JAMES TIPTREE, JR. |
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by Wikipedia
James Tiptree, Jr. (August 24, 1915 – May 19, 1987) was the pen name of American science fiction author Alice Bradley Sheldon, used from 1967 to her death. She also occasionally wrote under the pseudonym Raccoona Sheldon (1974–77).
Secret Agent Raccoona Sheldon -- Don't trust people who wear masks Tiptree/Sheldon was most notable for breaking down the barriers between perceived "male writing" and "female writing" — it was not publicly known until 1977 that James Tiptree, Jr. was a woman. Early life The child of Herbert Bradley, a lawyer and naturalist, and Mary Hastings Bradley, a prolific writer of fiction and travel books, Alice travelled the world with her parents from an early age. She was a graphic artist and a painter, and an art critic for the Chicago Sun between 1941 and 1942. She was married to William Davey from 1934 to 1941. In 1942 she joined the US Army and worked in the Air Intelligence division. In 1945 she married her second husband, Huntington Sheldon, and she was discharged from the military in 1946, at which time she set up a small business in partnership with her husband. The same year her first story ("The Lucky Ones") was published in the November 16, 1946 issue of The New Yorker, and credited to "Alice Bradley" in the magazine itself, but to "Alice Bradley Sheldon" in the magazine's DVD index. In 1952 she and her husband were invited to join the CIA. She resigned in 1955 as she wished to return to college. She studied for her bachelor of arts degree at American University (1957–59), going on to achieve a doctorate at George Washington University in Experimental Psychology in 1967. Her doctoral dissertation was on the responses of animals to novel stimuli in differing environments. She was bisexual. "I like some men a lot, but from the start, before I knew anything, it was always girls and women who lit me up," she said. [1][2] Science fiction career Unsure what to do with her new degrees and her new/old careers, Sheldon began to write science fiction. She adopted the pseudonym of James Tiptree Jr. in 1967. The name "Tiptree" came from a jar of marmalade. [AB-1] In an interview, she said: "A male name seemed like good camouflage. I had the feeling that a man would slip by less observed. I've had too many experiences in my life of being the first woman in some damned occupation." [1] The pseudonym was successfully maintained until the late 1970s. This is partly due to the fact that though it was widely known that "Tiptree" was a pseudonym, it was generally understood that its use was intended to protect the professional reputation of an intelligence community official. Readers, editors and correspondents were permitted to assume gender, and almost invariably they assumed "male." "Tiptree" never made any public appearances, but she did correspond regularly with fans and other science fiction authors through the mail. When asked for biographical details, Tiptree/Sheldon was forthcoming in everything but gender. Many of the details given above (the Air Force career, the Ph.D.) were mentioned in letters "Tiptree" wrote, and also appeared in official author biographies. After the death of her mother in 1976, all was revealed and several prominent science fiction writers suffered some embarrassment. Robert Silverberg had written an introduction to Warm Worlds and Otherwise, arguing on the basis of selections from stories in the collection, that Tiptree could not possibly be a woman. And in an introduction to a story in one of his Dangerous Visions anthology series, Harlan Ellison opined that "[Kate] Wilhelm is the woman to beat this year, but Tiptree is the man." The revelation of her gender had less adverse impact on people's opinions of her talent than she had feared; her final Nebula Award (for "The Screwfly Solution," published under her other occasional pseudonym, Raccoona Sheldon) was awarded in 1977. Description of works Tiptree/Sheldon was an eclectic writer who worked in a variety of styles and subgenres, often combining the technological focus and hard-edged style of "hard" science fiction with the sociological and psychological concerns of "soft" SF, and some of the stylistic experimentation of the New Wave movement. After writing several stories in more conventional modes, she produced her first work to draw widespread acclaim, "The Last Flight of Doctor Ain", in 1969. One of her shortest stories, "Ain" is a sympathetic portrait of a scientist whose concern for Earth's ecological suffering leads him to destroy the entire human race; in its unusual combination of morbid cynicism and compassion, and its often poetic verbal precision, it established Tiptree's distinctive voice. Many of her stories have a milieu reminiscent of the space opera and pulp tales she read in her youth, but typically with a much darker tone: the cosmic journeys of her characters are often linked to a drastic spiritual alienation, and/or a transcendent experience which brings fulfillment but also death. Notable stories of this type include "Painwise", in which a space explorer has been altered to be immune to pain but finds such an existence intolerable, and "A Momentary Taste of Being", in which the true purpose of humanity, found on a distant planet, renders individual human life entirely pointless. Another major theme is the tension between free will and biological determinism, or reason and sexual desire. "Love is the Plan The Plan is Death", one of the rare SF stories in which no humans appear, describes an alien creature's romantic rationalizations for the brutal instincts that drive its life