From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Journalist Phillips has achieved a wonder: an evenhanded, scrupulously documented, objective yet sympathetic portrait of a deliberately elusive personality: Alice Sheldon (1915–1987), who adopted the persona of science fiction writer James Tiptree Jr. Working from Sheldon's (and Tiptree's) few interviews; Sheldon's professional papers, many unpublished; and the papers of Sheldon's writer-explorer-socialite mother, Phillips has crafted an absorbing mélange of several disparate lives besides Sheldon's, each impacting hers like a deadly off-course asteroid. From Sheldon's sad poor-little-rich-girlhood to her sadder suicide (by a prior pact first shooting her blind and bedridden husband), Sheldon, perpetually wishing she'd been born a boy, made what she called "endless makeshift" attempts to express her tormenting creativity as, among others, a debutante, a flamboyant bohemian, a WAC officer, a CIA photoanalyst, and a research scientist before producing Tiptree's "haunting, subversive, many-layered [science] fiction" at 51. Sheldon masked her authorship until 1976, and afterward produced little fiction, feeling that a woman writing as a man could not be convincing. Through all the ironic sorrows of a life Sheldon wished she hadn't had to live as a woman, Phillips steadfastly and elegantly allows one star, bright as the Sirius Sheldon loved, to gleam. 16 pages of b&w photos. (Aug.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* Over the course of an abbreviated but prolific 20-year career, the late James Tiptree Jr. earned a well-deserved place in the pantheon of sf with a series of brilliantly original tales featuring a distinctive, apocalyptic flavor. Stories such as "The Girl Who Was Plugged In" and "The Women Men Don't See" have become staples of sf anthologies and university literature classes. Despite frequently featuring well-rounded female protagonists, Tiptree kept "his" true, female identity as Alice B. Sheldon (1915-87) a closely guarded secret until relatively late in her life. Phillips' long-overdue biography probes the mystery behind Sheldon's clandestine lifestyle while mapping out the many adventurous turns in her continuously reinvented identity as she changed roles from graphic artist and CIA agent to psychologist and award-winning author. Beginning with Sheldon's childhood spent tagging along to Africa with her mother, noted travel writer Mary Bradley, Phillips follows "Alli" from her formative years in a Swiss girls' school to her years working in a Pentagon subbasement to, finally, her almost whimsical turn as an sf author and eventual, premeditated suicide with her husband. Phillips draws on extensive interviews with surviving relatives and literary colleagues as well as Alli's revealing letters to write a compelling, sympathetic portrait of one of speculative fiction's most gifted and fascinating figures. Carl Hays
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
"An incredible life, done elegant justice. Tiptree-Sheldon is one of the century's astonishing figures, somewhere between Katharine Hepburn, Philip K. Dick, and Billy Tipton."
- Jonathan Lethem, bestselling author of The Fortress of Solitude
"An examplary biography of a fascinating life -- the brilliantly elusive woman who, as a writer, called herself James Tiptree Jr. Never oversimplifying, never overinterpreting, Julie Phillips illuminates a formidably complex psyche wihout invading it. "
- Ursula K. Le Guin, Hugo and National Book Award-winning author of The Dispossessed
- Jonathan Lethem, bestselling author of The Fortress of Solitude
"An examplary biography of a fascinating life -- the brilliantly elusive woman who, as a writer, called herself James Tiptree Jr. Never oversimplifying, never overinterpreting, Julie Phillips illuminates a formidably complex psyche wihout invading it. "
- Ursula K. Le Guin, Hugo and National Book Award-winning author of The Dispossessed
"The meticulous, emotionally intelligent biography of an extraordinary writer. Alice Sheldon is easily the most intriguing figure in late 20th-century American science fiction. Julie Phillips has given 'Tiptree' the book she deserves.”
