"Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” came a bit later in 1974, was published in 1976, and won both the Nebula and Hugo Awards. Some male astronauts are thrown forward in time, and discover that world is now populated by women. No men. What would this world be like? Would some of the more terrifying sexual politics be out of the picture? No such luck ... since it's a world of clones (the only way to survive the epidemic that wiped out the men), and the clones can't really handle the men. The ending is ambiguous only in that the men are either put to death or filed away in permanent isolation.
In the mid-1970s, Sheldon created a second pseudonym, a woman named Raccoona Sheldon. Raccoona didn't get as much recognition as Tiptree, but one of her stories, “The Screwfly Solution,” won the Nebula Award in 1977. It's a horrifying story—aliens attack our civilization by the simple means of amping up the aggressiveness of men's sexuality. Soon men are murdering women all around the world. It's another story with an epitaph of one kind or another for a conclusion.
The Tiptree story I always remember most vividly is “Milk of Paradise” from Harlan Ellison's Again, Dangerous Visions (published in 1972). It's a story of profound sexual and personal disappointment, told in evocative detail. Unlike some of her other stories, there is no death involved, but there is the same sense of biological impulses gone so awry that mad or impossible choices are the only ones left.
One other story that's worth mentioning, at least for its level of pertinence here, is “The Women Men Don't See.” A plane with three passengers in it crashes in the wilderness—a government agent and a mother and daughter. In addition to trying to survive, they encounter some aliens. The mother and daughter make the surprising decision to leave with the aliens. As Phillips puts it: “By showing women longing to leave Earth for the stars, it describes women's alienation in terms any male science fiction reader can instantly recognize” (280). This is the story that Karen Joy Fowler riffs off of in her story, “What I Didn't See"—see the next review. Sheldon withdrew “The Women Men Don't See” from Nebula consideration after it reached the final ballot.
Sheldon wrote two novels as Tiptree, Up the Walls of the World in 1978 and Brightness Falls from the Air in 1985. Neither had the same impact as Tiptree's short work. As is obvious even from my brief summaries, the Tiptree short stories were explosive stuff, and in addition to being well written and convincing, the ideas in each story couldn't help but leave an impression on the reader's mind. The longer works got lost in the mechanics of creating a large-scale structure—the shorter form seemed ideally suited to Sheldon's strengths.
Tiptree as a pseudonym lasted from the late 1960s until 1976. The revelation of Sheldon's identity came because of the death of her mother, which Tiptree wrote about in letters to friends with one detail too many. The obituary for Mary Sheldon said that she had been an explorer in Africa and that she was survived by one daughter—the game was up. Sheldon wrote to some close friends about it—Ursula K. Le Guin and Joanna Russ in particular—but the rest of the process of telling people she had gotten to know through the mail was haphazard.
The uncovering of Tiptree as Sheldon marked the termination of Tiptree's productivity. Friends had tried as hard as they could to reverse the impact of the circumstances in Sheldon's early life—surely she could write openly under her own name! But it was all too ingrained, the moment was past. Sheldon's essential isolation and depression were getting worse, and advancing age seemed to leach out the last bits of hope. In May of 1987, she shot her ailing husband and then herself.
Phillips’ biography of Tiptree/Sheldon conveys an overwhelming sense of lost potential and thwarted ambition in one life. At least at first glance. A more hopeful way of looking at it would be to say that Sheldon overcame enormous obstacles—alienation, lack of role models, depression—to write 8 years’ worth of remarkable stories. It's like the romantic lament about the death of Keats—if only he had not died so young! But you can turn it around too: the other way to look at it is to marvel that Keats produced so much in such a short span of time. Likewise Sheldon. Circumstances and time conspired against Sheldon and Tiptree, but there was a happy window when she conspired right back.
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The James Tiptree Award Anthology 1, edited by Karen Joy Fowler, Pat Murphy, Debbie Notkin, and Jeffrey D. Smith, Tachyon, 2005, 302 pp.
