The 1998 James Tiptree, Jr. Award: Long List
"Datableed", Asimov's, March 1998
,Good story, but didn't go far enough. A promising premise underutilised. (CJD)
House of Sleep, Alfred A. Knopf, 1998
,A fun novel of variations on sleep, positioned in a pleasant overlap of melodrama, cleverness, satire, and farce. As for gender exploration, I don't see it. The book is much more interested in exploring dreams, film, obsession, memory, and the spotty history of the mental health profession. Loved that eyelid fetish! (RD)
A nastily well-written book, and with some excellent commentary on the difference between how our sexuality perceives gender and how we think it does - but did not take us anywhere we hadn't been. Greg-Hollingshead-meets-Crying-Game. (CJD)
Quintessence: Realizing The Archaic Future, Beacon Press, 1998
,"It's different," as my mother often says when hard-pressed. Daly's style's gotten even loopier, the book's "future" may be the least clearly visualized utopia I've encountered since Sunday school's heaven, and it's no more (or less) fiction than a Scientology tract. But a vision that insists that kitties, bunnies, and snakes would all frolic peacefully together if only the patriarchy was gone is at least a ridiculousness at drastic variance from all the other ridiculousnesses I've had to deal with this year. (RD)
Difficult in ways which did not engender product loyalty. (Completely unreadable and coy to boot.) (CJD)
Pig Tales: A Novel Of Lust And Transformation, New Press, 1997
,Effective, blackly-funny - but oddly anachronistic. I felt like I had gone back twenty years and was reading one of the texts that inflamed the feminist anger of the late sixties and early seventies. Stating the problem might have been enough then, but much literature which expands the boundaries of gender issues has gone under the bridge since then. (CJD)
Pig Tales strikes me as a guilty romp. I enjoyed it and occasionally thought it was saying something about the relations of men and women or about the powerful and the powerless, but in the end its beastliness left me without new insights, or even old ones revisited. (KS)
Sirens And Other Daemon Lovers, Harper Prism, 1998
and , editors,While many of the stories were effective, I didn't feel that overall, individually or collectively, they contributed new insight on gender issues. (CJD)
, , Asimov's, March 1998
An example of a type of narrative we have seen several times this year, proving that what was radical in 1969, when Genly Ai sledded across the ice with a monosexual in The Left Hand of Darkness, is mainstream in our field now. While I saw with appreciation that "mother" and "father" were function words now (mother who carried the child and thus historically was granted a particular relationship while the sperm donor was the father and had less authority, cf. the last page) and that was consistent, I wondered also what this very traditional teenaged romance structure was going to lead to. Well told, though not my cup of tea as far as romance, but no for the award. (CJD)
, Tesseract Books, 1998
A good book - I should think so, as I published it - but I have to concur with the other judges that it doesn't push the gender envelope. (CJD)
Didn't seem to me to explore gender, but a beautifully-written book about involuntary sainthood and some of the odd uses religion can be put to. (KS)
"Oceanic", Asimov's, August 1998
,There's one gender twist: penises that are exchanged during sex - but I did not find the society consistent with such a biology. I was curious about why, in a society where bioengineered people could exchange genitals and anyone presumably could bear a child due to the physically-clumsy mechanism of the exchangeable penis, there are still words for "brother" and "sister" and other gender specifics when from time untold they have had this ability; and does Martin turn into Daniel's sister when he trades off his penis or are they still brothers; and why are there still gender specific names, and... A 1960s coming of age story with a religious challenge instead of a physical one, and with a powerfully Freudian metaphor for sex -- but it doesn't hold together socially or biologically once the well-told tale is analysed. (CJD)
"The Eye of the Storm", in Sirens And Other Daemon Lovers, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, Harper Prism, 1998
,Enjoyable story, notable for the treatment of gender, gender balance, and sexual orientation as resolved issues in an otherwise nearly-standard high fantasy world. (KS)
"In the Realm of Dragons", Asimov's, February 1998
,Another story which does effective work in the new mainstream of gender-conscious speculative fiction. It's nice that queers get more ink, and it's a nicely told story, with an excellent intention to help convince readers to oppose bashing -- and to remind people that we hate in others what we fear in ourselves -- but didn't cross frontiers of the kind I was looking for for the award. (CJD)
Commitment Hour, Avon Eos, 1998
,Another example of a type of narrative which considers questions which seem to me to have become mainstream in our field now. I find all these "discovery texts" anachronistic. Stating the problem is no longer enough to win a Tiptree. That said, I must say that I welcome the efforts of a wide spectrum of writers to consider these issues. What seems cutting-edge for me after twenty-seven years of reading the landmark texts in this area is one thing: the young conservative het males who read Jim Gardner and other writers working in this part of the forest will consider this work cutting-edge and apply that Occam's Razor to their own developing lives. Someone has to take them into this landscape which is new to them if not to us. I think that it is interesting to see what happens in the swirls and eddies behind the icebreakers and the exploration vessels. This is what the midlist, the "mainstream" of F&SF, thinks is out-on-the-edge. (CJD)
"Time Gypsy", in Bending The Landscape: Original Gay And Lesbian Science Fiction, edited by Nicola Griffith and Stephen Pagel, The Overlook Press, 1998
,Nice time travel story about cut-throat academic physicists; compares and contrasts modern acceptance of lesbians with the closeted world of 1956.
