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A Spaceship Built of Stone and Other Stories
Contents:
No Regrets (1985)
Wives (1979)
The Family Monkey (1977)
Mrs T (1976)
The Bone Flute (1981)
A Spaceship Built of Stone (1980)
The Cure (1984)
The Hollow Man (1979)
The Other Kind (1984)
Birds of the Moon (1979)
No Regrets (1985)
Wives (1979)
The Family Monkey (1977)
Mrs T (1976)
The Bone Flute (1981)
A Spaceship Built of Stone (1980)
The Cure (1984)
The Hollow Man (1979)
The Other Kind (1984)
Birds of the Moon (1979)
192 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 1987
7 people are currently reading
158 people want to read
About the author
Lisa Tuttle
275 books395 followers(Wife of Colin Murray) aka Maria Palmer (house pseudonym).
Lisa Tuttle taught a science fiction course at the City Lit College, part of London University, and has tutored on the Arvon courses. She was residential tutor at the Clarion West SF writing workshop in Seattle, USA. She has published six novels and two short story collections. Many of her books have been translated into French and German editions.
Lisa Tuttle taught a science fiction course at the City Lit College, part of London University, and has tutored on the Arvon courses. She was residential tutor at the Clarion West SF writing workshop in Seattle, USA. She has published six novels and two short story collections. Many of her books have been translated into French and German editions.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
September 8, 2016
"A Spaceship Built of Stone and Other Stories" wasn't mind-blowing. I wasn't on the edge of my seat, thrilled by every page I read. It was, instead, haunting. Each story was steeped in a eerie, sharp beauty that dug into me while I wasn't looking and I only seemed to notice when I put the book down and found one of Tuttle's ideas stuck somewhere in the corners of my brain.
I like keeping track of how I found a book or author and this one was pretty fortuitous. Two and a half years ago, my school's English department had their annual book sale. Faculty contribute old books they're no longer using, and prices drop each day (until, at the end, the books are free and stick around on communal shelves for the rest of the year). I picked this one up because it had the word "spaceships" and my first name on the cover, alongside probably three dozen other books because I have a serious book-hoarding problem, and it stayed in that stack until pretty recently. I've read or found-and-have-yet-to-read several other books from the Women's Press Science Fiction collection and recently looked into Tuttle's history. To my pleasant surprise, she's a fairly well-known author (she has a collaboration with George R. R. Martin and wrote the Encyclopedia of Feminism). So, I started this brief collection.
Honestly, Tuttle reads more like Shirley Jackson or perhaps Joan Aiken than Joanna Russ or Alice Sheldon. Her command of language is powerful in its clarity (lookin @ u Russ and Tiptree, u gals famous for ur wonderful obfuscation) and pretty solidly in the camp of New Yorker-style straight fiction of the 70s and 80s. This collection is also heavy on what I keep thinking of as body horror but is also the slow realization of the horrible loneliness of being a human. Over and over again Tuttle's characters see their bodies change as they become different people, or watch their lover's body become a hollow shell forever beyond the narrator's emotional grasp, or realize that their lives have shifted and their past isn't quite what they thought.
It feels like I'm exactly the target audience for this book. I fit the descriptions of many of the narrators: young women with academic pursuits in long-term relationships (and variously successful or not in those pursuits and relationships). There are so many things I love in these stories: queer narratives, linguistics, punch-to-the-gut stories on love and loss. I didn't love it as much as I thought I would but those stories are certainly sticking with me. In particular, I loved "The Cure," about two queer women who share a love of Chomsky and writing until one loses the ability to speak or understand language. It's beautiful and poignant and I want to read it over and over and over again.
Her science fiction concepts are simpler than I expected, not quite as interesting on their own as some of her contemporaries. At times they seemed tacked-on to more mainstream non-genre stories. There was one story that, to me, emphasized how underutilized the SF aspects of her stories can be. It follows several generations of a family that takes in a marooned alien. The alien learns how to sleep and dream, and ends up teaching one young girl in the family how to experience other humans' dreams. While there are powerful vignettes exploring racism and sexism within this larger narrative, on the whole it feels disjointed. The fantastical elements don't cohere with the larger story, and the smaller stories don't build into anything larger. On the whole, the collection does a generally good job of working in the realm of SF but I expected more complexity in the concepts and enthusiasm for the genre. Perhaps I'm reading too much pulp lately.
