---item---
storytitle:
firstname: Kathy
lastname: Acker
booktitle: Pussy, King of the Pirates
periodical: 
date: 
publisher: Grove Press
year: 1996
htmldescription: 
This retelling of Treasure Island as "a girl's story," (the author's words) is like Switchblade Sisters on the High Seas. A combination of high-theory on women's bodies, possession and language and drive-in movie biker violence. There's no one else who writes like Acker. [RK]
---item---
storytitle:
firstname: Gill
lastname: Alderman
booktitle: The Memory Palace
periodical: 
date: 
publisher: HarperCollins
year: 1996
htmldescription: 
A wonderfully decadent and intricate look at traditional gender archetypes, ringing changes on celibacy, impotency, fecundity, purity, decadence, magic, story-telling, words, nature and unnature. Really well (if a touch over-) done. [DS]
---item---
storytitle:
firstname: Kim
lastname: Antieau
booktitle: Jigsaw Woman
periodical: 
date: 
publisher: Roc
year: 1996
htmldescription: 
The central character is engaging, the characters she's made up of (you'll understand that if you read it) are interesting, the book has a sense of humor about its subject (which takes some doing), and a sense of compassion about the things that living in an unrelentingly patriarchal culture do to men. [DS]
---item---
storytitle: Y Chromosome
firstname: Donald
lastname: Antrim
booktitle: 
periodical: The New Yorker
date: 19961118
publisher: 
year: 
htmldescription: 
Doug and his ninety-nine brothers have gathered in the family library for some male-bonding before dinner. A mighty funny look at the dance of dominance, told by a shoe-fetishist who ends up on the floor. [KJF]
---item---
storytitle:
firstname: Margaret
lastname: Atwood
booktitle: Alias Grace
periodical: 
date: 
publisher: Doubleday
year: 1996
htmldescription: 
Whether or not this book is fantasy depends on your interpretation of a crucial scene towards the end of the book, though it certainly has minor fantastic elements (fortune-telling and premonitory dreams). So be warned: this book is only tenuously eligible for Tiptree consideration, but, in my opinion, too fine to be overlooked on a technicality. <CITE>Alias Grace</CITE> is a novel about the famous 19<SUP>th</SUP> century "murderess," Grace Marks, a servant who was convicted, along with her fellow servant James McDermott, of the murder of their employer and his housekeeper (and mistress). The way in which the historical Grace was involved in the murders is not clear, and Atwood is careful not to give a definitive answer. Instead, through the imagined Grace's experience, she explores work, sexual and class exploitation, fame, and the public fascination with murder, especially murder of or by a good-looking woman. Also innocence, responsibility, and memory. [JML]
---item---
storytitle:
firstname: Iain M.
lastname: Banks
booktitle: Excession
periodical: 
date: 
publisher: Little, Brown
year: 1996
htmldescription: 
Gender-exploring in a vein similar to that of Banks' other Culture novels-the people of the Culture routinely change sex and many of the characters are genderless machine intelligences. In addition, one of the main characters in <CITE>Excession</CITE> is a woman who has arrested her pregnancy for forty years. Entertaining, but not Banks' best work. [JML]
---item---
storytitle: Blue
firstname: Francesca Lia
lastname: Block
booktitle: Girl Goddess #9
periodical: 
date: 
publisher: HarperCollins
year: 1996
htmldescription: 
Block is a truly wonderful writer. Her power is rooted in a deceptively simple prose style which is compounded of young adult novels and children's fairy tales. Block takes these simple elements and weaves magical little stories with them. "Blue" is the story of the breakdown (and resurrection) of a family after the mother's suicide. The title character is a tiny transsexual dwarf who appears at a moment of crisis to a young girl in the story (and the only fantasy element). Is Blue an externalization of her own superego or simply a sign that she shares her mother's madness? Will she survive to know? Unfortunately, there isn't quite enough gender exploration in the story for it to be a Tiptree winner, but it's as emotionally strong and true and well-crafted as anything the judges read this year. [RK]
