Tiptree

James Tiptree Jr., aka Racoona Seldon, aka Alice Sheldon

James Tiptree Jr. was the pseudonym of one Alice Bradley Sheldon, who in the middle of an adventurous life -- her parents had taken her to Africa to kill gorillas on the Ackley expeditions; she had worked for the CIA and married an ex-CIA agent; she had a PhD in experimental psychology and raised chickens-- began writing brilliant SF stories which, while displaying many traits of traditional hard SF, posed some dark questions about gender arrangements and biological imperatives. Between publishing her first stories in 1968 and revealing her actual identity in 1977, she accumulated a series of awards while building an intimate circle of correspondents, including some of the foremost of contemporary SF writers such as Ursula LeGuin, Samuel (Chip) Delany, and Joanna Russ. "Love is the Plan the Plan is Death," a wildly tender but finally monstrous story, earned her first Nebula Award, the same year (1973) as her novella "The Girl who was Plugged In" won a Hugo. In 1976 another novella, "Houston, Houston Do You Read?" a take-off on Gilman's feminist utopia Herland in which three male explorers stumble across a world without men, garnered a triple play of Nebula, Hugo and Jupiter Awards. And the next year, under the alternate pseudonym of Racoona Sheldon, she wrote another creepy, tragic tale linking sex and violence with ecological devastation: "The Screwfly Solution" won another Nebula, for best novelette. The revelation that genial masculine Uncle Tip was a woman, was a minor scandal in the SF world, disappointing some who had though Tiptree to be that rare man who understood how women think while simultaneously proving that "masculine" style is not biologically determined. In all Tiptree/Shedlon published some 65 short stories, three novels, and a good deal of commentary on SF contained in letters, interviews, and fanzine panels. After her dual suicide with her terminally ill husband in 1987, the James Tiptree Jr. Award was established to honor a "work of science fiction or fantasy in one year which best explores & expands gender roles."

Bibliography

My List of Tiptree's Fiction in Chronological Order

My Annotated Descriptions of Tiptree's Short Stories

My List of Interviews, Reviews and Other Non-Fiction

Very Through Primary Bibliography from ISFDB

Teaching and Reading