The 2004 James Tiptree, Jr. Award: Long List

Summary | Winner | Short List | Long List | Special Mention

JURY

Margaret McBride, chair (mm), Judith Clute (jc), Alan DeNiro (ad), Ursula K. LeGuin (ukl), Cecilia Tan (ct)

Christopher Barzak "The Other Angelas"

Only semi-tiptroid, but it's a brilliant and charming story.--ukl

Elizabeth Bear "This Tragic Glass"
SciFi.com

What if we could determine the biological gender of poets based on something measurable in their words? Even if that poet's outwardly expressed gender differed? This story was part Shakespeare In Love part Connie Willis' Fire Watch, and anyone who is a sucker for "writer stories" will like it, too.--ct

A relatively straightforward but intricate story with sound scholarship and moving characterizations. Keats is kind of a bore, but on the whole, this story strikes at the heart of how gender informs authorship, and vice versa.- ad

Glenn Grant "Burning Day"
Island Dreams: Montreal Writers of the Fantastic, ed. by Claude Lalumiere (Vehicule Press)

I love a story that goes right through exploring what it means to be male or female and ends up getting at what it means to be human. This is a stylish, action-laden science fiction story, not a navel-gazer.--ct

A well-plotted story in Hardboiled Mode -- people smoking cigarettes even though they're androids, and cracking wise, and driving cars in cities, all very TV-cop show. More about species than gender, but has an original twist in the emphasis on the desire/compulsion to reproduce one's kind.--ukl

An interesting examination of sexuality and gender-how do expectations still influence "post-humans"-with film noir detective-story tropes.--mm

Victoria Garcia Unspeakable Vitrine

To me, the story that qualifies this uneven, entertaining collection as of interest to Tiptreers is "Wally's Porn," which is funny and touching.--ukl

"Anthropology" is a fun look at relationships too.--mm

Hiromi Goto Hopeful Monsters

Goto writes with vigor and energy, in a voice very much her own. "Night" and "Tales from the Breast," are both real Tiptroid fantasies, though you mightn't think so till right towards the end of both.--ukl

Elizabeth Hand Mortal Love

A gorgeous and rococo (at times) set piece of a novel--could have used more exploration of the vampiric femme fatale for Tiptree purposes.--ad

Anne Harris Inventing Memory

A message of hope about the possibility of inventing a new world by understanding one's own history and the history of the larger world. . . Goddesses in a science fiction context.--mm

Marie Jakober Even the Stones
(2004, revised from the 1993 Gullveig Books edition of High Kamilan)

No gender bending, but a serious, realistic, and grown-up novel of male-female power relationships, which is so unusual in "high fantasy" as to be practically invisible to many readers.--ukl

Ian McDonald River of Gods

"Nutes", a third sex, have had their sex organs removed and a sex-command centre placed in subtle ridges down "yt's arms. The same Dream Surgeon who performed these operations also does operations for AIs, called Aeais. The plot works interestingly around the world of Nutes and Aeais and humans plugging into the Aeai's communication lines by "lighthoeks."--jc

In addition to looking at how women might fare in India when the male/female ratio has become skewed with so many more males than females, a whole new gender is possible, surgically brought about.--mm

Kat Meads Sleep

This is a fierce, unrepentantly experimental, somewhat raw novel about motherhood in a highly gray utopia. The societies depicted are pitch perfect and the entire narrative is filled with edginess and a great sadness as we see how families become molten in a postmodern economy.--ad

Terry Pratchett Monstrous Regiment

Terry Pratchett is very good at making fun of things, and in this book he makes fun of archaic gender roles through a tried and true method: by dressing up his heroine as a male and marching her off to war. Only it being Pratchett, the farce escalates as quickly as the war, and we soon discover that not only are the other soldiers in the "monstrous regiment" vampires and trolls and the like, most of them are cross-dressing too. It's vintage Pratchett, which you will either love or hate depending on whether he is funny or tiresome to you. Now if only we could be so sure that those archaic gender roles are actually a thing of the past.-ct

Some nice perceptions of maleness and femaleness; genuinely funny when not merely facetious; charming and plausible when not glib and overconfident. Heterosexuality is assumed as the norm, to the point of sniggers and cute innuendoes about homosexuals. Is this 1944? That, and a certain artificiality or calculation in the central gender concern, are bad flaws in a good read.--ukl

Tom Purdon "Romance for Augmented Trio"
Asimov's SF, Feb. 04

--feels almost like a challenge story to lead to this concluding statement: "...the obsolete human and the future human had to start reconstructing the relationship they had been fashioning before the aberrant human interrupted them.--jc

Victoria Somegyi & Kathleen Chamberlain "Time's Swell"
Strange Horizons

An eerie, very disturbing piece about prostitution and mysterious time travelers. Maybe a little bit too elliptical but the characters' dulled reactions spoke a lot to the objectification of bodies.--ad

Peter Verhehst Tonguecat

This novel is structured with colliding, disorienting stories which act like a string of chants to keep us from the base-line of the book: the awfulness of war. And there's an exploration of gender in the stress of this urban violence: Ulrike, Prometheus's lover and guide through the underworld, is also Tonguecat the prostitute who can tell and retell stories.--jc

N. Lee Wood Master of None

A gender-exploration tale in the classic mold: lone man on the planet of women. Wood manages to find a few patches of fresh ground here, in a branch of the sf genre that was once a staple but now is rarely explored without irony--that of the self-consciously Utopian world. If you like a dash of up-front politics in your science fiction, this book is for you.--ct

This novel reminds me how much our beliefs about gender are cultural-a role reversal of power from male to female with some subtle side plots and interesting minor characters.-mm

Epic planetary gender-reversal with good world-building and empathic characters of all stripes. But the main character is straight out of central casting for Male Scientist Who Saves Planet.-ad


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