- William Gibson, New York Times Bestselling author of Pattern Recognition, and Hugo Award Winning author of Neuromancer
"A fascinating subject, an engrossing read. Philips provides sharp, insightful portraits of the real Alice Sheldon, the fictional James Tiptree, Jr, and the complicated partnership of their work and lives. This is a biography written with equal parts sympathy, respect, research, and honesty. And a real page-turner, too."
- Karen Joy Fowler, the author of SARAH CANARY, SISTER NOON, and THE JANE AUSTEN BOOK CLUB
"Why can't a woman be more like a man?" Professor Henry Higgins famously asks in My Fair Lady. In this deeply thoughtful, rivetingly readable biography of "James Tiptree Jr." Julie Phillips traces the life and work of a woman whose self-presentation in her writing made her seem so much "like a man" that she confounded our culture's myths of gender and genre, convincing even the most sophisticated readers that "Tiptree"--in "real" life a woman called Allie Sheldon--was and had to be "really" a man. This is a fascinating investigation of a fantastic literary career."
- Sandra Gilbert, distinguished scholar and Editor of Norton Anthology of Literature by Women
"Documents not only an extraordinary life but all the faultlines of what it meant to be female in the twentieth century. I think this may be the rare case when a biography actually exceeds what I expect from a novel…. I hope everyone reads this book.
– Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard Out Of Carolina
"It is a first-rate biography, important and rewarding to everyone interested in science fiction or Tiptree's work or women's writing or Alli herself. It's a solid, scholarly job , and shows great sensitivity to Tiptree's life and work."
- Joanna Russ, Author of The Female Man
Book Description
James Tiptree, Jr. burst onto the science fiction scene in the 1970s with a series of hardedged, provocative short stories. Hailed as a brilliant masculine writer with a deep sympathy for his famale character, he penned such classics as Houston, Houston, Do You Read?and The Women Men Don't See. For years he corresponded with Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison,Ursula Le Guin. No one knew his true identity. Then the cover was blown on his alter ego: A sixty-one-year old woman named Alice Sheldon. As a child, she explored Africa with her mother. Later, made into a debutante, she eloped with one of the guests at the party. She was an artist, a chicken farmer, aWorld War II intelligence officer, a CIA agent, an experimental psychologist. Devoted to her second husband, she struggled with her feelings for women. In 1987, her suicide shocked friends and fans. The James Tiptree, Jr.Award was created to honor science fiction or fantasy that explores our understanding of gender. This fascinating biography, ten years in the making, is based on extensive research, exclusive interviews, and full access to Alice Sheldon's papers
About the Author
JULIE PHILLIPS is a journalist who has written on books, film, feminism, and cultural politics for Newsday, Interview, Mademoiselle, and for Ms. and The Village Voice
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Introduction: Who Is Tiptree, What Is He?
No one [...] has, to my knowledge, ever met Tiptree, ever seen him, ever talked with him on the phone. No one knows where he lives, what he looks like, what he does for a living. [...] He volunteers no information about his personal life, and politely refuses to answer questions about it. [...] Most SF people [...] are wild to know who Tiptree "really" is.
---Gardner Dozois, 1976
In 1921 in the Belgian Congo, a six-year-old girl from Chicago with a pith helmet on her blond curls walks at the head of a line of heavily laden native porters. Her mother walks next to her, holding a rifle and her daughter's hand.
In 1929, the girl huddles under quilts in a cabin in the Great North Woods, reading Weird Tales. The candle by her bed flickers as an alien gently removes a young human's brassiere.
On Christmas Eve 1934, a nineteen-year-old in a white beaded evening gown makes her debut. At the party she meets a handsome, dark-haired boy in a tie and tails. She makes a joke; he laughs, and makes another. Five days later they elope and marry.
In 1942, a divorcée wearing three-inch heels and a fox fur jacket goes down to a Chicago recruiting station and enlists in the army.
Sometime in the near future, a woman and a man meet an extraterrestrial exploring party. The man tries to protect the woman. The woman says she doesn't believe in women's chances on Earth, and asks the aliens to take her away.