Overall, I enjoyed reading this quite a bit and I've enjoyed thinking about it even more, even if it wasn't what I expected.
I like keeping track of how I found a book or author and this one was pretty fortuitous. Two and a half years ago, my school's English department had their annual book sale. Faculty contribute old books they're no longer using, and prices drop each day (until, at the end, the books are free and stick around on communal shelves for the rest of the year). I picked this one up because it had the word "spaceships" and my first name on the cover, alongside probably three dozen other books because I have a serious book-hoarding problem, and it stayed in that stack until pretty recently. I've read or found-and-have-yet-to-read several other books from the Women's Press Science Fiction collection and recently looked into Tuttle's history. To my pleasant surprise, she's a fairly well-known author (she has a collaboration with George R. R. Martin and wrote the Encyclopedia of Feminism). So, I started this brief collection.
Honestly, Tuttle reads more like Shirley Jackson or perhaps Joan Aiken than Joanna Russ or Alice Sheldon. Her command of language is powerful in its clarity (lookin @ u Russ and Tiptree, u gals famous for ur wonderful obfuscation) and pretty solidly in the camp of New Yorker-style straight fiction of the 70s and 80s. This collection is also heavy on what I keep thinking of as body horror but is also the slow realization of the horrible loneliness of being a human. Over and over again Tuttle's characters see their bodies change as they become different people, or watch their lover's body become a hollow shell forever beyond the narrator's emotional grasp, or realize that their lives have shifted and their past isn't quite what they thought.
It feels like I'm exactly the target audience for this book. I fit the descriptions of many of the narrators: young women with academic pursuits in long-term relationships (and variously successful or not in those pursuits and relationships). There are so many things I love in these stories: queer narratives, linguistics, punch-to-the-gut stories on love and loss. I didn't love it as much as I thought I would but those stories are certainly sticking with me. In particular, I loved "The Cure," about two queer women who share a love of Chomsky and writing until one loses the ability to speak or understand language. It's beautiful and poignant and I want to read it over and over and over again.
Her science fiction concepts are simpler than I expected, not quite as interesting on their own as some of her contemporaries. At times they seemed tacked-on to more mainstream non-genre stories. There was one story that, to me, emphasized how underutilized the SF aspects of her stories can be. It follows several generations of a family that takes in a marooned alien. The alien learns how to sleep and dream, and ends up teaching one young girl in the family how to experience other humans' dreams. While there are powerful vignettes exploring racism and sexism within this larger narrative, on the whole it feels disjointed. The fantastical elements don't cohere with the larger story, and the smaller stories don't build into anything larger. On the whole, the collection does a generally good job of working in the realm of SF but I expected more complexity in the concepts and enthusiasm for the genre. Perhaps I'm reading too much pulp lately.
Overall, I enjoyed reading this quite a bit and I've enjoyed thinking about it even more, even if it wasn't what I expected.
June 25, 2020
A Spaceship Built of Stone and Other Stories, by Lisa Tuttle has taken me a while to finish as I have enjoyed dipping in and out of it. I think she's one of the BEST short story writers, and not just in the SFY genre. Her stories really make me think and they often have a strong emotional impact.
May 3, 2012
I hugely admired this. I didn't even like short stories... My contents page, of ten stories, has two 1-ticks, five 2-ticks and two 3-ticks which indicates the greatest enthusiasm for 'The Bone Flute' and 'The Other Kind' - the latter a massive influence, in that I tried over and over to write this story again myself. It is about attraction to the alien - on a plot-level, it's about underground sexual fetishes for an alien species (or not: look, this is strictly from memory) - the theme was so profound to me and I tried to plumb the depths of this story...
