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Journal from Ellipsia
A humorous satire and loving tribute to science fiction that delves into the tenuous relationship between science and the humanities by asking, What does it mean to be human?A genderless alien from Ellipsia, a planet whose inhabitants have no concept of individuality, comes to Earth on an intergalactic exchange program to learn how to become human. To live here, the traveler must study and understand our inclinations for seeing people as distinct beings—the nature of gender, and at the heart of identity, the word I . At once funny and serious, Journal from Ellipsia offers a starkly objective view on our own humanity.
375 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2013
2 people are currently reading
24 people want to read
About the author
Hortense Calisher
79 books11 followersHortense Calisher was an American writer of fiction.
Calisher involved her closely investigated, penetrating characters in complicated plotlines that unfold with shocks and surprises in allusive, nuanced language with a distinctively elegiac voice, sometimes compared with Eudora Welty, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, and Henry James. Critics generally considered Calisher a type of neo-realist and often both condemned and praised for her extensive explorations of characters and their social worlds. She was definitely at odds with the prevailing writing style of minimalism that characterized fiction writing in the 1970s and 1980s and that emphasized a sparse, non-romantic style with no room for expressionism or romanticism. As an anti-minimalist, Calisher was admired for her elliptical style in which more is hinted at than stated, and she was also praised as a social realist and critic in the vein of Honore Balzac and Edith Wharton.
Calisher involved her closely investigated, penetrating characters in complicated plotlines that unfold with shocks and surprises in allusive, nuanced language with a distinctively elegiac voice, sometimes compared with Eudora Welty, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, and Henry James. Critics generally considered Calisher a type of neo-realist and often both condemned and praised for her extensive explorations of characters and their social worlds. She was definitely at odds with the prevailing writing style of minimalism that characterized fiction writing in the 1970s and 1980s and that emphasized a sparse, non-romantic style with no room for expressionism or romanticism. As an anti-minimalist, Calisher was admired for her elliptical style in which more is hinted at than stated, and she was also praised as a social realist and critic in the vein of Honore Balzac and Edith Wharton.
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July 19, 2025
dense, revelatory, imprecise, innovative (mines le-guinian fields half-a-decade before LEFT HAND), frustrating, generically oblivious (ive railed, of late, against the ineptitudes of LitFic interlopers into sfnal space, what with their ‘ive-just-invented-the-wheel’ naivete), and, to be honest, probably deserving of its obscurity.
Here we have a classic tale of reverse anthropological sf, in which the visitor from outer space tries to make sense of the various pleasures and perils of humanity – a pangbornian mirror for observers. If the book’s forgotten, Calisher’s not quite. A creature that reached a stature during the only times possible for a creature with these features, Calisher littered the middle decades of the last century with dozens of similarly maximalist, erudite, and anonymous novels and story collections.
It takes a bit to latch onto the fluid obtuseness of her prose, but one can, although that doesn’t mean it'll go down easy even then. Consider this paragraph, appearing early on, in which our male protagonist reflects on first meeting his lover, and his difficulty in truly understanding her:
“His mistake had been awesome. To think of it that way lent his scrabbling actions, then and since, the only sort of dignity these could have. He’d fallen into an error of emotion about another human being, at the deepest level on which such could be made. It was only an error of reversal – a plaint whose echo could no doubt be heard above many a circle of the damned. He’d merely forgot, or not until now learned, under what actual light every human being was to be seen, approached, and if possible honored. What she hadn’t seemed to care about – he knew it now because he knew if for himself – had been merely the bramble and shadow behind which she had cached whatever it was she had cared for so ungovernably, enough to leave her world for it. In that light, every man he saw now seemed to carry his own meaning before him, plain as the nose on Cyrano; every woman, if one troubled to perceive it, shook it out like the perfume of nakedness, no matter what concealing garments of gesture she wore. A hundred times or more she must have told him what it was, silently handing him it the way children pass one another an icicle, holding at last only its shape. And when she said it aloud he hadn’t heeded, much less listened with every cell as he would now.”
We’re in late-Jamesian territory here, of course – a territory well-trod by few other than James himself, and only intermittently at that. Why this style requires such a narrative languorousness, I’m not sure, but Calisher is temperamentally unable to move a scene along, for each action necessitates rumination. Consider this paragraph following a simple knock at the door:
“Just then, a knocking came, apparently at one of the upper doors. But, these doors, like those in any supermarket, were opened in the modern way, by crossing a beam of light with one’s body – the kind of door at which, when set up for entry, it was almost physically impossible to knock. Maybe it was the younger generation knocking, as in that line of Ibsen he’d always despised for its patness. Go away, he said to it silently – I am the younger generation. Or was, up to last week. Sure enough, this not being the theater, it went away. Besides, he said after it, we have enough people, all she wanted. Every seat he could see was filled."