In 1970, a man who does not exist sits down at a typewriter. He writes, "At last I have what every child wants, a real secret life. Not an official secret, not a Q-clearance polygraph-enforced bite-the-capsule-when-they-get-you secret, nobody else's damn secret but MINE."
James Tiptree, Jr., appeared on the science fiction scene in the late 1960s, writing fast-paced, action-filled stories about rocket ships, alien sex, and intergalactic bureaucratic anxiety. He was a brilliant and original talent, with a voice like no one else's: knowing, intense, utterly convinced of its authority and the urgency of its message. No one had ever seen or spoken to the owner of this voice. He wrote letters, warm, frank, funny letters, to other writers, editors, and science fiction fans. His correspondence was intimate and revealing, yet even his closest friends knew little more about "Tip" than his address: a post office box in McLean, Virginia.
He was rumored to be a government official or secret agent. He did seem to know a lot about spooks around the water cooler: his characters worked in "an unimportant bit of C.I.A." or remarked, "Paranoia hasn't been useful in my business for years, but the habit is hard to break." He had opinions about fishing, duck hunting, and politics. He was courtly and flirtatious with women. When one of his friends, the writer Robert Silverberg, sent him a letter on his wife's stationary, Tip answered that he had "shaved and applied lotion" before reading on. Silverberg pictured Tip 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." Men looked up to him. His women friends fell in love.
The stories that came out of PO Box 315 became more and more brilliant and disturbing. It wasn't the sex, and it wasn't the death, but it was the combination of the two. His stories read like urgent messages from some haunted house on the corner of Eros and Mortality. Humans meet aliens---and abandon their very souls for a chance to sleep with them. A man in love with the Earth kills off the human race, including himself, to save her. A mission to the stars finds an alien egg for which the colonists themselves turn out to be the sperm.
Like Philip K. Dick, Tiptree used science fiction to talk about the importance of empathy and explore what it means to be human---though he was less likely than Dick to question reality. Reality is there; the human project is to learn to see it, or die. Or learn to see ourselves: the reality of human flesh and emotions was what terrified, and fascinated, Tiptree. Can the body be trusted? Will it betray us? What does it want? Can we get rid of it?
This masculine writer, who let his readers in on the technology of space flight and the inner workings of government, also showed a surprising sympathy toward his female characters. He wrote about women's alienation in a world of men, and was held up as an example of a male feminist, a man who understood. Still, his stories were so full of action, philosophy, and desire for women that everyone knew they were dealing with a man. In 1975, in an introduction to a book of Tiptree's short stories, Robert Silverberg wrote of his friend, "It has been suggested that Tiptree is female, a theory that I find absurd, for there is to me something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree's writing."
He likened Tiptree's "lean, muscular, supple" stories to Hemingway's:
Hemingway was a deeper and trickier writer than he pretended to be; so too with Tiptree, who conceals behind an aw-shucks artlessness an astonishing skill for shaping scenes and misdirecting readers into unexpected abysses of experience. And there is, too, that prevailing masculinity about both of them---that preoccupation with questions of courage, with absolute values, with the mysteries and passions of life and death as revealed by extreme physical tests, by pain and suffering and loss.
In the same year, another of Tiptree's letter-friends, the feminist science fiction writer Joanna Russ, wrote him that a professor at a party had "asked me if you were a woman (!) by which I gather he can't recognize a female point of view if it bites him." When Tiptree participated in a written symposium on "Women in Science Fiction" as a token "sensitive man," Russ told him he had ideas "no woman could even think, or understand, let alone assent to."
By then Tiptree had introduced a protégée, Raccoona Sheldon, who seemed strongly influenced by Tiptree's style. No one, not even herself, had opinions about Raccoona's sex: she was a former schoolteacher who published little and wrote, "As for me, really the less said the better."