In the early 1990s, a new award was announced and organized: the Tiptree. As the back cover of this volume helpfully points out, the award “honors fiction that explores and expands gender.” What might this mean? What kind of writing would be honoured by such an award? As we'll see, these are open questions, and the Tiptree Award is designed to keep them open.
In 1991, awards in science fiction and fantasy were not the crowded field that they are today. The Tiptree has held its own, however, mainly due to its unique aim and its unique structure. It recognizes no distinction between novels and short stories, it is a juried award, and it has the specific goal of shaking up readers and their understanding of gender. The judges have to figure out the meaning of “best story or novel” in this context, each and every year.
Tachyon, the noted small press, is the publisher of this ongoing series of anthologies. The series tries to represent the award and what it has done—two volumes are already in print, and a third volume arrives early in 2007. An award anthology series is not easy, and a book like this has to cover a number of difficult areas.
For one thing, this book has to be an ambassador for the Tiptree Award; first contact for those who might not have heard of the award before, but deep enough for the old hands. Volume 1 spends more time explaining the award, the jury process, and so forth, than the next entry in the series.
Secondly, Tachyon published the first anthology for the award in 2005, so nearly 15 years of material had already accumulated. How to represent this wealth of goodness? The first book does so obliquely, with a handful of older items and a general focus on the award's 2003 year for the fiction.
The award, as represented in a space-limited anthology, has an additional problem: insofar as I see it, the strongest material has been the novels (in a marked contrast between Tiptree's own work and the award given out in her name). There are no separate short and full-length categories in the Tiptree Award, unlike the Hugo or Nebula Awards, for example. That's fine, since a unified winner works well within the context of a thematic award like this one. But when it comes time to represent the award in anthology form, it breaks down a bit. If the novel winners have been the best exemplars of Tiptree-ness so far, how to represent this in a 300-page collection? It's an open question, but not one with a happy answer.
For setting the context of the award, this anthology relies on a variety of non-fiction pieces. The introduction, written by Pat Murphy and Karen Joy Fowler, does double duty introducing the award and this anthology, with a strong flavour of personal reminiscence. Next up is a piece from Tiptree/Sheldon herself, titled “Everything But the Signature Was Me.” Sheldon wrote this piece to a friend right after the revelation of her identity. Suzy McKee Charnas provides a piece called “Judging the Tiptree” which takes us into the actual process of picking the winners of the award. I found this fascinating, since it seems like a process in constant tumult.
Ursula K. Le Guin is represented here by a talk on the topic: “Genre: A Word Only a Frenchman Could Love.” The editors use key points from this essay to introduce the works by Ruff and Fowler—two works that push the boundaries of what might be generally classified as speculative fiction. As Le Guin puts it: “There are many bad books. There are no bad genres” (68).
The editors write small bits to introduce each piece. The book also has a fairly substantial section at the end, including a list of all winners and shortlists, divvied up by year, as well as acknowledgements and a section of bios for the authors and the editors.
On to the fiction! This volume has no story from Tiptree herself. I don't know why I was expecting one, since this is the award named in her honour, rather
an anthology of her writing. In any case, it might have been nice, since Tiptree's stories aren't as available as they used to be.
Two strong stories stand out from the rest of the fiction. Ruth Nestvold's “Looking Through Lace” rests on a relatively simple reversal or secret, but the rest of it is solidly written and convincing. The main character is a young female xenolinguist named Toni—she is called to a planet named Christmas to study the Mejan culture. Nestvold presents a neat puzzle, and she takes the time to present it just-so. It's the longest story in the collection.
Karen Joy Fowler's “What I Didn't See” is a deliberate referencing of Tiptree's famous story, “The Women Men Don't See,” but as the introduction points out, Fowler is playing with many other threads—"primate studies, King Kong, Belgian Congo politics, Tarzan, harems, spiders, and perilous card games” (191). Fowler also feeds some Tiptree biography into the mix as well, and the result is one of the smoothest and most deceptive postmodern stories of this type that I've read. A warning: knowing more about Sheldon's life makes the story much more effective.
