One For The Road: Happy Birthday, James Tiptree, Jr.
By Samantha Abernethy in Arts & Entertainment on Aug 24, 2012 10:40PM
James Tiptree, Jr., was not a real person, but for at least a decade fans of his work thought Mr. Tiptree was... well, a mister. Science fiction author Alice Bradley Sheldon, better known by the male penname she adopted, was born in Chicago on this date in 1915.
Several themes interpenetrate Tiptree's best work - Sex, Identity, Feminist depictions of male/female relations, Ecology, death - but the greatest of these is death. It is very rarely that a Tiptree story does not both deal directly with death and end in a death of the spirit, or of all hope, or of the body, or of the race.
Sheldon said she decided to adopt a male penname because it "seemed like good camouflage." She never made public appearances, but did respond to fans' letters and was forthcoming with her personal details... aside from her gender. When Sheldon mentioned that her mother, also a writer, had died, fans looked into it and found an obituary. Sheldon's little experiment was over. Sci-Fi Encyclopedia writes:
In [1967] she began writing as James Tiptree, Jr, an emotionally robust and engaging middle-aged man with Pentagon experience whose only oddity was that no one had ever met him. She had found a voice to speak in. She would only begin to lose that voice a decade later, when her true identity was unmasked, an event which killed Tiptree.
Learn more about Sheldon/Tiptree in the video below.
The Real James Tiptree Jr.: An Alice Sheldon Biopic from Krystal Manuel on Vimeo.