James Tiptree, Jr

James Tiptree Jr (24 August 1915 – 19 May 1987) was the pen name of American science fiction author Alice Bradley Sheldon, used from 1967 to her death. She also occasionally wrote under the pseudonym Raccoona Sheldon (1974–77).

Quotes

• You can understand why a system would seek information - but why in hell does it offer information? Why do we strive to be understood? Why is a refusal to accept communication so painful?
  • "I'm Too Big But I Love To Play" in Ten Thousand Light-Years From Home (1973)

• Anyone who shoots a real gun at you when drunk and angry is simply not husband material, regardless of his taste in literature.
  • Letter quoted in "James Tiptree Jr: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon" (2006) by Julie Phillips

• Our fellow passenger was Major Grogan, who thirty years before had been the first white man to go from the Cape to Cairo. It took him three years, one whole year in the marshes of the Sudd; his two companions died. It is said he ate them; I think so. He looked like a sensible man.
  • As quoted in "James Tiptree Jr: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon" (2006) by Julie Phillips

The Women Men Don't See (1973)

• What women do is survive. We live by ones and twos in the chinks of your world-machine.

• Women have no rights, Don, except what men allow us. Men are more aggressive and powerful, and they run the world. When the next real crisis upsets them, our so-called rights will vanish like—like that smoke. We'll be back where we always were: property. And whatever has gone wrong will be blamed on our freedom, like the fall of Rome was. You'll see.

Quotes about

• "James Tiptree, Jr." was a science fiction writer whose very fine work began appearing in the 1960s. No one had ever met "Tiptree" and theories about "him" were rife. Finally "James Tiptree, Jr." was revealed to be a sixty-year-old biologist called Alice Sheldon. We corresponded extensively, both before this revelation and afterwards. I loved James and was sad to lose him but I loved Alice too (she sent postcards typed in blue ink with blue-ink octopi drawn on them) and was much sadder to lose her because her loss (her death) was permanent. Straight people, however sympathetic they may be, don't know the texture or the difficulties of gay lives. When I heard of her death I determined that she wouldn't go down in history as another happy, heterosexual woman (like Virginia Woolf) whose life was edited because her real desires were held to be somehow an "attack" on her character. Sheldon, like Woolf, was married and happily so but she was a lesbian. Therefore I wrote the above note to Extrapolation and donated her letters to what I considered the appropriate place.
  • Joanna Russ in The Country You Have Never Seen: Essays and Reviews (2007)

External links

Biographical references

• James Tiptree, Jr. at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• Biography and resources at the James Tiptree, Jr. World Wide Website
• Site for Julie Phillips's biography of Tiptree
• New York Times review of JAMES TIPTREE, JR The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon By Julie Phillips

On-line Fiction

• The Women Men don't See
• Love Is the Plan, the Plan Is Death
• Her Smoke Rose Up Forever
• The Man who Walked Home
• And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill's Side
• The Last Flight of Doctor Ain