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A review by oleksandr
Up the Walls of the World by James Tiptree Jr.
4.0
This is a debut SF novel by [a:James Tiptree Jr.|9860453|James Tiptree Jr.|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1425083616p2/9860453.jpg]. I read is as a part of monthly reading for April 2020 at Hugo & Nebula Awards: Best Novels group. The novel received enough nominations to appear on the final ballot of Hugo award in 1979, but the nomination was withdrawn by the author.
It is a galaxy-spanning marvelous work of the 70s New Wave SF, which attempted to move the genre fiction from ghetto to mainstream. In its grandiosity it comes close to by .
The story is a bit hard to get into: there are three plot-lines, two of which are by alien minds, so tjhey are intentionally full of content that cannot be easily digested. Don’t be discourages and barge on, you’ll be rewarded!
The lines are (in order of appearance):
A giant entity going through the deep space, later called by others the Destroyer, on its millenia-long mission
Tivonel, a manta ray-like female flyer on the gas giant planet of Tyree, a semi-nomadic civilization with gender roles reversed compared with what is common on Earth and with psi-like powers. These aliens are threatened by the arrival of the Destroyer, who they feel extinguished a lot of life in the galaxy
Doctor Daniel Dann, a male 1970s drug-addict with M.D., who works at a telepathy lab run by the US Navy. He is skeptical about all parapsychological mumbo-jumbo but this is just a place for him to hide in plain sight. However, both his clients and he himself start to experience strange things
A very nice book with great ideas and twists.
It is a galaxy-spanning marvelous work of the 70s New Wave SF, which attempted to move the genre fiction from ghetto to mainstream. In its grandiosity it comes close to by .
The story is a bit hard to get into: there are three plot-lines, two of which are by alien minds, so tjhey are intentionally full of content that cannot be easily digested. Don’t be discourages and barge on, you’ll be rewarded!
The lines are (in order of appearance):
A giant entity going through the deep space, later called by others the Destroyer, on its millenia-long mission
Tivonel, a manta ray-like female flyer on the gas giant planet of Tyree, a semi-nomadic civilization with gender roles reversed compared with what is common on Earth and with psi-like powers. These aliens are threatened by the arrival of the Destroyer, who they feel extinguished a lot of life in the galaxy
Doctor Daniel Dann, a male 1970s drug-addict with M.D., who works at a telepathy lab run by the US Navy. He is skeptical about all parapsychological mumbo-jumbo but this is just a place for him to hide in plain sight. However, both his clients and he himself start to experience strange things
A very nice book with great ideas and twists.