Rose

Let me begin simply by saying that I think there is a very specific group of people who like Tiptree and I am not rushing to count myself among them. Sure, it's goofy and at least a little bit fun the whole way through, but at the end of each effort I've ever made to like the work I turn around with a horrible gut feeling that even the progressives still think we are a species confined to the most derogatory aspects of biological sex. I am often left wondering if my reaction to Tiptree makes me a prude or a hypocrite, a bad-feminist or a good one, a child of shame or of desire. Perhaps this questioning is the magic of a Tiptree story and the thing that convinces people the work is worth falling in love with. For me, it is a brutal cage match that I do not feel the need to participate in.

Now let's get complicated: I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill's Side is a story without a plot. If we strip the work of its ramblings about sex, it is about a news anchor on a space station who meets an engineer that thinks aliens are too amazing to be good for people. The engineer gets high and espouses his world views, the story ends. To me, this is not particularly novel or intriguing. Plot lines like this are really only of value when the author wraps them up in complicated world building and character development. Unfortunately for me, Tiptree successfully circumvents providing these aspects of storytelling by thinking about weird sex stuff instead (and then willfully sharing those thoughts!).

I think it is interesting to explore what relationships could mean under the auspices of alien encounters. I'm sure there are a large number of people, Tiptree among them, who would spend many lifetimes (if given the chance) focusing solely on the sexual possibilities and opportunities of those relationships, but that is not my jam in most cases. Moreover, it seems this group can imagine aliens in great detail (proving they lack no imagination) and somehow still never think to peel away at the misogynistic human beliefs about sex, sexuality, and gender. In short, if people are having sex with aliens at least do me the courtesy of making it different and very very weird.

This story discusses sex ad nauseum. As a woman in my twenties, I assure you the topic is not my concern. I grew up on Wattpad and certainly cannot be scared away by tasteful (or otherwise) discussions, descriptions, or conceptions of copulation. My biggest criticism of Tiptree's work on this story is that it truly doesn't have a single innovative idea about sex upon which to stretch its flimsy plot.

Tiptree imagines a future where sex with aliens is better than sex with people and yet, shows no understanding of the broad range and complexity of feminine sexuality (a thing which was very much alive and well as a topic in speculative fiction, high fantasy, sci-fi and others long before this story was published).

My distaste for the portrayal of sexual desire in this story can be broken down into the portrayal of feminine consent and the depiction of peak feminine pleasure. The women who "desire" this engineer we meet never actually express their desire for him in a verifiably consensual way (i.e. The alien who dances for a crowd for money says she wants it "here and here and here and now" but only ever with her body while performing a job). Moreover, the most pleasurable sex a woman can supposedly have is with two male aliens made of stone who leave her bruised. The engineer’s wife is never introduced, but is described as being tired, injured, and limping yet Tiptree imagines a world in which this sex is so good a woman has no more use for a human man and may drive herself off a bridge if she can't be treated to a rough bout of sex by the aliens. In short, I don't love what Tiptree imagines the height of female pleasure to look like or how she imagines my gender communicates our arousal, desire and consent.

In second place, I don't like that the sex she conceives of between wildly different species that evolved on different planets is so strictly formed upon gender lines. It is true that our engineer finds he was happy enough to pine after a male alien (though notably never touch, interact with, or even know that the alien is male during his pursuits), but this interaction is also presented, not as a freeing belief about sexuality in an expanded and very weird universe, but as further evidence that we like the aliens too much for it to be healthy. All other discussions of sex are between males and females. The wildest pairings include two male aliens and one female human, which is still fairly tame and still assumes that aliens have genders the way we do and strict socio-sexual boundaries the way Earth's western societies have conceived of them. There is no real discussion of different genders, sexualities, or even variant sexes. Tiptree imagines the height of weird as being essentially akin to bestiality except it's also really amazing and all humans love it so much as to be dangerous. I suppose, this books down to the idea that if an author wants to claim sex is so enjoyable it could ruin society, I'd love to see her make the sex discussion at least a little bit more interesting, varied, and actually weird.

