Free Meet Me at Infinity by James Tiptree Jr. Page B

Campbell rejected it as loo discursive,” and on December 9, 1968, it went to Fred Pohl, who was then editing Galaxy and If. Pohl returned it as too long, but he said he’d look at a revised version, which went to him on February 8,1969, “totally rewritten and shorter.” Pohl accepted it, complaining that “I like it, but… it still dawdles,” and said he would only be interested in further stories in the series “if they are tighter and preferably shorter.”
    “Happiness Is a Warm Spaceship” was published in the November 1969 issue of If, by then under new ownership and with a new editor, Ejler Jakobs-son. Tiptree wrote to Jakobsson on June 16,1969, asking if he would be interested in the series; there is no response in her files. No other complete stories were written, although two versions of a book proposal and some brief fragments were. One plot shows up as both a Rosenkrantz story and a Star Trek one.
    This story was included in the original manuscript for the first Tiptree collection, Ten Thousand Light-Years from Home (Ace 1973), and indeed her proposed title for the collection was Happiness Is a Warm Spaceship, but she eventually decided to remove that story from the book.
    (Alternate titles for the first collection included:
     
    News from a Warm Spaceship
    Making It Through the Night in a Warm Spaceship
    Tiptree Is a Warm Spaceship
    Fragments of Angry Candy
    If We Go to the Stars This Morning Where Will We Sleep Tonight?
    I See People in Spacesuits They Are Making Love
    Up the Main Sequence
    Starproof Earwarmers
    Some People Like These Stories
    Comfort Me with Comets)
     
    Alii grew disenchanted with this story. She mentions it disparagingly several times in the nonfiction portion of this collection and wrote this to me in August 1972: “Someday I might use part for a series—it started as a spoof on Star Trek, but then I thought of a couple good weird episodes—but it has to be reworked out of that ‘Dear Diary’ style. Anyway, the story as is—isn’t.”
    The two versions of the book proposal, written in 1969, had slightly different lists of projected stories. I have blended the two manuscripts into one document:
    This series, tales of the adventures of the integrated crew of the Patrol Boat Ethel R Rosenkrantz, was intended in part as a loving spoof of Star Trek and would appeal to the same or more mature audiences. The heroes operate an old space tub some centuries after the Enterprise, giving scope for some 1969-type problems. (“Space: a finished frontier. These are the voyages of the Ethel R Rosenkrantz, her mission to go where every Tom, Dick, and Bemmy has been before, and clean up the mess!”—as one of them says.) But of course there is some wildness left.
     
    The adventures are of two types. Some are stories about the whole crew; then there are stories from the standpoint of various officers. The introduction and the last are from the Human Quent’s point of view.
    1. The first story of the series has appeared in the November 1969 If under the above title. Introduces the “hero,” a shiny new lieutenant burdened by a big brass pa. He is and isn’t a dope; he’s a good officer who is “liberal” despite Pa’s violent anti-alien politics. Assigned to an alien-run patrol boat, he is astounded to discover the crew doesn’t want to be integrated. He gets involved with them and the story leaves him headed for extended duty with them, happily oblivious to hints that the lower echelons of space duty are sloppily run and full of obscure hanky-panky. (The cop on the beat.)
    2. They are called in to police a planetary mob scene caused by a sensory-religious revival movement analogous to Woodstock or Altamont. They have a combat crew of mercenaries, and the story revolves around their efforts both to control the mob and control their own blindly aggressive ant mercenaries.
    3. They are provided with a batch of super-scientific remote-control gadgets for exploring new planets, which