Why Have a Tiptree Award?
© 1998, Debbie Notkin
This essay is the introduction to Flying Cups and Saucers
If you were born before 1959, you remember where you were when John Kennedy was shot in 1963. If you were any way involved in the fan and professional science fiction communities (and even the littlest bit interested in gender roles in the field), you remember where you were when you learned that James Tiptree, Jr., was a woman.
In fact, I remember where I was when I learned that Tiptree wasn't a woman.
But to understand that (in case you weren't involved in this community--or weren't born--in the mid 1970s) you might want a little background.
There have always been women in science fiction. In fact, it's perfectly legitimate to argue that a woman wrote the first science fiction novel: what else would you call Frankenstein? In this century, we have Leigh Brackett, and C. L. Moore, and André Norton and Marion Zimmer Bradley, and a host of others, whose contributions are legion and should never be underestimated. However, almost none of them wrote under names conclusively identifiable as female, and most of them were consistently lauded for the "fine male qualities" of their writing.
There have also always been gay people, and gender transgressors in science fiction. Their history is chronicled, sometimes directly and sometimes between the lines, in thousands upon thousands of crumbling pages of mimeo ink on Twiltone paper, and no one has yet done a good enough job of telling their story. I'm not even going to try, but here are a few examples:
- Forrest J Ackerman, the grand old man of the horror film community, was an honorary male Daughter of Bilitis (a lesbian club) in the 1930s. Many of the people in that circle, including Marion Zimmer Bradley, were prominent gender radicals. (Bradley wrote lesbian fiction under a pseudonym.)
- James Kepner, founder of the International Gay and Lesbian Archives, was an active fan in Los Angeles in the 1940s.
- Theodore Sturgeon's pioneering "The World Well Lost," which treats homosexuality very sympathetically, was first published in 1953.
In the 1950s, there was another shift in the gender history of the science fiction community. Women began to change the face of the field as women, writing and editing under their own names. Virginia Kidd and Judith Merril, the two women to whom Flying Cups and Saucers is dedicated, stand out in this context. Kidd has been a literary agent for many decades, shepherding the careers of (among others) Ursula LeGuin and Anne McCaffrey. Merril, of course, edited the extraordinary Best Science Fiction of the Year series that was among my early introductions to the literature that would become my home. Kidd and Merril were closely followed by a number of women whose careers began in the late 50s and early 60s: Cele Goldsmith Lalli, the editor at Amazing who discovered and/or encouraged the fine writers of the 60s: Roger Zelazny, Samuel R. Delany, Thomas Disch, Ursula LeGuin. And the writers themselves, writing under their own gender-visible names: Anne McCaffrey, Kate Wilhelm, Katherine MacLean, and Joanna Russ.
One way to trace the changes in the field in this period is by looking at the awards. The science fiction field has two major awards: the Hugo Award (named for editor Hugo Gernsback and selected by popular vote of the members of each year's World Science Fiction convention) and the Nebula Award (given by the Science Fiction Writers of America). Both are given in several categories, including fiction at varying lengths. The Hugo has been presented since 1953. Anne McCaffrey was the first woman to win in a professional category in 1968, her award was a tie with a story by Philip José Farmer. Before that time, all women Hugo winners had won in the fannish categories, and had shared the awards with men-- generally with their husbands. Also in 1968, McCaffrey and Kate Wilhelm were the first women to win Nebulas, an award that had then been in existence just a few years. Gay (and black) author Samuel R. Delany won three Nebula Awards in the first three years of the award's existence and his unforgettable short story "Aye and Gomorrah" which won in 1967, was the first major work about gender (and sex!) to win an award in the field.
The scales were irrevocably tipping, and the balance changed fast. The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula LeGuin swept the novel awards for 1970 (no woman had ever won the coveted Best Novel award before), and she won again in 1972. In 1973, James Tiptree, Jr. got his first Nebula, and by that time Joanna Russ's incontrovertibly radical "When It Changed" had also been honored.
We return now to our regularly-scheduled discussion of the gender of James Tiptree, Jr.
I bought Analog off the stands in a New York subway station in December 1973 (even though I rarely read the magazines), simply because it had a new Tiptree story featured on the cover. After I'd read "The Women Men Don't See," I started announcing flatly to my friends that Tiptree was a woman. No man, I said, could write that story.
Chelsea Quinn Yarbro told me I was wrong. She was in regular correspondence with "Tip," (as we all called the writer of those fine stories, as well as the ubiquitous letters and postcards that Tip, despite his passion for never meeting people, sent with the slightest encouragement). She pulled out correspondence about being a spook for the CIA, about traveling alone in the Yucatan, about other very male adventures. She convinced me.
And once I thought about it, I was delighted. If a man could write "The Women Men Don't See," the world was a little more complex, and held a little more hope for a meeting of the sexes, than I had previously imagined.