In total, my position on Tiptree remains unchanged by this story and can thusly be summed up as such: if you are going to write horny sci-fi it either needs to have a cool plot and mediocre sex or it needs to have very good sex that genuinely explores human sexuality, gender, and desire in a way that is interesting and worth talking about. Since Tiptree has accomplished neither a cool plot nor the expression of interesting thoughts on sex, I end up finding myself disappointed and underwhelmed each time I have visited her work. Does that make me a bad feminist? I don't think I care to know.

Brian

As a sort of preamble to my review of “And I Awoke…” I wanna say that this is not one of my favorite Tiptree stories. It’s one of her most famous and it’s easy to see why, it’s short and is kind of a microcosm for Tiptree’s fears, namely her fear of humanity’s biological preoccupation with sex and how it might factor into humanity’s downfall. But it also barely counts as a “story” in the traditional sense.

This was Tiptree’s second appearance in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, actually only one month after her first. Despite debuting in 1967 it took her nearly five years to appear in F&SF, even though the two seemed made for each other. But Ed Ferman, the editor at the time, had cold feet about Tiptree at first; he initially rejected her story “Painwise” before changing his mind months later, and that would be her first F&SF appearance. By this point she had appeared in every other magazine worth mentioning, including, of all things, Analog.

The story is fine but it doesn't show you what really made Tiptree... challenging. It's kind of a throwback in terms of narrative technique since it's a frame tale: the reporter is the narrator but not the protagonist, that would be the man he's interviewing, who in turn narrates his story. If it feels like nothing happens that's because we're only told about things happening. It's really just two people talking. This was pretty common with short fiction written up to the time of Tiptree's childhood, but would have been sort of outmoded by the time she wrote this story. But I get why she did it, because otherwise how would you communicate these ideas in such a small space.

I forget who said it, maybe it was Arthur C. Clarke, but they said that if we were to encounter aliens, which would be incredibly unlikely (but possible), they would appear to us either as angels or devils. The latter option would've been well-worn in SF writing, even in the early '70s, either the aliens themselves being nefarious or the human race treating aliens the same way we treat many of our own kind: with extreme prejudice. Tiptree posits here, however, that the extreme opposite could be just as bad for humanity. It's not all sexual, but a lot of it is. Tiptree was no puritan, she married multiple times and admitted to being bisexual at a time when that was pretty rare; but her understanding of sexuality is extremely pessimistic, maybe a little too much from a modern perspective. And this story is just the very tip of the iceberg. Just a little taste of it. Tiptree would go way farther, in stories like "The Screwfly Solution" and "Love Is the Plan the Plan Is Death," in which both human and alien life respectively are challenged by the juxtaposition of sex and death—not just juxtaposition but an overlapping of the two. In the case of "And I Awoke..." humanity's need for pleasure might possibly contribute to its extinction.

Now, the conclusion here is ridiculous. I don't think such a scenario can happen. That's not really the point. A lot of "What if?" scenarios in Sf are impossible. I do think Tiptree's view on human psychology is flawed, but then she was way more experienced in psychology than I ever will be. What do I know. I think my problem with "And I Awoke..." is that it's better to think about than to read, although I have to admit that ending (wherein the reporter seems to have not learned anything from the man's warning) is haunting. Again, it's the tip of the iceberg in terms of Tiptree's pessimism. She's capable of being way more unforgiving than this.

Kris:

Following on from what Brian was saying this is very much Tiptree in a nutshell. An almost plotless mood piece musing about the nature of gender. What she is doing is often uncomfortable but you have to be willing to sit in the disturbing place she puts you and muse on what she has to say.

As such I often find her work fascinating, but then have to mentally recover afterwards. This is doing similar things but its length doesn't make it the best example as it doesn't allow for more in depth exploration.