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4.39 AVERAGE
4.39 AVERAGE
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I'm in love with this woman! Also, I need to read some more Tiptree.
I don't really have the words for how much this book means to me, how much it has woven into the fabric of my life and colored the way I view the world.
This was a Thorough biography and well worth the read about this incredible person, but just know that it is very dense and very detailed. That said, it's hard to imagine a crazier life and career than Alli Sheldon, who wrote classic science fiction under the name James B. Tiptree, Jr., and just a million other descriptive phrases. If nothing else, please read a review of this book or Sheldon's Wikipedia page, just so more people know about this amazing person.
This is a really interesting, well-researched, thoughtful biography of James Tiptree, Jr., a Hugo/Nebula-winning SF writer who corresponded with his many peers and fans as a male, but who was actually a woman.
It was tough at times. Her conflicts with gender in her youth were horrific, if you even part-identify, and she’s set on suicide in age. So, tough in the way her fiction is – alienated subject speeds to a bad ending – but I needn’t have been afraid to meet this writing-hero.
I liked her throughout – and mention it because not every reviewer has. My admiration has only escalated. It’s true I heard among the Tiptree rumours she was America’s first woman general, whereas she left the WAC a major. The WAAC/WAC was interesting – her hopes and disappointments in it. She managed to do useful work in photointelligence. But just what she thought and felt about women in uniform was eye-opening for me. Because Tiptree was a person wrecked by gender expectations. She felt herself wrecked – I quote this from an early age:
To grow up as a ‘girl’ is to be nearly fatally spoiled, deformed, confused and terrified; to be responded to by falsities, to be reacted to as nothing or as a thing – and nearly to become that thing.
She was a brain and a person without sufficient use. Always taken for ‘masculine’, though she kept up a repertoire of both. She was a (rarely-practising) lesbian who ended up in a great friendship-marriage. But even Ting failed at the equality experiment, and sex remained a murky issue for her.
Her letter-friendships with Ursula K. Le Guin and Joanna Russ were a highlight, as she found an almost-home in the sf community. Though as one sf guy said to her, it’s no use you coming along to the conventions for a sense of belonging, since you have so much more life experience than this group of nerds. And when she was outed she found hard to write again. James Tiptree Jr was a liberation. I’ve forgiven Robert Silverberg, who famously called Tiptree’s writing ‘ineluctably masculine’: turns out he was a nerd daunted by her he-man attainments (from real life), and he said afterwards he’d needed his head examined. But in her 60s she upset a feminist sf talk-fest, and made Samuel R. Delany hostile. I do not and never hope to understand the questions involved. But this book dives pretty deeply into them; I deduct a star because I wasn’t always happy with the commentary.
I want to mention her time as a rat psychologist. I’ll link to an article on it, though I think the article undervalues her written work and is weak on lit crit: http://starcraving.com/?p=555 It explains her mission to bring the social sciences to sf – ‘there are more sciences than physics.’
I can only wish she’d taken Joanna Russ up on her offer (sight-unseen, in a letter that began, “I like old women with a very special feeling and get all dreamy and erotic about them...”) and run away with her, but hey. You don’t get a happy ending in a James Tiptree Jr story.
I liked her throughout – and mention it because not every reviewer has. My admiration has only escalated. It’s true I heard among the Tiptree rumours she was America’s first woman general, whereas she left the WAC a major. The WAAC/WAC was interesting – her hopes and disappointments in it. She managed to do useful work in photointelligence. But just what she thought and felt about women in uniform was eye-opening for me. Because Tiptree was a person wrecked by gender expectations. She felt herself wrecked – I quote this from an early age:
To grow up as a ‘girl’ is to be nearly fatally spoiled, deformed, confused and terrified; to be responded to by falsities, to be reacted to as nothing or as a thing – and nearly to become that thing.
She was a brain and a person without sufficient use. Always taken for ‘masculine’, though she kept up a repertoire of both. She was a (rarely-practising) lesbian who ended up in a great friendship-marriage. But even Ting failed at the equality experiment, and sex remained a murky issue for her.
Her letter-friendships with Ursula K. Le Guin and Joanna Russ were a highlight, as she found an almost-home in the sf community. Though as one sf guy said to her, it’s no use you coming along to the conventions for a sense of belonging, since you have so much more life experience than this group of nerds. And when she was outed she found hard to write again. James Tiptree Jr was a liberation. I’ve forgiven Robert Silverberg, who famously called Tiptree’s writing ‘ineluctably masculine’: turns out he was a nerd daunted by her he-man attainments (from real life), and he said afterwards he’d needed his head examined. But in her 60s she upset a feminist sf talk-fest, and made Samuel R. Delany hostile. I do not and never hope to understand the questions involved. But this book dives pretty deeply into them; I deduct a star because I wasn’t always happy with the commentary.
I want to mention her time as a rat psychologist. I’ll link to an article on it, though I think the article undervalues her written work and is weak on lit crit: http://starcraving.com/?p=555 It explains her mission to bring the social sciences to sf – ‘there are more sciences than physics.’
I can only wish she’d taken Joanna Russ up on her offer (sight-unseen, in a letter that began, “I like old women with a very special feeling and get all dreamy and erotic about them...”) and run away with her, but hey. You don’t get a happy ending in a James Tiptree Jr story.