Up the Walls of the World
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Up the Walls of the World is a 1978 science fiction novel by the American author Alice Sheldon who wrote under the pen name of James Tiptree, Jr. It was the first novel she published having until then worked and built a reputation only in the field of short stories.
The novel explores the possibility that telepathy and other psychic phenomena are real. It sympathetically describes an attempt to invade the Earth by beings with advanced telepathic abilities from the planet Tyree.
It considers the subject of sentience in different life forms inhabiting widely different environments, in computers and in a vast sentient inhabitant of deep space formed of a network of widely spaced nodes. It is Sheldon's skill to be able to write convicingly of the experience of beings in all of these.
In some respects the novel could also be considered a part of occult and spiritual writing.
The story takes place in 3 settings which unfold together.
- On Earth, at a telepathy lab run by the US Navy.
- On the planet Tyree, a life-rich gas giant inhabited by intelligent beings resembling mantra rays or cuttlefish which ride the air currents of its vast atmosphere.
- In deep space, The DESTROYER, an intelligent entity larger than a solar system but only slightly denser than the vacuum of space and composed of countless linked nodes.
[edit] Miscellany
In November 2006 astronomers discovered a polar vortex on Saturn very similar to the one described by Alice Sheldon in this novel. Ref