---item---
storytitle: Girl Goddess #9
firstname: Francesca Lia
lastname: Block
booktitle: Girl Goddess #9
periodical: 
date: 
publisher: HarperCollins
year: 1996
htmldescription: 
A creepy encounter between two teenage girls and Graves' White Goddess, with an ambiguous end which may be interpreted as a critique of the patriarchal vision of the female muse. Or not. [JML]
---item---
storytitle:
firstname: Richard
lastname: Calder
booktitle: Dead Things
periodical: 
date: 
publisher: St. Martin's
year: 1996
htmldescription: 
<CITE>Dead Things</CITE> is the resolution to a complex trilogy chronicling the coming of a new sort of being into the world: predatory and hyper-sexualized females, the Lilim. Imagine a kind of perfect, frictionless Barbie doll with fangs. <CITE>Dead Things</CITE> is all about gender, but its challenge is inverted. It doesn't show new possibilities, but parodies accepted gender roles by pushing them to Wagnerian heights, making them all-defining, all-consuming and grotesque. It's a brutal kind of parody-fascinating, but an acquired taste. And that's part of the problem. <CITE>Dead Things</CITE>, the last book of the trilogy, does not stand alone. In fact, as the most stylized of the three books, it's almost incomprehensible without the background and language provided by the other two books. Taken together, the trilogy-<CITE>Dead Girls</CITE>, <CITE>Dead Boys</CITE>, <CITE>Dead Things</CITE>-is a literary head kick, pushing gender and bio-tech buttons as hard as something like <CITE>Neuromancer</CITE> pushed the romance of digital criminality. My recommendation is to read the whole set of books. And maybe try to convince a publisher to reprint them in a single volume, or better yet, to publish something like this in a single year so that a future committee can consider the work as a single thing, rather than being served a wing and a leg and trying to vote on the whole chicken. [RK]
---item---
storytitle: The Lucifer of Blue
firstname: Sherry
lastname: Coldsmith
firstname2: Ellen
lastname2: Datlow (ed.)
booktitle: Off Limits
periodical: 
date: 
publisher: St. Martin's
year: 1996
htmldescription: 
A haunting story of the Spanish Civil War. Coldsmith sets the piece in a brothel and gives us the amalgam of war and sex, without glamorizing or simplifying. [KJF]
---item---
storytitle: The Splendor and the Misery of Bodies, of Cities (excerpt)
firstname: Samuel R.
lastname: Delany
booktitle: 
periodical: The Review of Contemporary Fiction
date: 1996 Fall
publisher: 
year: 
htmldescription: 
An intriguing fragment in which the sexual identifiers change from paragraph to paragraph; woman appears to be the large category and man the subset, or the other. The setting is off world, there are aliens and the added layer of alien sexual identifiers. I am eager to see this play out in a longer work. [KJF]
---item---
storytitle:
firstname: Bradley
lastname: Denton
booktitle: Lunatics
periodical: 
date: 
publisher: St. Martin's
year: 1996
htmldescription: 
An exploration of the current status of the war between the sexes, <CITE>The Big Chill</CITE> with wings and talons. [DS]
---item---
storytitle:
firstname: Greg
lastname: Egan
booktitle: Distress
periodical: 
date: 
publisher: Orion
year: 1995
htmldescription: 
"Gender migration" as the ultimate critique of identity politics. Egan makes a credible case for the virtues of asexuality and androgyny, one that made me wonder just why I find the idea so disturbing. In contrast to Tepper, who comes off (to me at least) as anti-sex, Egan is clearly pro-freedom. [JML]
---item---
storytitle: Tiresias
firstname: Firecat
lastname: 
firstname2: Cecila
lastname2: Tam (ed.)
