Thank you to the publisher for the opportunity to read and review this book. It's a beautiful collection from a very important and influenced writer, and a was a pleasure to read.

This wonderful collection, edited by Karen Joy Fowler and Jeffrey D. Smith, features thirteen stories and one essay that aim to shine a spotlight on Tiptree's lesser-known but striking works. The horror is well done and sometimes quite shocking. It's a fantastic reintroduction to Tiptree or a great introduction to their short stories. There's a lot of great ones in here, my favorites being The Women Men Don't See and The Only Neat Thing to Do, but they're all worth the read.

The book is a collec­tion of thirteen stories and one essay compiled by Karen Joy Fowler and Jeffrey D. Smith, intended to highlight Tiptree’s lesser-known work. These stories are anything but murmurs, though, and a few of them are scary. The book is a terrific way to re-introduce yourself to Tiptree, or to introduce yourself to Tiptree’s short stories. The book isn’t really a “best of” collection – though they should not be ignored or forgotten. I enjoyed the short stories as it reminded me of the short stories I read and enjoyed immensely.

It has been a while since I have seen a new collection of Tiptree stories. Of course the stories aren’t new - Tiptree, or rather Alice Sheldon, died tragically in 1987. It had only been a few short years after I had first read a Tiptree story that it happened. So it has been a long time since any new volumes of the old stories have been assembled. This is a welcome new collection. The stories range over her whole short career. It's amazing that Tiptree made such a huge splash in the space of only about 20 years. But then her style is awesome. Even the most trivial of her stories are a joy to read. Kind of light and humorous, but often going to some very dark places. Her aliens are the most endearing aliens in all of science fiction, even when they are going to kill you. The imagination is colorful and wild. Anybody who has been reading SF for a long time already knows all of this. Why buy this book? Aside from a couple of classic Arkham House volumes, long out of print, there aren’t any really excellent, treasurable editions. Until now. I’ve only seen the ebook ARC so far, but I have purchased a number of other books from Subterranean and their quality is top-notch. I have no doubts that this volume will adhere to their high standards. This is a Tiptree collection to add to a collectible library. And the stories selected are among the very best. My favorite has always been The Only Neat Thing to Do, but there are many Tiptree treasures in this book. Tiptree is one of those authors who pulled SF out of the pulp adventures and made it a literature. This book is not to be missed.

"The Voice That Murmurs in the Darkness" is the James Tiptree / Alice Sheldon "B-sides and rarities" album to the greatest hits collection of "Her Smoke Rose Up Forever." Readers are much less likely to have encountered these stories, and the collection aims (and succeeds) at showing the breadth and range of Tiptree's writing. That the title comes from a description Alice Sheldon herself gave of Tiptree the writer/character/mask/muse is one of many delicious tidbits from the excellent introduction by Karen Joy Fowler.

A handful of the stories in this collection reflect, as is very often the case, the intersection of time, privilege, and normalized narrow American worldview from which the author was writing. While I hadn't known that Tiptree/Sheldon had written humor pieces and found the breadth of writing on display very interesting, the characterization of the medical care in a less affluent country, as described in "How to Have an Absolutely Hilarious Heart Attack" is likely to fall awkwardly and uncomfortably flat for modern readers.

Overall, though, the stories are good and interesting, and the collection as a whole is worth reading. The narrative voice and subject matter cover quite a lot of ground and show off (very) different facets of Tiptree's versatility. "The Only Neat Thing to Do" reminded me in the best way of how Heinlein's juveniles affected me when I was younger, which isn't something I would have expected from Tiptree. The going gets pretty weird in a few places, but I didn't mind. I received an ARC from Subterranean Press and Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

This is a 3.5 star book for me. I always round half stars down.

I would like to preface this review by stating I have not read any of James Tiptree, Jr/Alice Sheldon's previous work. I requested this ARC because a friend recommended her writing to me. Sadly, a couple of the short stories in this collection didn't live up to the hype.
Like many short story collections, this was a mixed bag. There was one story I didn't quite understand (I'm not sure if the fault actually lies with me, but I digress) and a couple others about which I couldn't decide how to feel. Those stories, at least, gave me something to think about, as did all the other stories in this collection. My favorites were The Only Neat Thing to Do, What Came Ashore at Lirios, and Yanqui Doodle. Yanqui Doodle is one of those stories that are so clearly written in response to happenings of decades past, yet still remain tragically relevant today, and I would recommend it in a heartbeat.
Unfortunately, not everything about this book aged well. There are some phrases and situations, ranging from cringey to actually offensive, that are a product of their time. Although they are peripheral details that don't render the entire plot of the stories they appear in unsavory, I do wish the introduction had done more to note them.
I haven't read any other work from James Tiptree, Jr/Alice Sheldon, so I can't speak as to how these stories stand up to her body of work as a whole, but despite their flaws, they did make me curious to seek out more of her work, if nothing else to form a better frame of reference.

Is there anything quite as disappointing as revisiting a pathbreaking writer you once idolized, only to discover that her work (and Tiptree's/Sheldon's work really was pathbreaking) includes not only some embarrassingly awkward prose but also some more than embarrassing language and attitudes? But here we are.

James Tiptree Jr., as pretty much any SF devotee knows, was actually Alice Sheldon in disguise. Notoriously, Robert Silverberg once wrote: “It has been suggested that Tiptree is female, a theory that I find absurd, for there is to me something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree’s writing. I don’t think the novels of Jane Austen could have been written by a man nor the stories of Ernest Hemingway by a woman, and in the same way I believe the author of the James Tiptree stories is male.” That smack in the face to gender essentialism will never stop making me evil-cackle. I read it after my first encounter with Tiptree's "The Women Men Don't See," a story about exactly what it says on the tin. It was first published in 1973, when I was a 15-year-old baby feminist at a time when feminists were routinely mocked in the media, and it. said. everything.

I've lost my taste for fiction that's more about elaborating ideas than it is about human beings, so to be fair to this posthumous collection, some of the stories do succeed as means of working out abstract concepts. Regrettably, the ARC doesn't include chapter headings/story titles, and I'm not about to take the time to play a matching game. Fortunately, the story I liked best as fiction is one easy to connect with its title: "What Came Ashore at Lirios." But I can't even recommend it in a general way, because ...

... because of the really unfortunate aspect of this collection. I should say that I'm well aware of Tiptree's/Sheldon's dates; at the time of her death, certain language, certain attitudes, still struck most editors -- most straight white people -- as acceptable. I would like to think that, were Tiptree/Sheldon alive today, she would have evolved, might even have edited her earlier work to eliminate the offensive bits. But oh, is it hard to stick with a book in which someone mistakes an alien for a Black child, in which a Latina interpreter looks pretty and speaks broken English, in which Oscar Wilde is called "an elderly faggot in Reading jail," in which a man is described as "not one of your handsome Latinos but the charming type, with sad, gay, all-knowing orangutan eyes." That's more than enough to give an idea of the problem, I think. I flinched over and over and over again, until reading had been completely ruined for me.

Why two stars, then, rather than one? I suppose because if you're willing to get past the language (and, let's face it, the mostly clunky prose), most of these stories are interesting as intellectual constructs and offer, at a minimum, historical value. But don't plan to read this book for pleasure.

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC; this is, obviously I suppose, my honest review.