Reprint: Transhumanity

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Arthur C Clarke, Bruce Sterling, Charles Darwin, Christopher Evans, Frederik Pohl, Greg Egan, H.G. Wells, Iain Banks, Isaac Asimov, Jack Finney, James Tiptree Jr, John W. Campbell, Martin Caidin, Olaf Stapledon, Robert Silverberg, S Fowler Wright, T.H. Huxley

We’re getting close to the end of the series of Cognitive Mapping columns I wrote for Vector. This one first appeared in Vector 194, July-August 1997.

Reprint: Space

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Arthur C Clarke, Cyrano de Bergerac, Douglas Adams, E.E. 'Doc' Smith, Fred Hoyle, H.G. Wells, Hal Clement, Hugo Gernsback, Iain Banks, James Blish, James Tiptree Jr, Johannes Kepler, John W. Campbell, Jules Verne, Larry Niven, Poul Anderson

This is another of my Cognitive Mapping columns. In this instance it first appeared in Vector 190 (November-December 1996).

Reprint: Transformation

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Algis Budrys, F. Anstey, Frederik Pohl, Gene Wolfe, H.G. Wells, James Tiptree Jr, Kevin Anderson, m john harrison, Martin Caidin, P.G. Wodehouse, Philip K. Dick, Robert Louis Stevenson, Robert Silverberg, Samuel R. Delany, Thorne Smith

And while I’m thinking about my Vector columns, here’s another from my Cognitive Mapping series. This was first published in Vector 203, January-February 1999.

Hustvedt and Tiptree

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James Tiptree Jr, Julie Phillips, Robert Silverberg, Siri Hustvedt, Ursula K. Le Guin

I put Siri Hustvedt’s The Blazing World down late last year. I was enjoying it, but I was overloaded with other things I had to do and reading for pleasure came rather low on the pecking order. This morning I picked it up again; still too much else to do, but what the hell. And practically the first thing I read is a passage about James Tiptree.

She outlines the basic story we all know: how no-one met Tiptree, how Silverberg said the work was ineluctably masculine, the appearance of Raccoona Sheldon, etc. Then we come to this bit:

What interested her was not simply substituting a man’s name for a woman’s. That was boring. No, she pointed out that Le Guin had suspected all along that Raccoona and Tiptree were two authors that came from the same source, but in a letter to Alice she wrote that she preferred Tiptree to Raccoona: ‘Raccoona, I think, has less control, thus less wit and power.’

Le Guin, Mother said, had understood something deep. ‘When you take on a male persona, something happens.’

When I asked what that was, she sat back in her chair, waved her arm, and smiled, ‘You get to be the father.’

… She told me that in 1987 Tiptree shot her husband and then killed herself. Mother said Sheldon couldn’t live without her man — not her husband, obviously, but the man inside her — and she believed that’s why she exploded into violence.

Two things struck me about this passage.

First, although this analysis of Tiptree’s suicide doesn’t conform to the story in Julie Phillips’s biography, doesn’t take into account the husband’s illness or her own, or mention that this was all a decade after her identity was revealed, yet there is something that rings true about it. Le Guin was right that there was something in Tiptree’s writing that Raccoona Sheldon’s lacked, and after Tiptree’s identity was revealed, Tiptree’s writing lacked it also. To my mind, ‘Houston, Houston, Do You Read?’, ‘The Psychologist Who Wouldn’t Do Awful Things to Rats’ and Raccoona Sheldon’s ‘The Screwfly Solution’, which came out around the time of the revelation, were the last really significant things she wrote. The stories that came later, and all of the novels, were distinctly minor affairs when compared to the work that appeared when Tiptree was safely behind her mask.

The Encyclopedia says that the revelation killed Tiptree. That’s not strictly true, it didn’t even stop her writing; but it stopped her being Tiptree, and that took something out of the writing. And for that, Hustvedt’s point about getting to ‘be the father’, works as well as any. It may not be that she couldn’t live without the man inside her, though she certainly went into decline without him; but it is surely the case that she couldn’t write to that high and wonderful standard without him.

The second thing is that Hustvedt’s novel tells of a woman artist who calls herself Harry, and whose work is exhibited as by a succession of male front men. All the time I was reading this far I was asking myself: does she know about Tiptree. It seems to me that there is a lot of James Tiptree in Harry.

Well, now it seems I have my answer.

Cognitive Mapping: Nature

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Edgar Pangborn, H.G. Wells, Ian McDonald, J.G. Ballard, Jack London, James Tiptree Jr, John Crowley, Joseph Conrad, Kathleen Ann Goonan, Mary Shelley, Richard Cowper, Richard Jefferies, Richard Kadrey, Robert Holdstock, Ronald Wright, S Fowler Wright, Steve Erickson, W.H. Hudson

Another of my Cognitive Mapping columns, this one was written for Vector, as usual, sometime around 1998, but may never have actually appeared.

Reprint: And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill’s Side

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Christopher Priest, Harry Harrison, James Tiptree Jr, John Keats, kameron hurley, Theodore Sturgeon

Given the review of the Tiptree biography I reprinted a few days ago, it seems appropriate to link to this column on Tiptree’s story. The column first appeared in Vector 272, Spring 2013.

Reprint: Humanity

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Algis Budrys, Anne McCaffrey, Frederik Pohl, Greg Bear, H.G. Wells, Isaac Asimov, James Tiptree Jr, Mary Shelley, Michael Bishop, N. Lee Wood, R.A. Lafferty, Robert Louis Stevenson

Another of my Cognitive Mapping series. This one first appeared in Vector 198, March-April 1998.

Reprint: A Doubled Life

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Alice B. Sheldon, Barry Malzberg, David Gerrold, Harlan Ellison, James Tiptree Jr, Jeffrey D. Smith, Joanna Russ, Julie Phillips, Mary Hastings Bradley, Maureen Kincaid Speller, Raccoona Sheldon, Robert Silverberg, Samuel R. Delany, Ursula K. Le Guin

James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon by Julie Phillips was one of the finest literary biographies it has been my pleasure to read. Naturally, Interzone decided it should be appreciated with a double review, so Maureen Kincaid Speller and I agreed to split the job between us. First published in Interzone 205, August 2006, Maureen’s review concentrated on the life, while mine concentrated on the career (though there were inevitable overlaps). You can read Maureen’s review here at Paperknife, while mine follows the cut.

Reprint: Clouds

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Arthur Conan Doyle, Fred Hoyle, H.G. Wells, Jack McDevitt, James Tiptree Jr, Terry Bisson

Time, I think, for another of my Cognitive Mapping columns. I’m doing them in alphabetical rather than chronological order, in case you haven’t noticed, and this one first appeared in Vector 197, January-February 1998.

Reprint: Founded on the Shambles

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Alfred Bester, B.F. Skinner, Francis Bacon, Gene Wolfe, H.G. Wells, Harlan Ellison, Henry Neville, Jack Vance, James Tiptree Jr, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, Lenin, Marge Piercy, Philip Jose Farmer, R.A. Lafferty, Samuel R. Delany, Terry Carr, Thomas More, Tommaso Campanella, Ursula K. Le Guin, Utopia, Vonda McIntyre, W.H. Hudson, William James, William Morris, Yevgeny Zamiatin

Not a review this time, but an essay I wrote about ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’ by Ursula K. Le Guin. This essay appeared in Vector 249, September-October 2006.