booktitle: GenderFlex
periodical: 
date: 
publisher: Circlet Press
year: 1996
htmldescription: 
A very sexy story which, incidentally, illustrates the distinction between gender change and sex change. [JML]
---item---
storytitle:
firstname: Kathy
lastname: Goonan
booktitle: The Bones of Time
periodical: 
date: 
publisher: Tor
year: 1996
htmldescription: 
Great read. Reminded me of <CITE>Distress</CITE> a bit-a perilous, shoot-em-up mystery plot with a lot of physics theory filling in the cracks. Early on, the narrator, a Hawaiian woman of Japanese ancestry, mentions that the old gender-biased educational system has been completely eradicated. We then rocket through an international chase, which allows no time to pause and see what the results of this have been. But what we're left with is a story in which no one's sex seems to matter at all. Which has its own kind of refreshment for the weary reader. [KJF]
---item---
storytitle:
firstname: Laurell
lastname: Hamilton
booktitle: The Lunatic Cafe
periodical: 
date: 
publisher: Ace
year: 1996
htmldescription: 
The adventures of Anita Blake, vampire assassin and zombie hunter. She's a Christian and doesn't believe in premarital sex. I find this more unusual and intriguing than the fact that she packs a piece and doesn't hesitate to use it. Things have come to such a pass! For our purposes, there are interesting dominance issues throughout, made more interesting by the fact that half the characters are werewolves and pack animals. Lots of the book is same old/same old sexually, but enjoyed for the same old reasons, which means enjoyable. Great fun in fact. [KJF]
---item---
storytitle:
firstname: Jean
lastname: Heglund
booktitle: Into the Forest
periodical: 
date: 
publisher: Calyx
year: 1996
htmldescription: 
A very poetic book about two young sisters living in rural isolation after the collapse of civilization. None of the gender issues are very pointed, but the relationship of women and wilderness is a particular fascination of mine, and I found this an entirely engaging addition to the tradition. The writing is especially lush. [KJF]
---item---
storytitle:
firstname: Tanya
lastname: Huff
booktitle: No Quarter
periodical: 
date: 
publisher: DAW
year: 1996
htmldescription: 
Tanya Huff has to be one of the most dependable writers of cracking good fantasies around. This book is no exception. Compulsively readable and great fun. The Tiptree elements concerns a man existing (as a separate being) within the body of a woman. However, for Tiptree purposes, there is really not enough exploration of this intriguing scenario. [JL]
---item---
storytitle: Red Sonja and Lessingham in Dreamland
firstname: Gwyneth
lastname: Jones
firstname2: Ellen
lastname2: Datlow (ed.)
booktitle: Off Limits
periodical: 
date: 
publisher: St. Martin's
year: 1996
htmldescription: 
A nasty twist on virtuality's mutual dreaming and the insidious clich&eacute;ed archetypes that have such a tenacious grip on our imaginations. [JL]
---item---
storytitle:
firstname: Jeanne
lastname: Larsen
booktitle: Manchu Palaces
periodical: 
date: 
publisher: Henry Holt
year: 1996
htmldescription: 
No one has ever managed to analyze the power of concubines in any new and interesting way. But in the last thirty pages of this wonderful book, Larsen does throw out our previous sexual assumptions and go somewhere unexpected. This is an intricate and beautiful book made up of stories about stories which contain stories, and I loved it. [KJF]
---item---
storytitle: The Reason for Not Going to the Ball
firstname: Tanith
lastname: Lee
booktitle: 
periodical: Fantasy & Science Fiction
date: 1996 October/November
publisher: 
year: 
htmldescription: 
A new version of an old nemesis. Lee's fairytale shows that there is always and infinitely another side to things. A good addition to the growing body of Cinderella rewrites. [KJF]
---item---
storytitle: Sleepy People
firstname: Jonathan
lastname: Lethem
booktitle: The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye
periodical: 
date: 
publisher: Harcourt Brace
year: 1996
htmldescription: 
A woman finds a man asleep on her doorstep and brings him into the house, where he remains asleep through various events. I read it as, in part, a comment on the lumpish husband who sits in front of the TV and is herded around by his wife: male protector/provider reduced to the role of passive icon. [JML]
---item---
storytitle:
firstname: Elizabeth
lastname: Moon
booktitle: Remnant Population
periodical: 
