Collected works

摘要

In several biting science-fiction stories, James Tiptree Jr (Alice Sheldon) suggested that alien contact would be terribly personal and sexually charged. Programmed by evolution with now-inappropriate compulsions, humanity would fatally love the aliens, or long to become like them ... This process has continued for centuries in Gwyneth Jones's Phoenix Cafe (Gollancz, £16.99, ISBN 0 575 06068 9), her third novel about the irreducibly messy problem of Earth's "Aleutian" visitors. Humans have grown uneasily used to the louse-like commensals that surround Aleutians in a soup of biological info-exchange. Conversely, Aleutians distrust our unliving technology of electromagnetic "void-forces". Engineered human half-castes imitate the noseless extraterrestrials; the lead character is an Aleutian in female human form. All communication is treacherous, all gender stereotypes unreliable.