I remember in college, I found Silverberg's (in)famous comment about Tiptree, and was all set to read it to my women's group, followed by a triumphant "Guess what!" Literally five minutes before the group met, I was browsing through an sf book that happened to be nearby, and lo and behold, it had Silverberg's very handsome retraction and apology. I brought both to the group and had the pleasure of reading them out loud back to back.
In some of Tiptree's stories (probably more than I remember offhand), the narrative voice comes heartbreakingly close to raising the question of two females being able to love each other, then swerves into obligatory heterosexuality, like "Ha ha, what was I thinking?".
My memory of the Silverberg forward was that he was dismissing suggestions people had made that Tiptree might be female, when the stories were "ineluctably masculine", which suggests in fact some people had twigged.
Ah, yes:
"It has been suggested that Tiptree is female, a theory that I find absurd"
Bzzt. Silverberg specifically rejected the idea that any woman could write what he saw as such a masculine prose:
"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. I don’t think the novels of Jane Austen could have been written by a man nor the stories of Ernest Hemingway by a woman, and in the same way I believe the author of the James Tiptree stories is male."
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james_davis_nicoll) wrote2015-07-13 11:43 am
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Ah, yes:
"It has been suggested that Tiptree is female, a theory that I find absurd"
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"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. I don’t think the novels of Jane Austen could have been written by a man nor the stories of Ernest Hemingway by a woman, and in the same way I believe the author of the James Tiptree stories is male."
He was just plain old wrong.
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