And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill’s Side, by James Tiptree, Jr.

A fantastic effort, a tale sure to offer the reader a visceral experience.

The story is structured along two planes: the first consists of a dialogue happening in the narrative present, between the two main characters – a green journalist, and a grizzled space station worker – and functioning mostly as a framing device, at least until the very end. The second plane is located within the dialogue itself, composed mostly of the flashbacks from the unnamed worker, and provide most of the plot, action, and context. While the story is told in the first person through the eyes of the journalist, the main character clearly is his collocutor; this creates a further frame through which the reader sees events unfold: we do not experience the story directly, nor through the eyes of an involved actor, but through the eyes of a further character, who is not the one that went through the events. This double-framing establishes the unreliability of the tale: by the time it reaches the reader, most of the plot points have been filtered at least three times: dredged up from the memory of the worker, then selected by him, then listened to by the journalist. This kind of multiple framing can feel cumbersome, but is deployed to great effect here; it helps creating a willing suspension of disbelief, a necessity given the flimsiness of the possible proposition that distinguishes the story’s world from our own (ie., that humans are unconsciously, irresistibly, sexually attracted to aliens, discussed in greater detail below).
This is also a staple of the “redemption of the irredeemable” story archetype: a person that has sunk to such lows (usually through some form of mitigating circumstance, such as substance addiction, unrequited or exploited love, a trauma in their past), that proper redemption is impossible, but who nevertheless receives a form of absolution in a – usually cautionary – telling of their tale. Such stories are almost always told to a listener, one that provides the point of view for the reader, for two main reasons: to maintain an element of unknowability into the plight of the “irredeemable”, and to guide the reader through the gambit of emotions expected by the writer, usually involving a switch from a negative form of appraisal (disapproval, fear, disgust), to a positive one (empathizing, pity, support).

The story follows this archetype structure throughout, the dialogue recounting in incredibly vivid detail the worker’s experience with aliens. There is a powerful immediacy in the tale, told in an intricate mixture of lust and hate, deprived of any other form of mitigating emotion, unmediated by any form of regret. The desperate slide down depravity is presented to the reader in masterful strokes by Tiptree Jr., perhaps in its most iconic fashion when the encounter with the Sellice dancer is described (and note the use of the possessive pronoun):

“Ah, yes, my Sellice. My first Sellice. […]
“She began to do what we’d call a dance, but it’s no dance, it’s their natural movement. […]
“She was fantastically marked and the markings were writhing. Not like body paint – alive. Smiling, that’s a good word for it. As if her whole body was smiling sexually, beckoning, winking, urging, pouting, speaking to me. […]
“Her arms went up and those blazing lemon-coloured curves pulsed, waved, everted, contracted, throbbed, evolved unbelievably welcoming, inciting, permutations. Come do it to me, do it, do it here and here and here and now. You couldn’t see the rest of her, only a wicked flash of mouth. Every human male in the room was aching to ram himself into that incredible body. I mean it was pain. […]

(pp. 56-57)

The basic idea behind the story, that evolution has rigged us to be attracted to strangers, and aliens being unbelievably strange creates an overwhelming reproductive urge within humans, is both the focal point of the story, and its weakness. The supernormal stimulus is evoked to help explain this drive, but it all falls a little flat. In fact, like most communal animals, it is only individuals that are far from the center of society’s circle that feel an urge to migrate and look for others – an evolutionary high risk – high reward gamble. Most of a population is less interested in “different”, favouring instead a combination of factors as close as possible to an optimum within a continuum of phenotypes, such as the famous waist-hip ratio – and that is before taking socio-cultural pressures into account, pressures that usually focus the boundaries of the optimum even further.
However, once the reader willingly suspends their disbelief, and accepts the premise of the story, the plot then flows along; in this, the short-story medium is exploited very well: there is little time to sit down and ponder Tiptree Jr.’s proposition in great detail. Furthermore, the spectacular writing of the story helps readers accept its frankly outlandish premise, a testament to the strength of the author’s prose.

The astute usage of the double framing device and the familiarity of the archetypical plot easily lull the reader into believing this is a story of ultimate redemption for the worker, a final warning shouted out in an attempt to stem the tide. Perhaps the only early hint that this will not be the case is that the emotional reactions of the journalist run contrary to the expected sequence: from positive (delight, expectancy) to the negative (disillusion, disgust). In truth, there is no happy end here. The worker might be fully aware of what he has become, but he is still fully in the grip of his addiction. His tale, his warning, is nothing more than an attempt at scaring a potential competitor away:

“Tell them,’ he said, turning to go. ‘Go home and tell them.’ Then his head snapped back toward me and he added quietly, ‘And stay away from the Syrtis desk or I’ll kill you.’

(p. 60)

That cold-blooded parting shot alone turns the whole expectation for this story on its head, and drains away all the warmhearted goodwill a reader might have felt for the worker. The chilling realization then expands to encompass the whole of humankind: is it possible we are doomed? That the “cargo-cult of the soul” the worker compares this situation to is truly inescapable?

The journalist, for his side, provides an unfortunate hint that he too has already fallen into the trap, as the story comes to an end:

“I changed tapes hurriedly with one eye on the figures passing that open door. Suddenly among the humans I caught a glimpse of two sleek scarlet shapes. My first real aliens! I snapped the recorder shut and ran to squeeze in behind them.”

(p. 60)

(Note how he has already forgotten the lowly Procya – there in the story to show us what humans might end up like).

It is interesting to compare and contrast this story with Swarm: there, it is the human intellect that will cause the downfall of humanity. Here, it’s human emotions. Two very different aspects, but one common theme: the fear we might not be, not unready, but incompatible with exploring the cosmos – a dystopian twist to an enormously familiar playground for science fiction.

A final note on the story’s title: it is a verse from Keat’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci“, in which a knight barely escapes the amorous attentions of a fairy. An apt quotation, and the parallels with this story are undeniable, though it might be worth mentioning that there are some differences too: John Keats was a supremely romantic poet, and his verses are a metaphor for unrequited love. Here, there is no love, but a deeper reproductive instinct, as dark as it is uncontrollable.

In closing, this is a powerful story; borne out of a fairly shaky premise, the fact it remains so gripping until its end is a testament to the author’s writing prowess. With its main theme of addiction, and structured in a way that presumes a form of redemption for its main character, it instead takes a dark twist in rejecting this form of final solace, leaving the reader with a bad, dystopian ending that feels good and in the right place.

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Tiptree, Jr., James. “And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill’s Side.” A Science Fiction Omnibus, edited by Brian Aldiss, Penguin Classics, 2007, pp 133-158