No one named Tiptree can be found in the Manhattan phone directory, Robert Silverberg notes in his introduction to Warm Worlds and Otherwise (1975) by the mysterious James Tiptree, Jr. Nor could Silverberg find the name in phone books from the San Francisco area. He also came up emptyhanded when consulting the Encyclopedia Britannica — where the only Tiptree mentioned was a heath in Britain, some 25 hectares in Essex County best known for the cultivation of berries.
Poor Mr. Silverberg! He had been asked to write the introduction to a collection of science fiction short stories by an author he had never seen—nor had anyone else in the sci-fi community. Even the name Tiptree seemed phoney, let alone the various autobiographical details, that had slipped out over the years, about an enigmatic recluse who had held various vaguely-described positions in unnamed organizations, and traveled to many far-flung places. Given the intense secrecy surrounding this writer, many believed Tiptree must be, in Silverberg's words, "a government agent involved in high-security work."
Of Tiptree's talent, there could be little doubt. In just a few years, he had published a series of provocative stories, and earned some high profile awards, including a Hugo for the novella "The Girl That Was Plugged In" (1974) and a Nebula for the short story “Love is the Plan the Plan is Death” (1973)—both included in Warm Worlds and Otherwise . Tiptree would win two more Nebulas in later years, for, "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?" (1976) and "The Screwfly Solution" (1977), the latter published under the name Raccoona Sheldon.
Left to hypothesis and speculation, Silverberg delivered the best biographical sketch he could offer of the recluse author. He envisioned Tiptree as "a man of 50 or 55, I guess, possibly unmarried, fond of outdoor life, restless in his everyday existence, a man who has seen much of the world and understands it well." In a passage destined for embarrassing notoriety, he wrote: "It has been suggested that Tiptree is female, a theory that I find absurd, for there is something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree's writings."
Nice try! James Tiptree, Jr. turned out to be an alias for Alice Bradley Sheldon, who was almost 60 years old when Silverberg wrote these words. Over the course of her career, she had served as a major in the military, worked as a painter and graphic artist, wrote art criticism for the Chicago Sun , earned a PhD in experimental psychology, and also earned a paycheck a CIA operative. Finally, in her early 50s, she took on the alias James Tiptree (drawing the name from a brand of marmalade ) and started writing science fiction.
Tiptree’s early stories were fanciful and flippant, and very much in the spirit of escapist pulp fiction. She came up with entertaining variants on the major sub-genre categories, including several different time travel stories and a range of traditional space operas. On the basis of these early works alone, however, Tiptree would merely rank as a solid journeyman author of sci-fi stories. But by 1973, she was moving beyond formulas, and creating genuine innovative work.
"Love is the Plan and the Plan is Death" dispenses completely with the heroic pretensions of pulp fiction. Indeed, the story operates without a single human or human-like character, and can perhaps best be described as a philosophical exploration of the conflict between reason and instinct as narrated by a large insect-like alien. Yet even Kafka’s "The Metamorphosis" seems straightforward compared with Tiptree's dense, indirect style of storytelling in these pages. I'm not surprised that this story never appeared in a sci-fi magazine—few readers of those periodicals would have been prepared for such a radical departure from the usual fare. But it did earn a well-deserved Hugo nomination as well as a Nebula and an award from Locus magazine.
"The Women Men Don’t See," also from 1973, keeps closer to the familiar ingredients of the classic adventure story—at least, in its opening pages. A plane crashes in an isolated coastal area in Latin America, and four individuals struggle to survive until a rescue team arrives. The science fiction angle doesn't emerge until the very end of this novelette, when the rescuers turn out to be extraterrestrials. But the most interesting twist here is in Tiptree's willlingness to challenge all the conventional gender roles associated with adventure stories. If Silverberg had paid more attention to this tale, he might well have figured out that Tiptree was a woman. As it stands, "The Women Men Don't See" ranks among the most persuasive feminist works in the annals of science fiction, and the quirks and eccentricities of character Ruth Parson probably tell you more about the real woman behind James Tiptree, Jr. than you will find anywhere else in her published works.
The third Tiptree masterwork from 1973, "The Girl Who Was Plugged In," is my favorite tale by this author—and, by any measure, one of the great sci-fi stories of the era. There are many reasons to admire this novella. First, Tiptree made some brilliant imaginative leaps in anticipating the future, devising one of the earliest fictional explorations of virtual reality. Current-day users of Facebook or Twitter, or the growing ranks of teenage smartphone addicts, might even take a much-needed warning from "“The Girl Who Was Plugged In." But I'm even more impressed by the acute insights into neuroses and personality disorders that Tiptree shows in this work. As mentioned above, this author earned a PhD in psychology before turning to literary pursuits, and this novella shows how acutely she understood the contradictions of the human psyche. Above all, this is that greatest rarity of sci-fi: a story the impresses us through the genuine pathos and tragedy of its characters, rather than via dazzling technologies and far-fetched concepts.
Shortly after the publication of Warm Worlds and Otherwise , Tiptree came clean, and the sci-fi world learned that the rough-and-tumble middle-aged man supposedly behind these books was an elderly woman, but still as rough-and-tumble as they came. But the Hugo and Nebula awards stopped coming at that point, and the two novels she wrote in her final years were poorly received and are now unavailable in print format. Yet this author is due for a reevaluation—in fact, one is long overdue. Next year marks the centennial of her birth, and this might just be the moment when publishers and readers give her works the serious consideration they deserve.
Ted Gioia writes on literature, music and popular culture. His next book, Love Songs: The Hidden History is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.