I hold James Tiptree Jr in high esteem, as a writer, and as a person who managed to hoodwink science fiction regarding her gender for several years. Yes, her, because James Tiptree Jr was a pseudonym of Alice Sheldon — although it’s unlikely anyone who encountered Tiptree’s fiction after 1977, the year she was “unmasked”, was unaware of Tiptree’s real gender. Certainly I knew Tiptree to be a female writer when I first encountered her fiction in the early 1980s.
But esteeming a writer is not the same as admiring all of their fiction. And Tiptree was chiefly a writer of short fiction. (Of course, it’s usually the reverse: admiring a writer’s fiction but recognising they’re a complete arsehole as a person; does that matter? But that’s an argument for another day.) Anyway, Tiptree wrote a number of classic science fiction stories — her ‘And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill’s Side’ (1972) remains a personal favourite. Bur she was also quite prolific, publishing over seventy-five stories between 1968 and 1987, the year of her death, not to mention several published after her death — and let’s not mention the relatively recent manufactured controversy over her death which saw the Tiptree Award rename itself the Otherwise Award (an especially irritating change as I was honour-listed for the Tiptree and liked being associated with her).
But my point is that Tiptree wrote a large number of short stories, and reworked many earlier ones, which saw print later under new titles. She’s remembered for a handful of really excellent pieces, as well she should be, and Warm Worlds and Otherwise (1975, USA) contains some of them. There’s ‘The Women Men Don’t See’ (1973), which actually doesn’t feel much like a Triptree story, and is both beautifully understated and beautifully-understated science-fiction. It is a favourite.
Also included is ‘The Girl Who Was Plugged In’ (1973), which paints an astonishing — for 1973 —portrait of the near-future, prescient in some respects (although what futurist could predict the impact of an idiot like Elon Musk), and an entirely sympathetic story of unrequited love, but is these days perhaps chiefly notable for its chatty narrative.
This is not unique to ‘The Girl Who Was Plugged In’. Many of Tiptree’s stories directly address the reader, almost as if they were oral, stories told to the “reader” by some charismatic raconteur in a pub or bar. Unfortunately, the language used positions that raconteur as an American… and it doesn’t work for non-USian readers. If anything, it adds another layer of strangeness.
And yet, Tiptree tried for strangeness, deliberately framing stories using narratives which were not demotic USian. Such as ‘Love is the Plan, the Plan is Death’, another highly-regarded story, but, which, to be honest, I couldn’t much see the point of. An alien, perhaps modelled on spiders or wasps, grows to adulthood, discovers its actual reproductive mechanism, and is, er, well, the story isn’t really anything.
To be honest, Warms Worlds and Otherwise is mainly worth reading for ‘The Women Men Don’t See’ and ‘The Girl Who Was Plugged In’. But it’s also worth reading because it’s a collection by James Tiptree Jr.
Any controversy attached to Tiptree’s name these days is entirely manufactured. Her stories are, to be fair, historical documents, but they’re interesting historical documents, in a way that novels by Robert A Heinlein or EE ‘Doc’ Smith or Larry Niven are not. There’s a tendency to ascribe the same level of quality to every story by such writers as the best they produced, and that’s unfair on both them and their readers. Tiptree wrote a number of stone-cold science fiction classics, but not everything she wrote has survived the test of time.
Know her, know her best work. Know her impact on the genre. Know that women have been writing science fiction since the genre’s beginnings — even if some of them used a male pseudonym. And fooled everyone when it came to their gender. I read the SF Gateway edition of Warm Worlds and Otherwise, which doesn’t include the introduction by Robert Silverberg, in which he wrote:
It has been suggested that Tiptree is female, a theory that I find absurd, for there is to me something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree’s writing.
Do we celebrate Tiptree for fooling Silverberg? Or do we point out that gendered views of science fiction are just simply wrong, archaic, and evidence of systemic misogyny in sf?
Because Tiptree solved nothing and her unmasking changed very little. She wrote some blinding sf stories, but it’s hard to see what other impact she might have had — other than naming an award, which was quick to distance itself from her when someone many years later questioned the circumstances surrounding her death… but let’s not go there. Women had written sf before her, and continued to do so after her identity had been revealed. Some of those women writers used their initials so that casual readers might not realise they were female — but they did not hide their gender. Even now, there are writers who prefer to use their initials on their work, such as multi-Hugo Award-winning NK Jemisin.
Personally, I think Tiptree was an important writer in sf, and not just because of her masquerade. She wrote some very influential stories — and a couple of personal favourites of mine — but I suspect her reputation has been inflated because of the deception she pulled on the world of US science fiction. She’s worth reading because when she was good she was very, very good, but most of her stories are very much of their time, especially in their use of language, particularly the invented slang. And, of course, the invented technology.
Read her best work, but read the rest as historical documents.
