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James Tiptree, Jr.
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 James Tiptree, Jr., was the pseudonym of Alice B. Sheldon, a writer who spent most of her life
working for the Central Intelligence Agency and other secret agencies of the U. S. Government before becoming
an experimental psychologist in the late 1960s, and bursting into the science fiction field with one of the
most important and influential careers of the 1970s, her most productive decade. She was a technician who
was always determined to learn more and exercise her skills as a writer. Her reputation is based upon her
short fiction, collected in Ten Thousand Light Years From
Home (1973), Warm Worlds and Otherwise
(1975), Starsongs of an Old Primate (1978),
Out of the Everywhere and Other Extraordinary
Visions (1981), etc. She continued to write at a reduced pace in the 1980s, when she produced her second and best novel,
Brightness Falls From the Air (1985), until her death (a widely publicized suicide) in 1987.
She was a complex and mysterious individual, who never appeared in public but was nevertheless
a public figure in the sf field (in contrast to the pseudonymous Cordwainer Smith, who remains mysterious even
after two decades of posthumous biographical investigation by fans and scholars).
The closest parallel to her work in impact, in attitude, in attention to craft and art, is Theodore
Sturgeon's writing of the 1950s. Like Sturgeon, when she erred, it was in the direction of too much passionate sentiment.
She was associated with raising the feminist consciousness of the sf field in the 1970s, but was rarely
considered as hard sf (too much sentiment, not enough science and technology). She was obsessed with the
theme and the imagery of the alien biologically and emotionally. Yet at least one of her stories, "The Girl Who
Was Plugged In" (1973, one of her several award-winners), is acknowledged by William Gibson as one of
the sources of cyberpunk. Ironically, her affect was closest to the hard sf attitude in those of her stories that
most clearly revealed her fascination, perhaps her obsession, with death. She certainly felt that the universe was
a formidable antagonist.
This story is in a sense a companion piece to Wilhelm's "The Planners," about being a working
scientist in a laboratory, facing moral choices, but replacing the fantasizing of Wilhelm's piece with a drunken,
dreamlike supernatural phantasmagoria at the center of this story, reminiscent of a Keatsian visit to Faerie.
Tiptree's story is another milestone in the characterization of the scientist, invoking the Gothic, Hawthorne strain.
Here the rich subjectivity of the individual is juxtaposed to the mechanistic model of research in the physical
sciences. Tiptree continually challenged idea of the coldness of the universe, portraying that coldness as a
negative aspect of human character rather than an affect existing somehow in external reality -- until her last stories.
Crown of Stars (1988) gathers most of her final tales, suicide-filled and full of the idea of honorable death.
She was a deeply moral writer, even when embracing death.
This story is a counterpoint to "The Cold Equations," while portraying it's affect ironically, and may
be taken as representative of the movement by many of the newer writers in 1970s sf away from the hard sf
affect into the fantastic.
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The Ascent of Wonder copyright © 1994 by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. | ||
Cramer: On Science & Science Fiction || Hartwell: Hard Science Fiction
David G. Hartwell || Kathryn Cramer || About Tor Books || Ordering Info
Interactive Intoduction to THE ASCENT OF WONDER copyright © 1995-1997 by Kathryn Cramer.