In 1975, in the introduction to the second collection of Tiptree short stories, Robert Silverberg (who would quite reasonably love it if we would all forget this anecdote) stuck his neck out and said:
Inflamed by Tiptree's obstinate insistence on personal obscurity, science-fictionists have indulged themselves in the wildest sort of speculation about him. ... It has been suggested that Tiptree is female, a theory that I find absurd, for there is to me something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree's writing. I don't think the novels of Jane Austen could have been written by a man nor the stories of Ernest Hemingway by a woman, and in the same way I believe the author of the James Tiptree stories is male.
I certainly believed him. Tiptree had, in fact, been thoroughly trounced in the round-robin symposium published in a fanzine called Khatru (edited by Jeff Smith) for his male pronouncements on subjects women clearly understood better.
And, as I said above, I was actually pretty glad that Tiptree was a man; I liked a world which contained men who were capable of that kind of perception of women.
Not too long after the publication of the Silverberg essay, I got a phone call from one of my best friends, author Elizabeth A. Lynn.
"Debbie," she said, "I have great news!"
"Wonderful!" I said. "What?"
"I can't tell you."
We're still friends. When I think about that phone call, I'm not sure why.
"But you'll hear about it in a week or so," she said.
I spent the next week chewing my fingernails and trying to imagine great secret news. Had Liz sold a novel for six figures (at that time, no one in SF ever had) but the deal wasn't signed? Was someone getting married? Or divorced?
No. James Tiptree, Jr., was revealed as Alice Sheldon.
Panic ensued. None of us knew how to react. We had all been convinced by a very convincing story that fit the things we knew about gender. Tip's closest correspondents felt lied to. Some people, like Lizzy Lynn, were simply delighted. I was profoundly disappointed (and a little smug-- after all, I'd seen it in the texts; I'd just been convinced not to believe my own ears). Bob Silverberg, of course, was mortified (and issued a very gracious apology).
Actually, I think most of us were suffering from a condition that had not been named in 1975: we were encountering genderfuck. We may have been comfortable with homosexuality, but we hadn't done much questioning of gender roles. Transsexuals were a very weird phenomenon only seen on the tabloid edges of the news. Cross-dressers were "sick" and best treated with psychoanalysis, or else they were really closet gays, and just needed to come to terms with their own desire. Intersexuals, of course, did not exist (quite literally, since most of them were-- and still are-- surgically "altered" for the peace of mind of doctors and parents). And virtually no one had had the experience of having someone who was actively part of their social circle (even if an invisible part) Change Sex.
Overall, we coped. Tiptree wrote a lovely essay called "Only the Signature Was a Lie," simultaneously apologizing and skillfully pointing out that we had all seen what we wanted to see. Everyone took the news in our own different ways and the science fiction world went on about its ever-more feminist, gender-exploring business.
John Varley started to publish, so an unmistakable man was writing brilliantly and insightfully about the condition of women. The third Tiptree collection came out with an introduction by Ursula LeGuin explaining about Alice Sheldon. Gay women, as well as men, were writing, and sometimes their characters (and the characters of straight authors) were also gay.
The late Susan Wood, professor of Canadian literature and leading SF fan and critic, began leading feminist panels at conventions, starting in 1976. Then she instituted the "Room of Our Own" feminist spaces at a variety of conventions. Most of them were "men-welcome" space, but they were still different from anywhere we'd been before. We all began talking to one another in new ways, and Tiptree/Sheldon, though she never came to conventions, was frequently one of the topics.
The tables turned again and the 1970s became "the Me decade." Cyberpunk became exciting and some of the new writers/commentators tried to erase Joanna Russ and Ursula LeGuin and Vonda McIntyre and Suzy McKee Charnas and and and ... Nonetheless, more and more women writers were entering the field. (Vonda once said, "Science fiction will come of age when mediocre female writers get published as regularly as mediocre male writers do." I don't think anyone would argue that that day has long since come.) It became de rigueur for even the most egregiously sexist male authors to include active female characters. Much water flowed under many bridges.
In 1991 my phone rang again. It was Pat Murphy, two-time Nebula winner, fresh from her guest-of-honor stint at WisCon, the "feminist SF convention" held annually in Madison, Wisconsin. "Debbie," she said, "At Wiscon Karen and I invented a new science fiction award!" (Karen Joy Fowler is another fine writer and a good friend of Pat's. The two of them are card-carrying troublemakers.)
"Oh, really?"
"Yes. It's an award for works of science fiction that explore and expand gender roles. We're naming it after James Tiptree."
"That's a fine idea."
"Would you chair the first panel of judges and help us figure out how we can make this work?"
And that's why you hold this book in your hands.
Oh, in case you were wondering? Pat and I are still friends too.