesses” her and “revels” in her. And finally, it is a Cold War narrative about the futility of political/ideological confrontations of that era’s magnitude, which is borne out by the fact that the medical conference is in Moscow and Dr. Ain, as a western bioweapons researcher challenges both systems by releasing a virulent contagion that ignores ideology.

There is an online copy of “The Last Flight of Doctor Ain” located in a PDF document of that story along with Raccoona Sheldon’s (another pseudonym of Alice B. Sheldon) “The Screwfly Solution” here.

Last night’s bedtime story was James Tiptree, Jr.’s Nebula-winning “Love is the Plan, the Plan is Death.” It was first published in 1973, but I read it in Tiptree’s collection, Warm Worlds and Otherwise, 1975. The story is an elucidation of an evolutionarily derived plan for propagation of an alien species and the way that one of the members, Moggadeet attempts to rationalize his subversion of the plan with “his” lover, Lilliloo. Moggadeet, who I soon thought of as a male character also identifies himself as mother to Lilliloo. As part of this identification, is the power relationship of Moggadeet subduing Lilliloo by force and binding her while he cares for “her.” However, the plan inverts the power relationship and Moggadeet is devoured by the true mother–Lilliloo. The story is replete with Freudian sexualized imagery made concrete by sadomasochistic behavior combined with fetishistic impulses. This is a bizarre story on the first read, but it’s underlying gendered power struggle and its subversion through a natural plan is well executed indeed!

Another interesting thing about Warm Worlds and Otherwise is that it contains an introduction by Robert Silverberg. In the introduction, Silverberg writes:

It has been suggested that Tiptree is female, a theory that I find absurd, for there is to me something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree’s writing. I don’t think the novels of Jane Austen could have been written by a man nor the stories of Ernest Hemingway by a woman, and in the same way I believe the author of the James Tiptree stories is male (xii).

Also, it’s interesting how close Silverberg got to the truth, if only he had been willing to admit it to himself. He writes:

All of these are mere hypotheses, based largely on the evidence of the Phantasmicom articles, Tiptree’s own occasional letters, and the stories themselves, which I think reflect much of the authentic Tiptree in characters like Dr. Ain, slinking from airport to airport, or Ruth Parsons of that remarkable story “The Women Men Don’t See,” determinedly tight-lipped about every aspect of her life in government service (xv).

For Silverberg, Sheldon was literally the woman men don’t see. However, it sounds very much like that was the way she wanted it as is reflected in some of her correspondence of the time.

Once the secret was out that Tiptree was actually a woman, I don’t think Silverberg retracted what he had said. As Le Guin has pointed out in the introduction to another Tiptree collection, everyone was fooled.

I’ve been meaning to read the James Tiptree, Jr./Alice B. Sheldon biography by Julie Phillips: James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon. I haven’t seen it in any UK bookshops yet, so I’ll probably have to order it from Amazon.