Tiptree did reveal a few facts about himself. He had been born in Chicago. His parents had been African explorers and his mother a writer. He had spent part of his childhood in colonial Africa, and the Second World War "in a Pentagon sub-basement." He was reluctant to reveal his true identity because he couldn't have the people around him know he was writing science fiction, and because he liked his secret life.
Then in late 1976, Tiptree told a few friends that his elderly mother had died. More than one of Tip's correspondents checked the Chicago papers and found an obituary for Mary Hastings Bradley, novelist, travel writer, and African explorer. Under "survivors" was listed her only child: Alice Bradley (Mrs. Huntington) Sheldon.
Ten years later, shortly before her death by suicide, Alli Sheldon wrote, "My secret world had been invaded and the attractive figure of Tiptree---he did strike several people as attractive---was revealed as nothing but an old lady in Virginia."
Alice Hastings Bradley Davey Sheldon, 1915--1987
As it turned out, the sixty-one-year-old Alice Sheldon, known as Alli, was just as attractive a figure as Tiptree had ever been, opinionated and theatrical, with a past that she revealed, bit by bit, in tantalizing anecdotes. The few friends she allowed into the home in McLean that she shared with her husband, Huntington "Ting" Sheldon, were fascinated by this eloquent storyteller. The writer Gardner Dozois called her "one of the most fascinating conversationalists I've ever met, brilliant, theatrical, far-ranging, strikingly perceptive." David Hartwell, her editor, said "Alli was electrifying, [...] enchanting both in person and in her fiction."
By the time she started writing science fiction she had already been a painter and an airforce intelligence officer. She had eloped with the "beautiful alcoholic poet" who had been seated on her left at her debut. She had worked for the CIA. She had earned a Ph.D. in experimental psychology. She had published a story in the New Yorker. She had begun and thrown out essays, scientific works, and novels.
She was born in 1915 as Alice Hastings Bradley, the cute, blue-eyed only child of two extraordinary parents. Her father, Herbert Bradley, was a lawyer who led three expeditions into unmapped Central Africa. Her mother, Mary Hastings Bradley, was a highly successful author of travel books and popular fiction. Both adult Bradleys were charismatic, energetic, public people whose adventures gave the family an exotic air.
Mary Bradley was an enormous presence in Alli's life: magnetic, generous, theatrical, extremely long-lived. Tiptree described his mother as
a kind of explorer-heroine, highly literate (Oxford & Heidelberg), yet very feminine whatever that is. You help her through doors---and then find out she can hike 45 miles up a mountain carrying her rifle and yours. And repeat next day. And joke. And dazzling looks [...] I am still approached by doddering wrecks, extinguished Scandinavian savants or what have you who want to tell me about Mother as a young woman.
Alli called her
a dazzling and formidable little person, a "queen bee" with two adoring males in addition to her husband. (In our Victorian culture they were Father's best friends.) She was gifted, beautiful, emotional, accomplished; a linguist, writer, spell-binding conversationalist---and a superb shot and brave endurer of considerable real hardships. [...] She didn't provide a model for me, she provided an impossibility.
Mary encouraged her daughter, first as an artist and then as a writer. But what Alli needed to say was not within the scope even of Mary's wide world, and what she did not learn from Mary's example was that women could say anything. She learned that women had to be very careful in order to speak at all.
<...
No one [...] has, to my knowledge, ever met Tiptree, ever seen him, ever talked with him on the phone. No one knows where he lives, what he looks like, what he does for a living. [...] He volunteers no information about his personal life, and politely refuses to answer questions about it. [...] Most SF people [...] are wild to know who Tiptree "really" is.
---Gardner Dozois, 1976
In 1921 in the Belgian Congo, a six-year-old girl from Chicago with a pith helmet on her blond curls walks at the head of a line of heavily laden native porters. Her mother walks next to her, holding a rifle and her daughter's hand.
