James Tiptree Jr.

James Tiptree Jr. was one of the greatest science fiction writers of the twentieth century — and one of the most extraordinary literary mysteries. For a decade, from the late 1960s to the late 1970s, “Tiptree” published some of the most brilliant, disturbing, and technically accomplished short stories in the history of the genre, stories that explored sexuality, death, extinction, and the biological foundations of human behaviour with a ferocity and a formal precision that placed them among the finest American short fiction of any genre. The SF community was fascinated by the reclusive author who communicated only by letter and whose stories displayed such an unflinching understanding of male psychology that Robert Silverberg declared it “ineluctable” that Tiptree was male. When Tiptree was revealed in 1977 to be Alice Bradley Sheldon — a sixty-one-year-old woman who had worked in Army intelligence, held a PhD in psychology, and had been painting and travelling the world since childhood — the revelation became the most discussed event in the history of science fiction and a permanent case study in the relationship between gender and literary reception.

Alice Bradley Sheldon

Alice Bradley was born in Chicago in 1915 to Mary Hastings Bradley, a travel writer and novelist, and Herbert Bradley, a lawyer and explorer. She spent her childhood on expeditions to Africa and India with her parents — experiences that gave her an early acquaintance with danger, death, and the non-Western world. She was a precocious artist and, at nineteen, had a brief career as a painter.

She married twice — first to William Davey (divorced), then to Huntington Sheldon, a CIA officer — and worked in Army intelligence during the Second World War, eventually joining the CIA, where she served until 1955. She earned a PhD in experimental psychology from George Washington University in 1967, at the age of fifty-two, and it was during her doctoral research that she began writing science fiction under the pseudonym “James Tiptree Jr.” — a name she chose from a jar of Tiptree marmalade.

The Stories

Tiptree’s stories were unlike anything in science fiction. They were compressed, violent, darkly comic, and suffused with a vision of human biology as destiny that was simultaneously feminist and despairing. The best of them — collected in Ten Thousand Light-Years from Home (1973), Warm Worlds and Otherwise (1975), Star Songs of an Old Primate (1978), and the posthumous Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (1990) — constitute one of the great bodies of American short fiction.

“The Women Men Don’t See” (1973) was a story about two women who choose to leave Earth with aliens rather than continue to live in a world controlled by men — a story that perfectly captured both the feminist argument and the male narrator’s inability to comprehend it. “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” (1973, Hugo Award) was a cyberpunk narrative avant la lettre about a disfigured woman who remotely controls a beautiful synthetic body. “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” (1976, Hugo and Nebula Awards) depicted male astronauts discovering that Earth has become an all-female world. “The Screwfly Solution” (1977, written as Raccoona Sheldon, Nebula Award) imagined an alien invasion that exploits the biological link between male sexuality and violence.

The Unmasking and After

When Tiptree’s identity was revealed in 1977 — after a journalist traced the name to Alice Sheldon — the SF community was stunned. The revelation forced a reckoning with the assumptions about gender and writing that had led so many readers and critics to insist that Tiptree’s work could only have been written by a man.

Sheldon continued writing as Tiptree after the revelation, publishing two novels — Up the Walls of the World (1978) and Brightness Falls from the Air (1985) — and several more story collections. The novels were less successful than the stories; the compressed, savage energy of Tiptree’s short fiction did not transfer easily to longer forms.

In 1987, Sheldon shot her husband (who was blind and in failing health) and then killed herself. The James Tiptree Jr. Award (now the Otherwise Award) was established in 1991 to honour science fiction that explores gender.

Collecting Tiptree

Ten Thousand Light-Years from Home (Ace, 1973) and Warm Worlds and Otherwise (Ballantine, 1975) are the primary collecting targets. Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (Arkham House, 1990), the definitive story collection, is the essential single volume. Tiptree material signed as “Alice Sheldon” is rare and highly valued. The Ace and Ballantine paperback originals are scarce in fine condition.