The Tiptree Award winner in 2003 was Matt Ruff's novel Set this House in Order: A Romance of Souls. The editors have picked what seems like a good excerpt, but by necessity it still feels incomplete. We get a glimpse of the story: two people living with multiple personality disorder deal with it in as logical a manner as possible. Ruff's most famous novel is the perennial campus favourite, Fool on the Hill, and now I'm looking forward to reading this book too.
A few of the short stories don't work as well as the Nestvold and Fowler contributions. Geoff Ryman's “Birth Days” opens the fiction section of the book. The story skips ahead ten years at a time in the life of a young gay man, a structure which lets Ryman create some sharp bursts of speculation. “The Ghost Girls of Romney Mill” by Sandra MacDonald asks an unusual what-if: what if gender prejudice continued past the grave? Both stories are more mood pieces than satisfying narratives, if that's what you're looking for. Carol Emshwiller's “Boys” is one of those pseudo-Tepperish stories that sometimes pop up in her oeuvre. I like Emshwiller but this one feels a bit rote for her.
The weakest material in the book can be found in two places. Richard Calder's “The Catgirl Manifesto: An Introduction” tries to be a witty satire/engagement with the way gender is de/constructed in academia and pop culture. Unfortunately it fails, sinking under the weight of its own supposed cleverness.
The second place of weakness is unfortunately a major one, and it's a unit made up of the last three items in the book. The editors include three versions of “The Snow Queen,” starting with a new translation of the original by Hans Christian Andersen. Andersen's tale feels quite up to date and sharp, so much so that the two that follow and adapt it strike me as superfluous. Kara Dalkey's “The Lady of the Ice Garden” takes up Andersen's tale and maps it to a Japanese setting. Closing the book is Kelly Link's “Travels with the Snow Queen.” Link's story is a legitimate inclusion, since it shared the Tiptree in 1997 with Candas Jane Dorsey's Black Wine. But it's a case of too much of a good thing; with three versions of the same story in a row, there's not enough distinction between them.
So, a decent anthology: some non-fiction bric-a-brac that may or may not be of interest outside of the context of the Tiptree award, one novel that is now on my reading list, two strong stories, and an assortment of weaker fiction.
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The James Tiptree Award Anthology 2, edited by Karen Joy Fowler, Pat Murphy, Debbie Notkin, and Jeffrey D. Smith, Tachyon, 2006, 252 pp.
The second volume of the Tiptree Award anthology series features the same editors and the same basic format. This time around, the series has moved ahead to a basic focus on 2004, with a handful of older stories. The heart of the book seems to be Le Guin's “Another Story Or A Fisherman of the Inland Sea” which was first published in 1994. The other material is mostly more recent.
I'm still not quite sure how the novel excerpts might fit best into a collection like this. And this time around there are two; fortunately, the two books that shared the Tiptree Award in 2004, Joe Haldeman's Camouflage and Johanna Sinisalo's Troll, are both top-notch. The excerpts don't do the books justice—of course if it was possible to do them full justice in a shorter length, the authors would not have written novels.
Camouflage is a canny novel written in Haldeman's deceptively simple prose. There are three main characters, only one of them human. Russell is hired to raise an artifact from the Pacific Ocean—he's somewhat of a stereotypical engineer for this kind of a story, but grounds it in his practical nature. Two immortal aliens, both with the power to change shape and mimic human form, are part of the story too, one with a higher regard for human life than the other. I like how Haldeman takes an explore-the-alien-artifact story and gives it a twist, and yes, some of that twist is gender-related enough to draw the attention and approval of the Tiptree jury. The excerpt here gives a short piece from each of the three viewpoints.