date: 
publisher: Baen
year: 1996
htmldescription: 
A consciousness-raising novel about an old, working class woman named Ofelia who has spent most of her life bowing to the will of her husband, her employers, and her children. The book is mostly about Ofelia "finding" herself, developing a new strength, and, at the same time, becoming a pivotal person in the formation of the relationship between humans and another intelligent species. Elderly female protagonists are rare (I'm tempted to say unknown) in science fiction, and it's refreshing to see one portrayed with complexity and honor. Unfortunately, Ofelia's opponents and detractors are all straw men (and women); they are so completely one-dimensional and unsympathetic that Ofelia's ultimate triumph seems cheapened. In retrospect, the most interesting aspect of the book, to me, was the aliens' combination of youth (as a species) and intelligence. In science fiction, humans are often pitted against primitives or against older and more "advanced" (but stuffy and conservative) alien civilizations. It's rare to see a situation in which humans are coping with a new, young alien race that's smarter than we are. Of course, this has nothing to do with gender. At least, I don't think so. [JML]
---item---
storytitle:
firstname: Charles
lastname: Oberndorf
booktitle: Foragers
periodical: 
date: 
publisher: Bantam
year: 1996
htmldescription: 
The set-up, with some agreeable twists and additions, is the human anthropologist among an alien race-known in this case as the slazans. Humanity is at war with one set of these aliens, when another, an isolated group of hunter/gatherers, is found. The human anthropologist finds among them that the primary value is for solitude. This is an ambitious book with an obvious sexual component and a complex web of plots and subplots. [KJF]
---item---
storytitle:
firstname: David
lastname: Prill
booktitle: Serial Killer Days
periodical: 
date: 
publisher: St. Martin's
year: 1996
htmldescription: 
While not terribly pointed in terms of gender content, this novel does contain a marvelous send-up of beauty pageants and the American entertainment industry's appetite for young murdered women. The protagonist is competing for the crown of Scream Queen and fighting her own unfortunate and unmarketable fearlessness. Very funny and absolutely original. [KJF]
---item---
storytitle:
firstname: Kim Stanley
lastname: Robinson
booktitle: Blue Mars
periodical: 
date: 
publisher: Bantam
year: 1996
htmldescription: 
The final and best book of one of my favourite science fiction trilogies of all time. On finishing it my first impulse was to go back and re-read the whole thing in one go. Robinson's Mars is one of the most fully-realised, fascinating future histories ever written. However, from a Tiptree point of view, the book's speculation about gender is disappointing. On page 43 we are told that sexual violence against women has disappeared and on page 345 that patriarchy has been brought to an end. We are not shown this reinscription of the roles of men and women, however, as, in much loving and convincing detail, Robinson delineates many of the other changes on Mars as its human society is created and grows. [JL]
---item---
storytitle: A Boy's Night Out
firstname: Lori
lastname: Selke
firstname2: Cecilia
lastname2: Tam (ed.)
booktitle: Genderflex
periodical: 
date: 
publisher: Circlet Press
year: 1996
htmldescription: 
A light-hearted story about the irrelevance of sex to gender, and vice versa. [JML]
---item---
storytitle: Fetish
firstname: Martha
lastname: Soukup
firstname2: Ellen
lastname2: Datlow (ed.)
booktitle: Off Limits
periodical: 
date: 
publisher: St. Martin's
year: 1996
htmldescription: 
I sometimes think that in the West gender difference is all about hair, not genitals-this story is a witty, sharp exploration of just that. [JL]
---item---
storytitle:
firstname: Nancy
lastname: Springer
booktitle: Fair Peril
periodical: 
date: 
publisher: Avon
year: 1996
htmldescription: 
What Springer does with the structures and assumptions of fairy-tale, the way she weaves Story and psychology, the way she makes us hate a character like Prentis and then shows us enough of his vulnerability to make him more than a simple MCP stereotype-not to mention the fact that I kept laughing out loud-are delightful. [DS]
---item---
storytitle: Bicycle Repairman
firstname: Bruce
lastname: Sterling
firstname2: John
lastname2: Kessel (ed.)
firstname3: Mark L.
lastname3: Van Name (ed.)
