James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon by Julie Phillips

[james_davis_nicoll]

James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon by Julie Phillips

Comments

[supergee.livejournal.com]

Everyone thought Tiptree was male. Silverberg had the misfortune of phrasing it memorably.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Actually, a number of people thought Tiptree was a woman. Silverberg just got it wrong.

[supergee.livejournal.com]

I was fairly active in fandom at the time, and I don't remember anyone suggesting Tiptree's true sex before it was revealed.

[tavella.livejournal.com]

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"

[tekalynn.livejournal.com]

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.

[daev.livejournal.com]

Siverberg was right. Tiptree was male. Sheldon deliberately wrote him that way.

[tavella.livejournal.com]

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."

He was just plain old wrong.