cycle; "The Screwfly Solution" suggests that humans might similarly rationalize a plague of murderous sexual insanity. Sex in Tiptree's writing is frankly portrayed, a sometimes playful but more often threatening force. Before the revelation of Sheldon's identity, Tiptree was often referred to as unusually feminist for a male SF writer — particularly for "The Women Men Don't See", a story of two women who are visited by aliens and, rather than being abducted, go willingly to escape their limited opportunities on Earth. However, Sheldon's view of sexual politics could be ambiguous, as in the somewhat colorless and ruthless society of female clones in "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?" Sheldon's two novels, produced toward the end of her career, were not as critically well received as her best-known stories but continued to explore similar themes. Some of her best-regarded work can be found in the collection, Her Smoke Rose Up Forever, available in paperback as of 2004. Death Sheldon continued writing under the Tiptree pen name for another decade. On May 19, 1987, at age 71, Sheldon took the life of her 84-year-old, nearly blind husband and then took her own. (Contrary to rumor, her husband did not have Alzheimer's Disease.) They were found dead, hand in hand in bed, in their Virginia home; the suicide note Sheldon left had been written years earlier, and saved until needed. In an interview with Charles Platt in the early 1980s Sheldon spoke of her emotional problems and previous suicide attempts. Much of her work contains dark and pessimistic elements, which in retrospect can be seen as reflective of her troubled emotions.[2] The James Tiptree, Jr. Award is given in her honor each year for a work of science fiction or fantasy that expands or explores our understanding of gender; funds for the award are raised in part by bake sales. Quotes about James Tiptree, Jr "James Tiptree's surface was often airy and at times hilarious, and her control of genre conventions allowed her to convey the bleakness of her abiding insights in tales that remain seductively readable; but she was, in the end, incapable of dissimulation." — from The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, by John Clute and Peter Nicholls "Sheldon was simply one of the best short-story writers of our day....She has already had an enormous impact on upcoming generations of SF writers. Her footprints are all over cyberpunk turf (...)" — Gardner Dozois, in Locus magazine, 1987 "Her stories and novels are humanistic, while her deep concern for male-female (even human-alien) harmony ran counter to the developing segregate-the-sexes drive amongst feminist writers; What her work brought to the genre was a blend of lyricism and inventiveness, as if some lyric poet had rewritten a number of clever SF standards and then passed them on to a psychoanalyst for final polish." — Brian Aldiss, Trillion Year Spree "'Tip' was a crucial part of modern SF's maturing process (...)'He'(...) wrote powerful fiction challenging readers' assumptions about everything, especially sex and gender." — Suzy McKee Charnas, The Women's Review of Books "[Tiptree's work is] proof of what she said, that men and women can and do speak both to and for one another, if they have bothered to learn how." — Ursula K. Le Guin, Khatru Bibliography Ten Thousand
Light-Years from Home (1973) Novels Up the Walls of
the World (1978) Other collections Neat Sheets: The
Poetry of James Tiptree, Jr. (1996) Adaptations "The Girl Who Was
Plugged In" (1998) - television film for the series Welcome to Paradox
Major awards Hugo Awards: 1974
(Best Novella, "The Girl Who Was Plugged In") and 1977 (Best Novella,
"Houston, Houston, Do You Read?") References Profile in April
1983 issue of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. "James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com If you lived in
McLean, Va., in the 1960s and '70s, you probably ran into Alice B.
Sheldon. You might have seen her shopping for dresses at Lord & Taylor's
or buying gardening supplies at Hechinger's. But you would not have
known that under the pseudonym "James Tiptree Jr.," she wrote works that
were at the vortex of gender wars that raged in the world of science
fiction. Sheldon was born Alice Bradley in Chicago. Her mother, Mary Bradley, was an accomplished popular novelist and lecturer. Her father, Herbert, was a real estate developer who made enough money to pursue his fantasy of exploring Africa. The Bradleys made three trips to Africa from 1921 onward, taking their daughter with them each time. The expeditions did little to advance science but provided Mary Bradley with material for several bestsellers, some featuring Alice. But for a 6-year-old Alice, seeing animals routinely die in the wilderness was emotionally scarring. Though intelligent, Alice soon ran into the barriers imposed on women of her generation. For the rest of her life, she rebelled against femininity -- cotillions, fashion, frills -- and the idea that men command and women obey. "Being stuck in traditional roles was one of the great sources of Alice's anger," Phillips writes, but "often that anger was directed at other women. About girls and women, Alice was always ambivalent. She wanted to like them, but was regularly disappointed by their failure to take their future seriously, by their artificiality, later by their reluctance to think politically and their willingness to put up with the status quo." In her twenties, Phillips argues, Alice concluded that "the only way to survive as an intelligent woman was to think of herself as a secret exception -- not really a woman at all." Such