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recent reading: James Tiptree, JR
Apr. 18th, 2024 01:01 pmI spent many weeks this winter sitting with the work and life of genderbending scifi pioneer James Tiptree, JR, legally Alice Bradley Sheldon. I've known for some time that Tiptree was a figure with the power to compel me; in the holiday season tumult of my changing family, Tiptree was the one I needed.
I read Julie Phillips' magisterial biography "James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon," and also worked my way more methodically than I had before through the stories collected in "Her Smoke Rose Up Forever."
The biography presented a portrait of a non-neurotypical woman of unfocused genius I feel like I've known, and been. Raised by wealthy liberal Chicagoans who moonlighted as African explorers, Alli had an epic childhood. Only through sliding with deliberate nonchalance into pseudonymity could she seem to convey the intense art that was in her.
I first became aware of Tiptree through LeGuin's published encomiums, and there's a real treat to be found in the Phillips bio of vital, playful correspondence between early SF figures like Tiptree, LeGuin, Harlan Ellison, and Joanna Russ. Tiptree's inability to connect fully with Russ, separated by pseudonymity, gender pretense, and that thing that afflicts early movement pioneers and makes them unable to connect with the full movements that come after, is poignant.
And then the stories are so very intense. Tiptree circles around biology, love, death, inspiration, and the call of the wild, often ending with gut-punches that make you need to put the book down. I've been a fan of "The Girl Who Was Plugged In" (1973) since I first read it years ago, but, of all the stories collected in this anthology, "And I Have Come upon This Place by Lost Ways" (1972) has sat with me most vividly: a portrait of an inspired scientist believing, past all safety and sanity, in the knowledge that their culture does not value or validate.
It's not a happy story, but the ending rings with strange triumph; and that strange, Pyrrhic victory sits at the core of so much of Tiptree's works, perhaps most starkly in the vore bug horror/romance "Love Is the Plan the Plan Is Death" (1973). The expansiveness of Tiptree's ethical and aesthetic vision, the way her stories can contain love, predation, death, rebirth, and beyond, stretching but not breaking, helped me cope with the shifting territory of my own family group, and made the ways that loved ones fight against one another comprehensible, maybe even palatable.
The unravelling at the end of Alli's life is something, the drama getting real. A strange thing, that this person who chose suicide so many years before actually going through with it, still tragically early, and annihilated her partner as she went, tells the insights that make tough times bearable for others. But perhaps it is often so.
What I took from my engagement with Tiptree, beyond the stabilization through personal changes, was a renewed dedication to my art persona, my art community, and making what I can/do make. Tiptree's stories are, imo, impossibly valuable, and they were such a struggle to get out; every time Alli tried to "go legit," she clammed up, or made sentimental things that belied the wild true insight of her creative gifts. It was only when she let herself create for the heck of it, working through her pseudonym, that the stream of her art seemed to flow clear.
My own mother had been pushing me, over the holidays, as she often does, to "go legit," and spending time thinking about Tiptree steered me in another direction: doubling down on doing my weird shit with the people what I do it with. & the early SFF fandom energy in Tiptree's correspondence reminded me so much of my own roots in journal fandom. "Let us not desert one another ... our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world," indeed.
I read Julie Phillips' magisterial biography "James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon," and also worked my way more methodically than I had before through the stories collected in "Her Smoke Rose Up Forever."
The biography presented a portrait of a non-neurotypical woman of unfocused genius I feel like I've known, and been. Raised by wealthy liberal Chicagoans who moonlighted as African explorers, Alli had an epic childhood. Only through sliding with deliberate nonchalance into pseudonymity could she seem to convey the intense art that was in her.
I first became aware of Tiptree through LeGuin's published encomiums, and there's a real treat to be found in the Phillips bio of vital, playful correspondence between early SF figures like Tiptree, LeGuin, Harlan Ellison, and Joanna Russ. Tiptree's inability to connect fully with Russ, separated by pseudonymity, gender pretense, and that thing that afflicts early movement pioneers and makes them unable to connect with the full movements that come after, is poignant.
And then the stories are so very intense. Tiptree circles around biology, love, death, inspiration, and the call of the wild, often ending with gut-punches that make you need to put the book down. I've been a fan of "The Girl Who Was Plugged In" (1973) since I first read it years ago, but, of all the stories collected in this anthology, "And I Have Come upon This Place by Lost Ways" (1972) has sat with me most vividly: a portrait of an inspired scientist believing, past all safety and sanity, in the knowledge that their culture does not value or validate.
It's not a happy story, but the ending rings with strange triumph; and that strange, Pyrrhic victory sits at the core of so much of Tiptree's works, perhaps most starkly in the vore bug horror/romance "Love Is the Plan the Plan Is Death" (1973). The expansiveness of Tiptree's ethical and aesthetic vision, the way her stories can contain love, predation, death, rebirth, and beyond, stretching but not breaking, helped me cope with the shifting territory of my own family group, and made the ways that loved ones fight against one another comprehensible, maybe even palatable.
The unravelling at the end of Alli's life is something, the drama getting real. A strange thing, that this person who chose suicide so many years before actually going through with it, still tragically early, and annihilated her partner as she went, tells the insights that make tough times bearable for others. But perhaps it is often so.
What I took from my engagement with Tiptree, beyond the stabilization through personal changes, was a renewed dedication to my art persona, my art community, and making what I can/do make. Tiptree's stories are, imo, impossibly valuable, and they were such a struggle to get out; every time Alli tried to "go legit," she clammed up, or made sentimental things that belied the wild true insight of her creative gifts. It was only when she let herself create for the heck of it, working through her pseudonym, that the stream of her art seemed to flow clear.
My own mother had been pushing me, over the holidays, as she often does, to "go legit," and spending time thinking about Tiptree steered me in another direction: doubling down on doing my weird shit with the people what I do it with. & the early SFF fandom energy in Tiptree's correspondence reminded me so much of my own roots in journal fandom. "Let us not desert one another ... our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world," indeed.