"Snow", in Starlight 2, edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Tor Books, 1998
,A lovely lovely little piece, heartbreaking - but not for this award. (CJD)
Dark Waters Embrace, Avon Eos, 1998
,I liked reading Dark Waters Embrace but again I found it was following not leading, same as does Jim Gardner's book, and I agreed with another judge who said it was biology not gender. I do think it is a lapse of the imagination to assume that the alien humanoid culture would have bi-phobia just like ours, especially if the Ke were not only part of the species but a necessary part of reproduction. It would be like hating your sexuality, and while I realise Augustine managed that, still...there, it would be fundamentalists who defended the trio family, wouldn't it? I fear that at the last it fails because the author can't imagine past male-female fences. (CJD)
Killing Darcy, University of Queensland Press, 1998
,I liked it, and I thought it was a real winner of its type -- but didn't cross any boundaries in Tiptree terms: we know there must be non-het aboriginals -- so? If I were judging a YA book award, it's be a short list item or even a winner, (as long as there wasn't a Jill-Paton-Walsh ringer in the field), but for our purposes, no. (CJD)
Children Of God, Villard Books, 1998
,It is not gender but issues of parents and children which drive this book, and Russell's themes seem somehow more conservative in this one than in The Sparrow. (CJD)
Children of God is concerned, as The Sparrow was, with Tiptree-type issues (the celibate's role in society, women's role in society) and explores them, both in the human context and in the context of the alien world, Rakhat. However, the primary concern of the novel is the transformation of a precariously balanced society into a possibly more just but certainly different society once the balance is disturbed by an outside force. It's an interesting concern, but not the one we're focussed on here. (KS)
"The Drag Queen of Elfland", Ultra Violet, 1997
,Thought "The Drag Queen of Elfland", despite the realisation that he was Le Belle Dame etc., was not about gender, but was a one-note gender-substitution story with no real surprises that couldn't have happened to opposite-sex couples. (CJD)
Six Moon Dance, Avon Eos, 1998
,I'm not much for biological determinism, and I'd feared the worst. But the novel's exaggerations along those lines were satirical and tidily taken care of by plot twists. And I welcomed the mellowness of the humor and the classically comedic conclusion, though the dialects should've been dropped fast and hard. Highly recommended. (RD)
I admire Tepper's ideology and passion, but for some reason did not find this as winsome as did some other judges. I was sorry not to, for I think that Tepper is doing important work. (CJD)
Nameless Magery, Del Rey, 1998
,This book has a female mage in a male college of mages, in some ways a typical genre fantasy set-up, but she's on another world where the gender roles are wonky (to her) while on her own world, magic is considered sentient and has its own pronoun (lle, ller). Not a winner for this award, but worthy of being on the list of nominees. (CJD)
"The Body Politic", in Dreaming Down-Under, edited by Jack Dann and Janeen Webb, Voyager HarperCollins, 1998
,It's about a woman working, and a man ignoring or misinterpreting all her signals, spoken and unspoken, leading to his death at her hands. Her work is a particular kind of prostitution; he hires her for a different kind, thinking he can set the terms of the contract at will. I'm a sucker for stories that look like they're about sex but turn out to be about work. (KS)