firstname4: Richard
lastname4: Butner (ed.)
booktitle: Intersections: The Sycamore Hill Anthology
periodical: 
date: 
publisher: Tor
year: 1996
htmldescription: 
The protagonist is on anti-libidinals as a member of the Sexual Deliberation Movement, and argues briefly that true freedom is freedom from the urge to reproduce. There's also a fabulous social worker in the story. All a bit peripheral, but fine stuff, nevertheless. [KJF]
---item---
storytitle:
firstname: Bruce
lastname: Sterling
booktitle: Holy Fire
periodical: 
date: 
publisher: Bantam
year: 1996
htmldescription: 
It begins with a crone. In a period of extended lifespans, sex and family and connections of any kind are something she long ago put behind her. She is a well-behaved, rich, and powerful old person who says she has become something other than a woman. She takes a new rejuvenation treatment and becomes a young, beautiful, badly behaved girl and, for a time, a model. I don't think Sterling understands the world of high fashion any better than I do, which is to say, not at all. The sexual aspects of his character's identity are more interesting in the crone part of the book, which is relatively short, than they are in the vamp part of the book. And the sexual aspects are drowned under the less familiar and more fascinating generational aspects. What would it be like to be the last generation of humans who die? This is a wonderful novel and maybe Sterling's best to date. [KJF]
---item---
storytitle:
firstname: Sean
lastname: Stewart
booktitle: Cloud's End
periodical: 
date: 
publisher: Ace
year: 1996
htmldescription: 
A magical blending of fairy tale, myth and fantasy. Although the book is packed with as much fairy tale adventure as any Tolkien clone the book's heart is in the realms of the domestic. The book offers a traditional hero named Seven and then makes his story a minor melody. Marriage, children and home are central. However, this is not the saccharine family values imagined by the political right. Home and hearth are as disturbing and uncertain as any of the more traditional sites of adventure <CITE>Cloud's End</CITE> has to offer. [JL]
---item---
storytitle:
firstname: Caitlin
lastname: Sullivan
firstname2: Kate
lastname2: Bornstein
booktitle: Nearly Roadkill
periodical: 
date: 
publisher: High Risk Books
year: 1996
htmldescription: 
I wanted to like this book better than I did. It takes place in the near future, and it takes the form of a series of transcriptions of Internet communications with various backgrounds filled in through connecting narratives. It's the story of two people's erotic adventures on-line in a variety of different guises and genders, and of their battle against the world that doesn't want to accept them. Perhaps inevitably, given its structure, it suffers from a certain "talkiness," and I found the tone irritatingly self-congratulatory. [JML]
---item---
storytitle:
firstname: Lucy
lastname: Sussex
booktitle: The Scarlet Rider
periodical: 
date: 
publisher: Tom Dougherty
year: 1996
htmldescription: 
A scholarly mystery, all about history and research and women in Australia, told in Sussex's best wry prose. Among its subjects are women's roles on a frontier, communities of women, how men and women deal with women who act like men, and how men and women can be friends. [DS]
---item---
storytitle: The Dead
firstname: Michael
lastname: Swanwick
firstname2: Patrick Neilsen
lastname2: Hayden (ed.)