In 1929, the girl huddles under quilts in a cabin in the Great North Woods, reading Weird Tales. The candle by her bed flickers as an alien gently removes a young human's brassiere.
On Christmas Eve 1934, a nineteen-year-old in a white beaded evening gown makes her debut. At the party she meets a handsome, dark-haired boy in a tie and tails. She makes a joke; he laughs, and makes another. Five days later they elope and marry.
In 1942, a divorcée wearing three-inch heels and a fox fur jacket goes down to a Chicago recruiting station and enlists in the army.
Sometime in the near future, a woman and a man meet an extraterrestrial exploring party. The man tries to protect the woman. The woman says she doesn't believe in women's chances on Earth, and asks the aliens to take her away.
In 1970, a man who does not exist sits down at a typewriter. He writes, "At last I have what every child wants, a real secret life. Not an official secret, not a Q-clearance polygraph-enforced bite-the-capsule-when-they-get-you secret, nobody else's damn secret but MINE."
James Tiptree, Jr., appeared on the science fiction scene in the late 1960s, writing fast-paced, action-filled stories about rocket ships, alien sex, and intergalactic bureaucratic anxiety. He was a brilliant and original talent, with a voice like no one else's: knowing, intense, utterly convinced of its authority and the urgency of its message. No one had ever seen or spoken to the owner of this voice. He wrote letters, warm, frank, funny letters, to other writers, editors, and science fiction fans. His correspondence was intimate and revealing, yet even his closest friends knew little more about "Tip" than his address: a post office box in McLean, Virginia.
He was rumored to be a government official or secret agent. He did seem to know a lot about spooks around the water cooler: his characters worked in "an unimportant bit of C.I.A." or remarked, "Paranoia hasn't been useful in my business for years, but the habit is hard to break." He had opinions about fishing, duck hunting, and politics. He was courtly and flirtatious with women. When one of his friends, the writer Robert Silverberg, sent him a letter on his wife's stationary, Tip answered that he had "shaved and applied lotion" before reading on. Silverberg pictured Tip 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." Men looked up to him. His women friends fell in love.
The stories that came out of PO Box 315 became more and more brilliant and disturbing. It wasn't the sex, and it wasn't the death, but it was the combination of the two. His stories read like urgent messages from some haunted house on the corner of Eros and Mortality. Humans meet aliens---and abandon their very souls for a chance to sleep with them. A man in love with the Earth kills off the human race, including himself, to save her. A mission to the stars finds an alien egg for which the colonists themselves turn out to be the sperm.
Like Philip K. Dick, Tiptree used science fiction to talk about the importance of empathy and explore what it means to be human---though he was less likely than Dick to question reality. Reality is there; the human project is to learn to see it, or die. Or learn to see ourselves: the reality of human flesh and emotions was what terrified, and fascinated, Tiptree. Can the body be trusted? Will it betray us? What does it want? Can we get rid of it?
This masculine writer, who let his readers in on the technology of space flight and the inner workings of government, also showed a surprising sympathy toward his female characters. He wrote about women's alienation in a world of men, and was held up as an example of a male feminist, a man who understood. Still, his stories were so full of action, philosophy, and desire for women that everyone knew they were dealing with a man. In 1975, in an introduction to a book of Tiptree's short stories, Robert Silverberg wrote of his friend, "It has been suggested that Tiptree is female, a theory that I find absurd, for there is to me something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree's writing."
He likened Tiptree's "lean, muscular, supple" stories to Hemingway's:
Hemingway was a deeper and trickier writer than he pretended to be; so too with Tiptree, who conceals behind an aw-shucks artlessness an astonishing skill for shaping scenes and misdirecting readers into unexpected abysses of experience. And there is, too, that prevailing masculinity about both of them---that preoccupation with questions of courage, with absolute values, with the mysteries and passions of life and death as revealed by extreme physical tests, by pain and suffering and loss.
