But then the first two stories sold—and the next, and the next, and I was stuck with “Tiptree, James Jr.” I thought this was a good joke, and greatly enjoyed my anonymity. (I am a reclusive type, afraid of meeting people, except on paper.) I went happily on writing stories, all of which, to my amazement, continued to sell—and I was quite unaware of the curiosity I was provoking in the SF community. (A squad of fans once actually staked out my McLean P.O. box when the big convention was in D.C.—luckily I was in Canada at the time.) Quite a few pages were written elucidating what I must be, and while a certain number of observant souls deduced that I must be a woman, nobody really knew, and others were as positive that I was male.
The stories I wrote then were just about the same as I write today, with one exception: A few violently prowoman ideas came to me, and I saw that they were simply noncredible under a man’s name, so I invented a female pseudonym (Raccoona Sheldon) for these. Raccoona lived in Wisconsin, and her mail was a terrible headache to the local postmistress—and me.
During all that decade of being James I corresponded freely with all sorts of SF people, principally as a result of my habit of writing fan letters to writers I admired. And I made what I thought were good friends. I always told the plain truth about myself in my letters; my biography is ambisexual—Army, government, academe. I also told a few close friends about my trials with my aged, widowed mother, then living, or rather, dying in Chicago, and that she had been an African explorer and writer. So when Mary did die, in 1977, one of these friends saw the newspaper obituaries, and my secret was out.
Oddly enough, that shattered me. I felt I could never write again. My secret world had been invaded, and the attractive figure of Tiptree—he did strike several people as attractive—was revealed as nothing but an old lady in Virginia. No more speculations about my “mysterious” travels, or that I might be the secret spymaster of the CIA. And worse, I was no longer able to be my female correspondents’ “understanding” male friend, or say things to editors, like “Why aren’t there any women writers in this anthology?” Now I was just another woman, with my own tale of woes. No magic. And I stood ashamed before the women writers who had used their own female names in cracking the predominantly male world of SF. I had taken the easy path.
But was it easier, getting accepted as a man? I can’t honestly tell, except by indirection.
You see, after the revelation, quite a few male writers who had been, I thought, my friends and called themselves my admirers, suddenly found it necessary to adopt a condescending, patronizing tone, or break off altogether, as if I no longer interested them. (I can only conclude that I didn’t.) If that is how I would have been received from the start, my hat is off to those brave women writing as women.
And there have been no more Nebulas, except one to Raccoona. No more Hugos. I can’t believe that the quality of my stuff has deteriorated so suddenly. Of course, though, it may be that I withdrew too many stories at the last minute. For example, I pulled out “The Women Men Don’t See” when it looked like winning, because I thought too many women were rewarding a man for being so insightful, and that wasn’t fair. People may have thought I undervalued the award. So that isn’t a clear result of my sex change. But it is depressing, since I personally think one or two of my best have been written since then.
But as I think it over, and think also of the fact that some of the male writers who have been a touch snotty to me seem to be genuinely friendly to other women writers, I think there is a deeper problem. People dislike being fooled, and, quite innocently, I did fool them for ten years. Moreover, it seems to be very important, especially to men, to know the sex of the person they are dealing with. What’s the use of being Number One in a field of two—i.e., male—if people can’t tell the difference? I had not only fooled them, I had robbed them of relative status. Clearly, friendship is out of the question after that.
So there is my somewhat unconventional history of male/female relations in my work. And I believe it answers certain aspects of other questions too. Those which remain seem to have to do with writing itself.
As to how I develop a character, I do it the same way we come to know people in life—by seeing what they do, and listening to what they say. I haven’t had occasion to develop any very complicated characters yet, like, say for example a wily hypocrite. I would do this, I imagine, by showing his hypocrisy. He might be driving along in a car, expatiating on his good-heartedness and universal sympathy, and suddenly a child lets his puppy loose in the street ahead. The car hits it, the child screams—and Mr. Benevolent simply accelerates, continuing to talk.
I believe this is how all writers develop character, some more subtly than others. Oh, and there is a useful way of doing it fast, by reporting what other characters say or think about the subject. But that’s nothing new, either.
And as to what kind of writer I think I am, and how I fit in the world of SF, I believe I am, as I mentioned, an idea writer with a talent for fleshing out what might be impersonal ideas, like say time travel, so that the reader takes them as real.
And I am also, deep down, a teller of cautionary tales. “If this goes on—Look Out!” I sometimes wonder if my readers get the cautionary element, or whether it is buried under too much color and flesh. For instance, one of my Nebula winners was a tale of an alien race who have a set of powerful instinctual drives that are carrying them to disaster. Part of my intent, in addition to telling a good story, was to warn of the dangers of yielding to instinctive behavior, like our own patterns of aggression. But no one, speaking of the story, seems to have drawn this analogy. Such are the pitfalls of setting up your message as the under-theme—although I’d have thought its title (“Love Is the Plan the Plan Is Death”) rather gave things away.
Which concludes all I know of myself as SF writer. I look forward to reading what my sisters will report—doubtless they will say insightful things that open whole new boxes. But I must go back to doing whatever it is we do at the typewriter, and in keeping faith with the small but devoted band of left-handed penguins whom I see as my readers.
—December 1986
Chronology Of Publications
Here, in as close to the order of composition as I could determine, is a complete list of Alice Sheldon’s science fiction. I used, whenever possible, the date of first submission to an editor. The stories are grouped by year of composition, with year of publication in parentheses.