November 15, 2022
Landing in between A Nest of Nightmares and Memories of the Body chronologically, these stories show Tuttle taking her particular style of feminist psychological body horror into new, gender- and genre-bending places. There's quite a lot of ambition beginning to emerge in the sci-fi particularly, with some stories breaking free of the standard format (which happens even more in Memories of the Body) and others exploring themes that wouldn't be out of place in Octavia Butler or Ursula K. LeGuin. My favorite was probably the classic psychological haunted-house story "No Regrets," but the stranger forays ("The Family Monkey," "The Cure," and "The Other Kind") were incredibly compelling.
September 21, 2018
Lisa Tuttle's writing and stories have truly won me over, as this collection is a great example of speculative fiction with limited science.
At first, I was somewhat skeptical on the author's peculiar decision to base her stories in a period where people still used the 'telephone' and the internet was nowhere in sight. (Except for a future-based story where people often watched 'holodreams'.
It was only after completing the collection that I came across the original publication dates for these stories, which were written between 1976-1985.
Makes sense now.
But that only makes the author's work all the more impressive to me; for the imagination that is cramped into these stories and novellas is inspiring and ahead of their time.
What's more, I can't seem to choose any favorites, as they're all of high standard.
Can't wait to read more from Lisa Tuttle.
At first, I was somewhat skeptical on the author's peculiar decision to base her stories in a period where people still used the 'telephone' and the internet was nowhere in sight. (Except for a future-based story where people often watched 'holodreams'.
It was only after completing the collection that I came across the original publication dates for these stories, which were written between 1976-1985.
Makes sense now.
But that only makes the author's work all the more impressive to me; for the imagination that is cramped into these stories and novellas is inspiring and ahead of their time.
What's more, I can't seem to choose any favorites, as they're all of high standard.
Can't wait to read more from Lisa Tuttle.
February 28, 2021
As with any collection of short stories, there were some that spoke to me more than others. This said, there were a number that were extraordinary, including "The Family Monkey" (told from multiple perspectives, the tale of an extra-terrestrial being adopted by a Texas family and eventually collected by his own kind), "The Cure" (about language, medical hubris and falling out of love) and "The Hollow Man" (interlaces suicide, privilege and possession). "The Other Kind" also stands out, and in a few very short pages provides the depth and satisfaction of a much longer novel, and offers a chilling vision of how inconsequential the line between ignorance and conspiracy may be as misfits of all kinds "choose" a subaltern life.
October 29, 2017
Como en todas las antologías, hay relatos que me han gustado más que otros, pero en todos he disfrutado del estilo y los personajes de Lisa Tuttle. Más de uno me ha dejado pensando al terminarlo, me gusta la complejidad que tienen las ideas que presenta.
Además, personajes femeninos muy interesantes y la visión de la autora sobre los roles de género muy presente en casi todos los relatos.
Me lanzaré a leer sus relatos de terror en cuanto pueda.
#LeoAutorasOct
Además, personajes femeninos muy interesantes y la visión de la autora sobre los roles de género muy presente en casi todos los relatos.
Me lanzaré a leer sus relatos de terror en cuanto pueda.
#LeoAutorasOct
March 8, 2023
This is a collection of 10 short stories; one of them is VERY trite and a 1 star review on its own, and she's a bit too chill throwing the N word around in another story for my liking, but the last 4 stories in the collection are imaginative, really engaging and just the right amount of creepy!
Everything else in the collection is at the very least a decent (and quick!) read so I would recommend it!
Everything else in the collection is at the very least a decent (and quick!) read so I would recommend it!
July 27, 2021
This collection of short science fiction stories, many of which had previously appeared in such luminary journals as Asimov's, contains much that is to be enjoyed - and some, like The Hollow Man, that pre-date similar stories in the likes of Black Mirror. Not every piece was to my liking, but there was enough here to make me want to keep going all the way to the end.
March 23, 2018
Entertaining and different.
Diverse and intriguing, a good helping of unusual ideas. A rich blend of possible ways in which we could lose or mislay, what makes us “human”.
Diverse and intriguing, a good helping of unusual ideas. A rich blend of possible ways in which we could lose or mislay, what makes us “human”.
August 24, 2018
Well worth reading, all of the stories in this collection are at least interesting.
May 18, 2019
Normally I hate short stories but Lisa Tuttle is really compelling. Great premises and twists
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews