James Tiptree Jr. – Wis[s]e Words

I’m sort of reworking a MetaFilter comment into a post here, so bear with me, as I got a brainwave after some chance remarks about James Tiptree, Jr. As you know Bob, James Tiptree was in reality Alice B. Sheldon, who spent over a decade pretending to be a male writer and who during that time was feted as one of the few male science fiction writers actually able to grok women. Somebody asked why it was that so many people believed Tiptree for so long and whether this was all sexism, which somebody else said it was pure sexism and ignorance.

That too dismissive a response crystallised something for me, as I realised it wasn’t so much that these old time science fiction authors like Ellison or Robert Silverberg just couldn’t bring themselves to believe somebody who was that good a writer could be anything other than a male, but that they wanted to believe that it was possible for a male author to portray a female point of view and female characters so well as Tiptree did. Even in the early seventies there were female sf authors, even if they often had to hide between male sounding names (Andre Norton) or the careful use of initials (C. L. Moore), so that really couldn’t be the problem people had with Tiptree.

In fact, debate about his gender had been raging for years, with quite a few people convinced he was a pseudonym for a female writer, while others, like Silverberg, continuing to see something ineluctably masculine in him. What helped confirm the latter camp in their beliefs was that quite a few of them had had personal contact with Tiptree, writing lettres to each other, in which he presented the same as he did in public, so how could he be a woman?

But of course he was, which may have come as a disappointment to some people, who had hoped that it was possible for a writer with such an insight into, such empathy for women to be male, who saw Tiptree as a male counterpart to a Joanna Russ or Ursula LeGuin. Sadly, it wasn’t the case and somebody else had to prove that it was not impossible for a male science fiction writer to write about “womens issues”…

Cover of 10,000 Light-Years from Home

10,000 Light-Years from Home
James Tiptree, Jr.
255 pages
published in 1973

Ther may have been something ineluctably masculine about James Tiptree Jr’s writing, as Robert Silverberg will never live down writing in his appreciation of Tiptree, but he’s still part of my Year of Reading Women project. Because as we all know now, but Silverberg didn’t, “James Tiptree Jr” was a pseudonym for Alice B. Sheldon. Sheldon’s reasons for chosing a male pseudonym were many and complex and if you want to know all about it, read Julie Phillips James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon. Suffice to say that at the time of 10,000 Light-Years from Home, Tiptree’s first collection, the secret was not out yet, as is obvious from Harry Harrison’s introduction, full of what “he” did during the war. All of which was true by the way, just with the genders flipped.

James Tiptree, Jr. therefore was an obvious entry for my little project; the reason I chose this particular collection was just because this was the only one at hand. I’ve read quite a lot of Tiptree stories, as well as several under her other pseudonym, Raccoona Sheldon, but mostly through various anthologies rather than her own collections. Because 10,000 Light-Years from Home is such an early collection it misses most of Tiptree’s best stories. Worse, some of her better known early stories, like e.g. “The Last Flight of Dr. Ain” or “Your Haploid Heart” are also missing. Yet what remains is still a very good collection of short stories any writer could be proud of. What struck me is that some of the stories in this collection could’ve been published in Analog unaltered, which is not what you’d expect from Tiptree’s reputation as a “difficult”, too feminist, New Wave writer who helped ruined science fiction, as some of the troglodytes online would have it.

Articles with the Tag James Tiptree Jr.

When Tiptree was still a man

10,000 Light-Years from Home — James Tiptree, Jr.