Contrast this with an earlier paragraph, where our main character (Linhouse) is considering his childhood, divided between estranged parents (one English and one American):
“Privately, Linhouse knew his parents had gotten away with blaming temperamental differences on national ones. His father, correspondent for a London newspaper and circuit lecturer, had always been careful to send very good maintenance, to keep a respectable housekeeper for visiting progeny, and never to be seen with young women who had too much fringe. Meanwhile he had sent volumes of Chesterfieldian advice to all, those letters to his wife usually ending on a sharply human note: ‘Send for Betty, I’ve had enough of her,’ or ‘Time for Patrick, isn’t it? Good God, he’ll scarcely remember me!” His wife in her own meanwhile had kept her calendar full, her causes and acquaintances visited, a circle of admirers of the opera-escort type dancing round the Maypole of a lively establishment, and almost certainly no lover. So, with the help of Atlantic crossings almost as common as mailings, the personal façade of the family had been preserved.”
On display here are some of the virtues of that midcentury literati – as well-read as they were well-heeled – with a lively prose of chuckling elan. The hit rate for the first third of the book, with pleasant paragraphs as above, is high. Not so for the rest.
What such a style does NOT do is tell a propulsive sfnal tale. as such, the thing bogs down precisely when it should be picking up, namely when the titular journal from ellipsia begins, in which we hear of our creature who sheds the collective consciousness of her alien planet to assume the gender and shape of us. There is nonetheless some gold in those hills, if youd want to wade into the final 250 pages.
Here we have a classic tale of reverse anthropological sf, in which the visitor from outer space tries to make sense of the various pleasures and perils of humanity – a pangbornian mirror for observers. If the book’s forgotten, Calisher’s not quite. A creature that reached a stature during the only times possible for a creature with these features, Calisher littered the middle decades of the last century with dozens of similarly maximalist, erudite, and anonymous novels and story collections.
It takes a bit to latch onto the fluid obtuseness of her prose, but one can, although that doesn’t mean it'll go down easy even then. Consider this paragraph, appearing early on, in which our male protagonist reflects on first meeting his lover, and his difficulty in truly understanding her:
“His mistake had been awesome. To think of it that way lent his scrabbling actions, then and since, the only sort of dignity these could have. He’d fallen into an error of emotion about another human being, at the deepest level on which such could be made. It was only an error of reversal – a plaint whose echo could no doubt be heard above many a circle of the damned. He’d merely forgot, or not until now learned, under what actual light every human being was to be seen, approached, and if possible honored. What she hadn’t seemed to care about – he knew it now because he knew if for himself – had been merely the bramble and shadow behind which she had cached whatever it was she had cared for so ungovernably, enough to leave her world for it. In that light, every man he saw now seemed to carry his own meaning before him, plain as the nose on Cyrano; every woman, if one troubled to perceive it, shook it out like the perfume of nakedness, no matter what concealing garments of gesture she wore. A hundred times or more she must have told him what it was, silently handing him it the way children pass one another an icicle, holding at last only its shape. And when she said it aloud he hadn’t heeded, much less listened with every cell as he would now.”
We’re in late-Jamesian territory here, of course – a territory well-trod by few other than James himself, and only intermittently at that. Why this style requires such a narrative languorousness, I’m not sure, but Calisher is temperamentally unable to move a scene along, for each action necessitates rumination. Consider this paragraph following a simple knock at the door:
“Just then, a knocking came, apparently at one of the upper doors. But, these doors, like those in any supermarket, were opened in the modern way, by crossing a beam of light with one’s body – the kind of door at which, when set up for entry, it was almost physically impossible to knock. Maybe it was the younger generation knocking, as in that line of Ibsen he’d always despised for its patness. Go away, he said to it silently – I am the younger generation. Or was, up to last week. Sure enough, this not being the theater, it went away. Besides, he said after it, we have enough people, all she wanted. Every seat he could see was filled."
Contrast this with an earlier paragraph, where our main character (Linhouse) is considering his childhood, divided between estranged parents (one English and one American):
“Privately, Linhouse knew his parents had gotten away with blaming temperamental differences on national ones. His father, correspondent for a London newspaper and circuit lecturer, had always been careful to send very good maintenance, to keep a respectable housekeeper for visiting progeny, and never to be seen with young women who had too much fringe. Meanwhile he had sent volumes of Chesterfieldian advice to all, those letters to his wife usually ending on a sharply human note: ‘Send for Betty, I’ve had enough of her,’ or ‘Time for Patrick, isn’t it? Good God, he’ll scarcely remember me!” His wife in her own meanwhile had kept her calendar full, her causes and acquaintances visited, a circle of admirers of the opera-escort type dancing round the Maypole of a lively establishment, and almost certainly no lover. So, with the help of Atlantic crossings almost as common as mailings, the personal façade of the family had been preserved.”
On display here are some of the virtues of that midcentury literati – as well-read as they were well-heeled – with a lively prose of chuckling elan. The hit rate for the first third of the book, with pleasant paragraphs as above, is high. Not so for the rest.
What such a style does NOT do is tell a propulsive sfnal tale. as such, the thing bogs down precisely when it should be picking up, namely when the titular journal from ellipsia begins, in which we hear of our creature who sheds the collective consciousness of her alien planet to assume the gender and shape of us. There is nonetheless some gold in those hills, if youd want to wade into the final 250 pages.
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