thinking led her to adopt a male pseudonym 30 years later. Sheldon went to Sarah Lawrence and dabbled in painting and writing, but dropped out. After an unfortunate first marriage, she found some happiness in the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps. She became a skilled photo interpreter, able to pick out targets for Allied bombers. The Army rewarded her by shipping her to Germany, where she spent the last year of the war. The colonel commanding the intelligence unit where she worked was Huntington "Ting" Sheldon. They dated and married in 1945. After a failed venture in chicken farming, Alice Sheldon spent three years interpreting photos for the CIA. (Ting remained a high-ranking CIA officer until his retirement.) She went back to college, getting her bachelor's degree and, in 1965, a doctorate in psychology from George Washington University. Not wanting to teach, Sheldon decided to try writing science fiction. We know very little about why she liked sf. When she was a teenager, an uncle introduced her to pulp sf magazines. In the 1950s, she tried to sell a few stories; all were rejected, Like much else in her life, her development as an sf writer remains cloudy and obscure. But when she started writing again in her fifties, she had become a mature artist. Sheldon thought her professional career as a psychologist would be ruined if her love for sf was found out, so she decided to write under a pseudonym. One day at the supermarket, she found a jar of Tiptree jam from England. Inspired, she became "James Tiptree Jr." Science fiction at the time was in a war between the "Old Wave" that believed in scientific accuracy and a "New Wave" that made literary values paramount. Tiptree's work fell into both camps -- scientifically accurate but passionately concerned with gender and power. In the award-winning novella "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?" (1974), Tiptree portrayed a world where male astronauts return to an Earth where an epidemic has wiped out all men, leaving an all-female society of clones who have eradicated war, hierarchy and violence. In "The Women Men Don't See" (1972), tough CIA operative Don Fenton hopes to save some women from an alien invasion, only to find that the women prefer the aliens to being ruled by men. "What women do is survive," one of the women tells Fenton. "We live by ones and twos in the chinks of your world-machine." As Tiptree, Sheldon acquired a reputation in sf as the man who really understood women. While keeping her distance from the field and keeping her background mysterious, she wrote long, passionate letters to Ursula Le Guin full of news about Le Guin's family, gossip and discussions of favorite stories and poems. To other correspondents, Tiptree displayed rage and pain. (These emotions, Phillips writes, may well have been enhanced by Sheldon's excessive use of coffee, cigarettes and amphetamines.) In 1973, editor Harry Harrison said he would be in Washington and invited Tiptree to come downtown and have a drink. Tiptree declined the invitation. "My life is a mixed up mess right now," she wrote. "I have personal problems like other people have termites. I'm barely viable . . . The last time well-meaning pals tried to cheer me up, I ended sitting around with my .38 in my mouth." "The disparity between Alli's [Sheldon's] pretended gender and her real feelings was really confusing and bewildering," Le Guin said in an interview with Phillips. "It's kind of upsetting, that sort of insecurity in a man." For several years in the 1970s, Sheldon had to deal with her aging, ailing mother. In 1976, Mary Bradley died at age 94. In letters, Tiptree had written about a mother who was an African explorer, and sf writers read the obituaries and made the connection between Sheldon and Tiptree. After her male pseudonym was revealed, Sheldon wrote little for three years. Her later work lacked the passion and force of her "male" writing. As critic John Clute notes, James Tiptree's major theme was death. "It is very rarely that a James Tiptree story," Clute writes, "does not directly deal with death and end in a death of the spirit, or of all hope, or of the body, or of the race." "I've lived so deep under masks," Sheldon wrote interviewer Charles Platt in 1982, "my interior was built to satisfy me alone -- I have lived almost 60 years alone, mentally, and quite content to have it so." For much of the 1980s, she told several of her correspondents that she would kill herself when Ting died. She had no close friends and was an atheist. So when Ting gradually went blind, Alice Sheldon decided that the only solution was to kill him and commit suicide, which she did in 1987. Her suicide note had been written eight years earlier. In sf, Alice Sheldon's chief legacy is the James Tiptree Award, given annually for the best feminist sf. Her work blazed a trail that other women have followed. Julie Phillips does an excellent job in telling Sheldon's story. Reviewed by Martin
Morse Wooster ________________ American Buddha Librarian's Comments: [AB-1] Oh, I don't think so. "James Tiptree, Jr." -- "James" most likely stands for the King James Bible; "tree" is always phallus; tipping means following the age-old Illuminati agenda of creating a new world order genesis that has Satan at the head, instead of God, and is, additionally, a play on the movie, "Tipping the Velvet," about lesbian love and obsession with artificial phalluses; and "Jr." is in reverence of aristocracy. This lady is totally revolting. That she would be given to us women as an icon is the height of misogyny. See "Misogyny" section in David Lindsay's "A Voyage to Arcturus." |
