« Another note on Orpheus | Main | Oh, Valinda! »
September 14, 2006
"Dust from the future ... What's it going to tell you? That the future has dust in it?"
A friend recently sent me an aerial photo with an odd curved line though it, asking me if I thought it was the remains of an old road. (Sure why not? I replied.) What I thought first, however, was "We need James Tiptree, Jr."
James Tiptree, Jr. was the pen name of Alice Sheldon, a Major in the Army trained in interpreting intelligence photos taken from the air. She also had a Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology and worked for the newly-formed CIA. She wrote SF, won awards, and signed letters and books under her male pen name -- keeping her secret so carefully that her identity would not be known until 1978, after ten years of writing. Her biography and her accomplishments were so conventionally male (and much of her short fiction was such a fine and exacting parody of the machismo common in then-contemporary SF) that Robert Silverbergs brief biography of Tiptree in his introduction to the story "A Momentary Taste of Being" did not blink at calling Tiptree "a man of middle years." (p. 88 The New Atlantis ed. Silverberg, also part of the Sprague Browsing collection.)
(Although I wonder, as others have, if signing herself 'Tip' (instead of 'James' or 'Jim' or 'Tiptree') was a reference to Ozma of Oz -- if you dont understand this why, then please read L. Frank Baum's second Oz book. (You dont have to have read the first one to understand it, except for the world it is a completely independent book.) The Oz books were the Harry Potter books of their own day, and in the right time for Tiptree of have read them herself as a girl.)
This anthology contains one of Tiptrees early stories, 'The Man Who Walked Home.' It first appeared in Amazing Science Fiction Stories in 1972; Tiptree started publishing in 1968. This story is an unusual mix of pastoral post-apocalypticism and time travel gone wrong (or is that 'gone right'?) It discusses magical thinking vs. science and is fundamentally optimistic about human nature: it is the first post-apocalyptic work Ive read in a long time that was disquieting but not depressing.
You can read an appreciation of Tiptree’s legacy in Ursula K. LeGuins book of essays called The Language of the Night. There is also a new biography of Alice Sheldon called: James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon by Julie Phillips.
Tiptrees legacy is honored by an award in her name: http://www.tiptree.org/
-LV
Posted by lisav at September 14, 2006 10:23 PM