ALICE BRADLEY—THE LIFE AND THE STORIES.

ALICE BRADLEY—THE LIFE AND THE STORIES. Julie Phillips finds convincing connections between Alice Bradley’s life and her stories, beginning with the connection between the horrors that Alice encountered as a child in Africa and the horrors of Alice’s dark science fiction. She points out that Alice and her parents were often the first white people that the natives had seen, “and they experienced what for most science fiction writers is only a story or a metaphor: ‘first contact’ with the alien.” (p. 32). In World War II, Alice was one of the first women members of the Womens Army Auxiliary Corps, and marveled at reporting to a camp where women were in charge. In Tiptree’s “The Women Men Don’t See,” UFO’s arrive, and the woman protagonist decides to go away with the aliens, leaving the male figure to wonder why a woman would do that. Alice wrote once that “having a woman’s body is like being the owner of a large and only partly tamed animal, day and night the damn thing is being itself, with its own semi-inscrutable operations.” (p. 155). In “The Girl Who Was Plugged In,” an ugly girl trapped in a closet is wired to and controls a beautiful female body.