James Tiptree, Jr.

James Tiptree, Jr. (born August 24, 1915, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.—died May 19, 1987, McLean, Virginia) was an American science fiction author known for her disturbing short stories about love, death, gender, and human and alien nature.

When Alice Bradley was six years old, she and her parents traveled to the Belgian Congo (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) on an expedition with a family friend, American naturalist Carl Akeley. Alice made two further trips to Africa as a child, in 1924–25 (which was also part of a trip around the world) and in 1931. Her mother, author Mary Hastings Bradley, wrote several books about their travels, including two children’s books that Alice illustrated, Alice in Jungleland (1927) and Alice in Elephantland (1929).

In 1934 Alice eloped with William Davey, a Princeton student she had met five days earlier. After an abortive attempt at college and a career as a painter, she divorced Davey in 1941 and returned to Chicago, where she was hired as the art critic of the Chicago Sun (later the Chicago Sun-Times). In 1942 she joined the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (later the Women’s Army Corps). From 1943 she worked at the Pentagon as an interpreter of aerial reconnaissance photographs.

After World War II ended in Europe, she was transferred in 1945 to a different unit and soon married her commanding officer, Colonel Huntington Sheldon. They left the army in 1946. From 1948 to 1952 they ran a chicken farm in Toms River, New Jersey. In 1952 they joined the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Washington, D.C., where he was director of current intelligence and she again worked on photographic intelligence and studied political changes in Africa.

When Alice Sheldon left the CIA in 1955, she was unsure about her marriage and used her training in intelligence to disappear for a brief period. She remained separated from her husband for one year, and during that time she pursued an interest in the relationship of aesthetics to human vision. She received a bachelor’s degree from American University in Washington, D.C., in 1959 and then began graduate studies in experimental psychology at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. (Ph.D., 1967).

In 1967, while finishing her dissertation, Sheldon wrote several science fiction stories. Because she was embarking on a career as an academic, she submitted those stories to magazines under the pseudonym James Tiptree, Jr. (The name Tiptree came from a label on a brand of jam she saw at the grocery store.) Much to her surprise, she sold several of Tiptree’s stories.

The first story Tiptree published, “Birth of a Salesman” (1968), was characteristic of her early stories in that it was a humorous variation on a standard science fiction theme. Tiptree came into her own with the calmly apocalyptic “The Last Flight of Dr. Ain” (1969; revised 1974). A biologist in love with Earth and its natural beauty, Dr. Ain flies around the world deliberately spreading a virus that will wipe out humanity. In “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” (1973; winner of a Hugo Award for best novella), an ugly homeless girl in a media-saturated future is recruited to remotely control the empty body of a new celebrity. This prophetic story of celebrity worship, product placement, and global corporations is often cited as an early inspiration for cyberpunk. Tiptree’s skill at depicting alien psychology was shown in “Love Is the Plan the Plan Is Death” (1973; winner of a Nebula Award for best short story), which is told from the viewpoint of a giant alien arachnid.

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Tiptree’s work took on a more feminist cast beginning in the early 1970s. In “The Women Men Don’t See” (1973), a plane carrying three Americans—a male federal agent and a mother and daughter—crashes in the Yucatán. An alien spacecraft also crashes nearby, and, despite the efforts of the man, the women choose to leave Earth—a planet where women do not thrive, only survive—with the aliens. Three male astronauts from the present day are transported to a future Earth where males have died out in “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” (1976). The astronauts are emotionally and psychologically unprepared for a world where they have no meaning. “Houston” won a Nebula for best novella and shared the Hugo Award for best novella (with Spider Robinson’s “By Any Other Name”).

More than a mere pseudonym for Sheldon, Tiptree was almost a separate character, albeit one that drew extensively on Sheldon’s own experience. She felt that she needed to write more as herself, as the part of her that was not “Tiptree,” so she came up with another pseudonym, Raccoona Sheldon, whom she introduced to editors as an old friend of Tiptree. Raccoona Sheldon’s first stories were seen by some editors as light and trivial when compared with those of Tiptree. However, as Racoona, Alice wrote two of her most notable stories: “The Screwfly Solution” (1977; Nebula Award winner for best novelette), in which an alien influence that fuses the urges toward sex and violence causes men to kill all women and children, and “Your Faces, O My Sisters! Your Faces Filled of Light!” (1976), about a nameless young woman’s journey through a delusional world populated only by women.

Tiptree corresponded extensively with other authors and editors but jealously guarded “his” privacy. One of the details Tiptree did reveal was that his mother was an explorer from Chicago. When Mary Bradley died in 1976 and obituaries listed Alice Sheldon as Bradley’s only surviving family member, Tiptree’s true identity was exposed. Many in science fiction had accepted Tiptree as male because of “his” familiarity with such stereotypically masculine fields as the military and the intelligence service. That Tiptree was Alice Sheldon did much to overturn lazy assumptions within the genre about the difference between male and female writing. Sheldon, however, deeply felt the loss of her alter ego. Although she continued to publish as Tiptree, her later work lost some of its earlier complexity and vigour. Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (1990) is a collection of Tiptree’s and Racoona Sheldon’s most important short stories.

Sheldon had struggled with depression throughout her life. Early in the morning of May 19, 1987, she shot her ailing husband in the head as he slept and then shot herself. In 1991 American science fiction authors Pat Murphy and Karen Joy Fowler established the James Tiptree, Jr. Award for work that “expands or explores our understanding of gender.”