booktitle: Starlight
periodical: 
date: 
publisher: Tor
year: 1996
htmldescription: 
An intense disturbing story written in Swanwick's usual elegant ice. You'll never sleep with another dead person! [KJF]
---item---
storytitle:
firstname: Bryan
lastname: Talbot
booktitle: The Tale of One Bad Rat
periodical: 
date: 
publisher: Dark Horse
year: 1996
htmldescription: 
Well drawn and well meant. The protagonist is a young girl, a homeless runaway, struggling to come to grips with her father's sexual abuse. Three things eventually save her. They are 1) self-help books, 2) a move to the country-the countryside, itself, really-wilderness-and 3) her identification with Beatrix Potter. [KJF]
---item---
storytitle:
firstname: Melanie
lastname: Tem
booktitle: Desmodus
periodical: 
date: 
publisher: Headline Feature
year: 1995
htmldescription: 
Tem's writing always disturbs me and <CITE>Desmodus</CITE> is no exception. She strips the vampire myth of any black nail polished romanticism. Her matriarchal vampires are wholly unlike any others, with lives which are on the whole nasty, brutish and sometimes even short. [JL]
---item---
storytitle:
firstname: Sherri
lastname: Tepper
booktitle: Gibbon's Decline and Fall
periodical: 
date: 
publisher: Bantam
year: 1996
htmldescription: 
I love the characters, taken each by each, and I think that she's remarkably fair-handed about having good men and honorable lesbians among them, but I wish, oh how I wish, that she wouldn't insist upon Sex being What's Wrong With the World. Even when I don't agree with Tepper's conclusions, she makes me think. And I'm never, ever bored. [DS]
---item---
storytitle: The Hermaphrodite
firstname: Edmund
lastname: White
booktitle: 
periodical: The Review of Contemporary Fiction
date: 1996 Fall
publisher: 
year: 
htmldescription: 
This story, written in 1960 but only just published, has some interesting threads-the notion that grief and despair are less intimate than sex, a sort of conflation of upper class with female and lower class with male. This story argues that sexuality is not just a mental construct, but that there are always physical facts to be dealt with. A deceptively simple story with a sad and inevitable conclusion. [KJF]
---item---
storytitle: The Stupefaction
firstname: Diane
lastname: Williams
booktitle: The Stupefaction
periodical: 
date: 
publisher: Knopf
year: 1996
htmldescription: 
Not to be confused with the collection of the same name by the same author in which this novella appears, this is a poetic narrative, very apt to our purposes, with some provocative bits. Because of its impressionistic approach, the images and moments last longer than the whole. [KJF]
---item---
storytitle:
firstname: Tess
lastname: Williams
booktitle: The Map of Power
periodical: 
date: 
publisher: Random House
year: 1996
htmldescription: 
Williams' novel explores, in part, what happens when three very different people from societies with radically different ideas about gender interact. The author has the courage to confound romantic expectations by depicting this interaction as one of continuing conflict, confusion, and miscommunication, rather than resorting to a climactic, happily-ever-after resolution. [JML]
---item---
storytitle: Natural Permanent Boy
firstname: Laurel
lastname: Winter
booktitle: 
periodical: Fantasy & Science Fiction
date: 199602
publisher: 
year: 
htmldescription: 
A suggestive story about identical boy-girl twins and the business of growing up. [JML]
---item---
storytitle:
firstname: N. Lee
lastname: Wood
booktitle: Looking for the Madhi
periodical: 
date: 
publisher: Bantam
year: 1996
htmldescription: 
This book looked very promising. It's about an "ugly as a mud fence" female journalist who, for various reasons (e.g. to make it easier for her to report from the Middle East), dresses as a man and takes on a male persona. There's lots of potential for gender exploration here, but it all gets frittered away. We never get much sense of how the protagonist feels about her disguise, and we never find out how her Arab buddies from her days as a war-correspondent react when they find out she's a woman. The disguise just becomes a plot device. On the other hand, this book has the virtue of being about the only one I can think of in which a woman-disguised-as-a-man is truly ugly, not just slender and "boyish." [JML]
---item---
storytitle: Utensile Strength
firstname: Patricia
lastname: Wrede
booktitle: Book of Enchantments
periodical: 
date: 
publisher: Harcourt Brace
year: 1996
htmldescription: 
Who says gender exploration can't be fun? Wrede neatly deflates half a dozen gender-bound fairy tale conventions and provides an excellent chocolate cake recipe to boot. I laughed out loud. [JL]
---item---
storytitle:
firstname: Mary Kay
lastname: Zuravleff
booktitle: The Frequency of Souls
periodical: 
date: 
publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
year: 1996
htmldescription: 
The story of a man trying to define himself within his relationships and without reference to or seeming awareness of the template of masculinity. The book looks at male sexuality, but is written by a woman. So is its charmingly passive male well done and refreshingly novel, or is it just a female fantasy of what men might be? I think the former, but what do I know? [KJF]
