Aqueduct Press continue to mine Rebecca Ore's back catalogue but, unlike 'Collected Egoense', an excellent collection of short science fiction stories written in the nineties, this shifts to non fiction and goes back much further. I believe that everything here except the title piece comes from 'The Bicycle Trip and Poems', originally published in 1974 by Telephone Books in quarto size and limited to just three hundred copies that was stapled together. The author hadn't married back then so it was credited to Rebecca Brown. Ore revised and corrected it in 2025, but I presume it's largely the piece it was half a century ago.

I believe that the title piece, which is novelette length at thirty-eight pages, is new. Certainly, it's not listed anywhere as an earlier work and it's a memoir that ends with her living in Nicaragua, to which she retired presumably recently, so I'm pretty confident that it's new. Of course, unless you happen to own that limited edition from 1974, everything here will be new to you, even if it had a previous release. I can't imagine that a lot of people read 'The Bicycle Trip and Poems' in 1974 and it surely can't be the most accessible title on the second hand market, though I'm surprised to see a couple of copies available on ABE Books.

I guess I should start with 'The Bicycle Trip', which is shorter again at only twenty-four pages. It's a travelogue of a solo adventure that young Rebecca took after she turned twenty-five and a tarot reading told her "change or die". So she leaves New York for Trenton, New Jersey by train, taking her ten speed with her, and then cycles to New Hope, Pennsylvania, historically popular as a gay resort and an artistic haven where Broadway shows were fine tuned. I don't think Ore details why she chose that initial destination, but I'd guess at the former reason.

I wouldn't want to guess at Ore's sexuality from these pages. In 'Writer's Writing', she remembers sleeping with a man but also says that her father believed her to be gay. What matters, I think, is that all her friends "are gay or Jewish" and so presumably felt most comfortable within those two communities. While 'The Bicycle Trip' was a journey out of and back into New York, it also happens to take place on the fringes of communities. She joins a traditional family—father, mother, a pair of girls, a boy and a baby—for food one evening but encounters many other family dynamics, the first in New Hope being a polyamorous trio, a married couple and their male lover.

The young Rebecca is observant and it's interesting for me as an English man to see through her eyes as an American woman, a young American woman at that, whose friends "are gay or Jewish". What was most apparent to me was that she was open to different ways of being, not surprising for a poet or a future science fiction writer. If not eager, she was at least accepting of encounters with people who didn't belong to the social norm, presumably by identifying with being different, even if not in the same ways. In the first few pages, she spends time at a gay bar and watches the drag show there with one of the polyamorous men, without anything feeling weird.  All the mildly scary moments to come involve single, presumably straight men, usually in wide open spaces.

I enjoyed the travelogue but there's nothing science fiction about it, unless you translate her bike to a spaceship and the Philadelphia tri-state area to an alien planet and treat the whole thing as an anthropological exploration. It isn't, except in hindsight, because all travelogues kind of have to be to a degree. 'Writing's Writing' isn't particularly science fiction either, but it's a memoir of much broader scope, written more recently with an eye for what she calls "fishing in memory". I might call it unreliable autobiography, in which the intention is to tell the truth but at such a big disconnect in time that what she remembers may have been flavoured by what happened during the decades in between.

It starts with her first memory, of older children chaining her to a tree with bracelets, while their mothers look on with apathy. No wonder she grew up to be different. She learned to read earlier than her peers and didn't believe in Santa when many of them did. Teachers weren't happy and I fully remember that sentiment. She read broadly, wrote early and discovered science fiction. I do believe there are commonalities that drew people of diverse backgrounds to the same places. It doesn't matter what gender, colour, creed or nationality. So much of it depends simply on being different from those around us, being interested in everything and forging opinions.

Ore was born in 1948 so was in school in the fifties and sixties and so much of what she remembers from then is scary to me, especially given that there's a serious cultural push right now to take us back to that era. "Girl children's ambitions other than marriage to men who could support them were considered mental problems." A Latin teacher at her South Carolina high school was a Nazi, married to a holocaust denier. "We decide who's a Jew, a Slav, a Latin gang member, who's crazy and who's sane." At Appalachian Hall, after getting pregnant, "The alcoholic wife of an alcoholic husband said that masturbation would spoil me for men."

Eventually she found her way to science fiction because poetry wasn't financially viable. It seems unfair to judge her poetry from the poems included here because they saw publication alongside 'The Bicycle Trip' without ever having been submitted elsewhere. There are moments to some of them but I wasn't particularly impressed. I'm sure she's done much better work since, though I've only read some of her short stories. Those absolutely impressed me and I'd like to pick up some of her other Aqueduct Press titles. There are two within the 'Conversation Pieces' series, this being one, and ten outside it.

Her education in science fiction began by reading as a kid, but was honed as an editorial assistant for the Science Fiction Book Club. I wanted more from that period here, but this isn't a fully blown autobiography and "fishing in memory" to find connections does what it does. I also wanted more from the period where she had become a published writer, but I guess that's covered within those books I mostly haven't read yet, as science fiction. Her first novelette landed her on the Campbell Award shortlist for Best New Writer and 'Becoming Alien' and its sequel were both nominated for Philip K. Dick Awards. 'Writer's Writing' is an interesting reminiscence but I want to dive more into her fiction. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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