In the same year, another of Tiptree's letter-friends, the feminist science fiction writer Joanna Russ, wrote him that a professor at a party had "asked me if you were a woman (!) by which I gather he can't recognize a female point of view if it bites him." When Tiptree participated in a written symposium on "Women in Science Fiction" as a token "sensitive man," Russ told him he had ideas "no woman could even think, or understand, let alone assent to."
By then Tiptree had introduced a protégée, Raccoona Sheldon, who seemed strongly influenced by Tiptree's style. No one, not even herself, had opinions about Raccoona's sex: she was a former schoolteacher who published little and wrote, "As for me, really the less said the better."
Tiptree did reveal a few facts about himself. He had been born in Chicago. His parents had been African explorers and his mother a writer. He had spent part of his childhood in colonial Africa, and the Second World War "in a Pentagon sub-basement." He was reluctant to reveal his true identity because he couldn't have the people around him know he was writing science fiction, and because he liked his secret life.
Then in late 1976, Tiptree told a few friends that his elderly mother had died. More than one of Tip's correspondents checked the Chicago papers and found an obituary for Mary Hastings Bradley, novelist, travel writer, and African explorer. Under "survivors" was listed her only child: Alice Bradley (Mrs. Huntington) Sheldon.
Ten years later, shortly before her death by suicide, Alli Sheldon wrote, "My secret world had been invaded and the attractive figure of Tiptree---he did strike several people as attractive---was revealed as nothing but an old lady in Virginia."
Alice Hastings Bradley Davey Sheldon, 1915--1987
As it turned out, the sixty-one-year-old Alice Sheldon, known as Alli, was just as attractive a figure as Tiptree had ever been, opinionated and theatrical, with a past that she revealed, bit by bit, in tantalizing anecdotes. The few friends she allowed into the home in McLean that she shared with her husband, Huntington "Ting" Sheldon, were fascinated by this eloquent storyteller. The writer Gardner Dozois called her "one of the most fascinating conversationalists I've ever met, brilliant, theatrical, far-ranging, strikingly perceptive." David Hartwell, her editor, said "Alli was electrifying, [...] enchanting both in person and in her fiction."
By the time she started writing science fiction she had already been a painter and an airforce intelligence officer. She had eloped with the "beautiful alcoholic poet" who had been seated on her left at her debut. She had worked for the CIA. She had earned a Ph.D. in experimental psychology. She had published a story in the New Yorker. She had begun and thrown out essays, scientific works, and novels.
She was born in 1915 as Alice Hastings Bradley, the cute, blue-eyed only child of two extraordinary parents. Her father, Herbert Bradley, was a lawyer who led three expeditions into unmapped Central Africa. Her mother, Mary Hastings Bradley, was a highly successful author of travel books and popular fiction. Both adult Bradleys were charismatic, energetic, public people whose adventures gave the family an exotic air.
Mary Bradley was an enormous presence in Alli's life: magnetic, generous, theatrical, extremely long-lived. Tiptree described his mother as
a kind of explorer-heroine, highly literate (Oxford & Heidelberg), yet very feminine whatever that is. You help her through doors---and then find out she can hike 45 miles up a mountain carrying her rifle and yours. And repeat next day. And joke. And dazzling looks [...] I am still approached by doddering wrecks, extinguished Scandinavian savants or what have you who want to tell me about Mother as a young woman.
Alli called her
a dazzling and formidable little person, a "queen bee" with two adoring males in addition to her husband. (In our Victorian culture they were Father's best friends.) She was gifted, beautiful, emotional, accomplished; a linguist, writer, spell-binding conversationalist---and a superb shot and brave endurer of considerable real hardships. [...] She didn't provide a model for me, she provided an impossibility.
Mary encouraged her daughter, first as an artist and then as a writer. But what Alli needed to say was not within the scope even of Mary's wide world, and what she did not learn from Mary's example was that women could say anything. She learned that women had to be very careful in order to speak at all.
<...