1967
Birth of a Salesman (1968)
Fault (1968)
Faithful to Thee, Terra, in Our Fashion (1968)
Your Haploid Heart (1969)
Mama Come Home (1968)
1968
Help (1968)
Please Don’t Play with the Time Machine (1998)
The Last Flight of Doctor Ain (1969)
Meet Me at Infinity (1972)
Last Night and Every Night (1970)
Beam Us Home (1969)
Happiness Is a Warm Spaceship (1969)
A Day Like Any Other (1973)
I’m Too Big but I Love to Play (1970)
And I Have Come Upon This Place by Lost Ways (1972)
1969
The Snows Are Melted, the Snows Are Gone (1969)
Through a Lass Darkly (1972)
The Girl Who Was Plugged In (1973)
Amberjack (1972)
The Night-blooming Saurian (1970)
The Milk of Paradise (1972)
Painwise (1972)
And So On, and So On (1971)
1970
Mother in the Sky with Diamonds (1971)
The Peacefulness of Vivyan (1971)
The Man Doors Said Hello To (1970)
I’ll Be Waiting for You When the Swimming Pool Is Empty (1971)
1971
Love Is the Plan the Plan Is Death (1973)
All the Kinds of Yes (1972)
The Man Who Walked Home (1972)
And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill’s Side (1972)
On the Last Afternoon (1972)
Forever to a Hudson Bay Blanket (1972)
1972
The Women Men Don’t See (1973)
Angel Fix (1974)
The Trouble Is Not in Your Set (2000)
Press Until the Bleeding Stops (1975)
1975
Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (1974)
A Momentary Taste of Being (1975)
The Earth Doth Like a Snake Renew (1988)
1974
Houston, Houston, Do You Read? (1976)
The Psychologist Who Wouldn’t Do Awful Things to Rats (1976)
Beaver Tears (1976)
Your Faces, O My Sisters! Your Faces Filled of Light! (1976)
She Waits for All Men Born (1976)
1976
Time-Sharing Angel (1977)
Up the Walls of the World (1978)
The Screwfly Solution (1977)
1977
Slow Music (1980)
We Who Stole the Dream (1978)
1978
A Source of Innocent Merriment (1980)
1980
What Came Ashore at Lirios (1981)
The Boy Who Waterskied to Forever (1982)
Beyond the Dead Reef (1982)
Excursion Fare (1981)
Out of the Everywhere (1981)
With Delicate Mad Hands (1981)
1985
Brightness Falls from the Air (1985)
1984
Morality Meat (1985)
The Only Neat Thing to Do (1985)
Good Night, Sweethearts (1986)
1985
All This and Heaven Too (1985)
Collision (1986)
Trey of Hearts (2000)
Our Resident Djinn (1986)
Second Going (1987)
1986
Come Live with Me (1988)
Yanqui Doodle (1987)
Backward, Turn Backward (1988)
The Color of Neanderthal Eyes (1988)
1987
In Midst of Life (1987)
Notes
[←1]
See “The Laying on of Hands.”
[←2]
Note of Historical Interest: What we actually enlisted in was not the Army, but the A.U.S., or “Army of the United States,” which disbanded at peace. All the civilians went home, or enlisted in the Regular Army, and most majors and generals went back to being sergeants and lieutenants in the Army. The AUS is a creature of wartime national mobilization, and members of the “real” Army showed some condescension toward their jumped-up “civilian” colleagues and temporary superior officers.
But how many readers would recognize “enlistment in the AUS” today?
[←3]
The converse fall from favor of an artist immensely popular in his day has also been seen, but far more rarely and with such conspicuous exceptions as Titian and Rubens, inter alia… Will Picasso’s work go the way of Titian or of Sargent and Bouguereau?
[←4]
Of whom Jeffrey D. Smith (see below) is the leading candidate. It is the author’s belief that Jeff, Tiptree’s earliest and best pen-friend, could easily have winkled out Tip’s identity years earlier, had not honor impeded him. Only when the public press all but spelled it out did he feel sufficiently released from his self-imposed vow not to “pry,” to write Tip a direct inquiry—thus enabling his friend to keep his (her) promise that when the matter came out Jeff should be the first to know.
[←5]
If it needs saying in these days of Chrissie and Navratilova, I can confirm from personal experience that normal women do experience the joy-of-physical-combat-between-comrades, a type of bonding supposedly confined to Captain Kirk. Only, among women, the constraint of protecting body parts needed by the next generation (and which men too, by tacit consent also protect) is so very much more awkward.
[←6]
I was mistaken in thinking I’d found a field Mary hadn’t preempted, but it wasn’t until the 1950s, when I dug into some old boxes—and found that she had a nice hand at watercolors. I don’t know whether she’d been too busy or too tactful to mention it, but I think if I’d known this as a child I’d have flung myself from the roof. And to close the circle—near his death, I found that Father too had once written a tale for the pulps, under another name: Lord, how I wish the other nine had lived!
[←7]
As also to the Gestalt psychologist.
[←8]
I left out verbiage supporting this, people have tried to feralize them. But this isn’t a journal article.
[←9]
Please notice that I said women are evolved to rear children, not to enjoy it or find it totally fulfilling. To say that they are not so evolved is to fly in the face of all we see in other primates. And watch any pair of parents with a newborn baby. It is the mother who is in her element.
Meet Me at Infinity Page 42
