Like Jasmine, Michael and Kai, I came away from reading Tiptree's fiction feeling depressed and terrified by her visions of the world. However, when reading Houston, Houston, Do You Read?, I found myself more afraid of the present and the past than I was of the future.

In his Introduction, Michael Swanwick comments that this short story is a twist on "a familiar thought-experiment," which went on to demonstrate the "wrongness" of a world without any men. With his comment that "Humanity, despite all final solutions, remains what it has always been" (xi), Swanwick seems to suggest that humanity has a natural inclination to repress and dismiss the "other," that whether man or woman is dominant, they will always consider the other sex as "irrelevant" (216).

However, as I read this story, I had to wonder whether the world Tiptree presented was a utopia or a dystopia, or something in between. Each man on the ship seems to have a different interpretation, as Bud thinks of a utopian world with himself as the only man, where all the women will "worship" his penis (209), and Dave, considering the women "lost children," decides that he also shall "rule over them" to bring them into God's dominion (212). Yet how do the women feel about their own world? Aggression is gone. Wars are gone. There are no struggles for power, and everyone seems connected and content. The only problem with this world, in fact, is that progress is not as fast as the time-travelling men would prefer (although they seem to dismiss the progress that has been made, including great leaps in bio-engineering and space travel, based only upon their biases that "women are not capable of running anything" (212).) Indeed, from our limited glance at the world, there don't seem to be any problems, except the ones created by bringing men forward in time to disrupt this peace.

I therefore think Tiptree's conclusion is even more complex and uncertain than Swanwick suggested. Both Bud and Dave eventually explode in fits of their own superiority, and attempt to dominate over the women, despite their status as outsiders and guests, because they feel themselves naturally superior. Without men, "nothing counts" (211), and so to make things count, they both attempt to commit acts of either sexual or physical violence against the women to bring them in line. Even Dr. Lorimer, the more sympathetic character, explodes in a fit of lost privelege, as he shouts, "I'm angry. I have a right. We gave you all this, we made it all" (215), assuming that his legacy of oppression was a gift. Furthermore, when he bursts out that men built "your dreams," he suggests that even the women's thoughts and goals could only have been created by men. Men "gave" all this to women, not because women were oppressed and forbidden from contributing, but because they would have (in his opinion) been unable to create it themselves, unable to conceive of anything without the other sex. Now the women are literally conceiving by themselves, and conceiving of advancement, of a new structure for society, the men find themselves unable to cope with the hint of irrelevancy that was felt by women for centuries. "They mustn't do that to Dave, treating him like an animal, for Christ's sake, a man - ", Lorimer says, suggesting that Dave deserves better treatment, not because he is a person, but because he is male. He makes no such protests while Bud is abusing Judy.

The short story therefore seems to present the bleak outlook that only one sex can exist without oppression developing. Tiptree cannot conceive of a world where men and women are equal, because men, it seems, will naturally attempt to dominate if found in world where women display any kind of power. If any man finds himself in this utopian world for women, he will have to be removed, or else he will bring back violence, pain and oppression. Similarly, however, women also cannot be trusted not to be oppressors if given a position of power. When Lady Blue confirms that there is no point "taking the risk of giving [men] equal rights," because "what could [they] possibly contribute?" (216), Tiptree presents a role reversal that suggests that humanity has a natural inclination to belittle and dismiss. One sex, no matter which, will always consider the other inferior. There is no "utopia" for one sex, without a dystopia, if not an utter lack of existance, for the other.

Evolution and Gender Equality in the Future

Although I really enjoyed reading Tiptree’s stories this week, I came away a little depressed at the dark themes which they addressed, most primarily the challenges women face living in a male-dominated society. In The Women Men Don’t See, despite being strong-willed and hardy enough to cope with life in the wilderness, Mrs. Parsons does not believe that there is any future for women in their society, and she prefers to leave with the aliens for an uncertain future, rather than stay and face an unchangeable, oppressive future. Similarly, the women in Houston, Houston Do You Read choose to kill the three male astronauts from the past, believing them too much of a threat to be controlled, rehabilitated, or successfully integrated into their way of life. Extrapolated from Tiptree’s personal views on gender equality, these stories certainly provide a grim depiction of the fears women have about life in a male-dominated society, and their setting in the present or near future suggests that Tiptree believes this state of affairs is not going to be changing anytime soon.

The body’s natural instincts also play an important role in Tiptree’s stories, which rather demoralizingly highlight the futility of attempting to resist these instincts. Lilliloo and Moggadeet attempt to do so by breaking from the Path, and avoiding the old traditions of having to kill one another in order to survive the winter, but in doing so end up giving in to it in their own way, just as the Old One predicted they would. Similarly, after the male astronauts in Houston, Houston have spent time aboard the Sunbird, surrounded by females who they were used to viewing as subservient to them, they give in to their aggressive fantasies, which are arguably the product of the male instinct to dominate. Bud, under the effects of the inhibition-reducing aphasia drug, attempts to sexually exploit Judy, whereas Dave attempts to seize control of the space station through violence. Both these examples portray man as being ultimately subservient to his most primal desires, suggesting that no matter how much we might evolve, these subconscious desires our ancestors once had will always be present in us as well.

Interestingly enough, Tiptree’s stories also address another aspect of evolution, namely the desirability of the “survival of the fittest” paradigm in evolutionary biology. In the original Time Machine text, Wells proposes that such conflict is desirable, as it forces mankind to adapt and evolve, and the lack of intellectual curiosity and physical fitness in the conflict-free Eloi society is depicted as being undesirable, as exemplified by the Time Traveler’s negative impression of them. However, in Houston, Houston, Tiptree suggests that such conflict is not necessarily desirable, as even though the women of the future have not made much technological progress in their time, they are certainly more at peace with one another and with nature, as evidenced by the wildlife and plants which their ship can successfully sustain in outer space. Thus through this depiction of a society free from the conflict male behavior purportedly causes, Tiptree raises a rather uncomfortable question: is the evolution which “survival of the fittest” brings about necessarily more desirable than the other kinds of progress we might make, following other evolutionary paradigms? Tiptree’s answer appears to be no, as the actions of the women who remove the astronauts from the past from their society suggest.