A collection of wild rides, often having quirky visions of alien creatures as the central plot idea. If I hadn’t known that James Tiptree actually was a retired lady writing SF in the late 60’s and early 70’s, I would have guessed that a SF version of Hunter S. Thompson was writing this fueled by drugs. Creativity abounds more than once bordering on the surreal and absurd.
If I were to give an average rating, it would probably be two stars as I wasn’t taken by the majority of the stories. The highlight of the collection is the novella ‚The Girl Who Was Plugged In‘. A fun social commentary on the overflowing importance of advertising and at the same time an early cyberpunk story before cyberpunk existed. It even could be seen as a presage of influencers omnipresent nowadays.
I also liked ‚Fault‘ due to its original premise. Alien justice in a novel form, punishing a human perpetrator by removing his perception from the fabric of time. ‚The Milk of Paradise‘ and ‚The Last Flight of Doctor Ain‘ also have nice ideas although the plots aren’t that great.
The rest of the stories were forgettable. I’m especially astonished how the repellent ‚Love is the Plan the Plan is Death‘ was awarded with the Nebula award in 1973. Get this collection for ‚The Girl Who Was Plugged In‘ and skip the rest.
One more note: the German translation I read isn’t good and has aged terribly, using a lot of out-of-date pseudo-hip vocabulary not used anymore since the 80’s.