Sinisalo's Troll is a different beast altogether. A hot young gay photographer who lives in Helsinki gets drunk one night, stumbles home after an unlucky night, and rescues a troll being beaten by a gang of thugs—how's that for a premise! It's clear to Angel that the troll, who he nicknames Pessi, is not feeling well, but what does a troll need to recuperate? A large part of the charm of the book is in Sinisalo's careful supply of troll history as Angel trawls the internet. I've seen this sort of faked-up pop culture/historical detritus before, but seldom done this well, and almost never to this effect. On top of all the things going on in Angel's life, Sinisalo throws in a mail-order bride who lives a confined life one floor down in Angel's apartment. The magic of Sinisalo's writing is how it all works together. In the excerpt quoted here, the editors take some passages from near the beginning of the book, leaving out much of the results of Angel's troll research.
Like Volume 1, Volume 2 relies on some non-fiction to outline the context for the award. There's more material about Tiptree, in the form of an excerpt from Phillips’ just-released biography of Sheldon. At least it looks like an excerpt at first. In fact it's called “Talking Too Much” and it's in the form of some reflections by Phillips and her experience in writing the biography of a writer who felt isolated and overly expressive at the same time.
Other non-fiction pieces include a letter written by Tiptree to a colleague, a Wiscon speech by Nalo Hopkinson, and a summary of recent research in gender/sex differences by Gwyneth Jones (a bit out of date by now since it was written in 1994).
"Another Story or A Fisherman of the Inland Sea” by Ursula K. Le Guin is the longest story in the book, clocking in at 42 pages. It reminded me of The Left Hand of Darkness or The Dispossessed—classic Hainish tales. Le Guin tells the story of a man named Hideo who grows up on a planet named O. He leaves to do research on a matter-transporter version of the ansible, without saying a proper goodbye to the woman he loves. A wrinkle in time helps him fix that mistake. The Tiptree Award angle comes from the unusual four-person marriages on O.
"The Gift” by L. Timmel Duchamp is relatively solid but a bit odd: Florentine is a travel writer, which in the future is more of a multimedia thing. She has enormous power to bring tourist dollars to a planet. She falls in love, but the love is not reciprocated. I liked this story, since it has a classic feel like Le Guin's novella.
"Congenital Agenesis of Gender Ideation by K.N. Sirsi and Sandra Botkin” by Raphael Carter is a pseudo-report on a phenomenon where people have trouble identifying the sex of the person they are talking to or observing. Like “The Catgirl Manifesto” in the previous volume, this story tries to play with narrative, in this case presenting itself as debate about an academic thesis.
Volume 2 has three other not so good stories. “Nirvana High” by Eileen Gunn and Leslie What is not my favourite story, since it tries to riff on Kurt Cobain and doesn't seem to go anywhere. “Five Fucks” by Jonathan Lethem is a weird and confrontational story, about two beings who gradually degrade every tim
e they sleep together. “All of Us Can Almost...” by Carol Emshwiller covers some familiar material for Emshwiller fans. It feels very Tiptree-ish. The Lethem story is from 1996, while the other two are from 2004.
And that's pretty much it. I like how the volume ends: “Kissing Frogs” by Jaye Lawrence wraps up the book, with a light piece with a nice twist. As the editors point out, this one is nearly irresistible as an endnote. But Volume 2 overall feels a bit like a ghost or a shadow of a full anthology. I think that's partly a function of trying to excerpt two novels rather than just one. As I've pointed out, Volume 3 is due to arrive soon—like any strong award, the Tiptree marches on. If the winners or nominees in a specific year are not to every reader's liking, the award reinvents itself the next year.
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Tiptree's work is not as easy to find as it once was. Her two novels are not in print, and the original short story collections are long gone as well. Tachyon has reprinted Her Smoke Rose Up Forever, now the only thing in print.
Information about the Tiptree Award can be found at the website www.tiptree.org, complete with winners and a handy reading list.
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James Schellenberg lives and writes in Ottawa. He currently works for science.gc.ca, a site which tries to organize science information for the government.
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As humans we are doubly lucky, of course: We enjoy not only the privilege of existence but also the singular ability to appreciate it and even, in a multitude of ways, to make it better. It is a talent we have only barely begun to grasp.
—Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything
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