Science Fiction Double Feature

I’ve blogged before about Alice Sheldon, the SF author who famously wrote under the pseudonym James Tiptree Jr. in the 1970s.  She has long been in my personal pantheon of favorite writers.  

There’s a new biography of Sheldon/Tiptree out now, and last week Salon reviewed it (well worth sitting through the advertisement  if you don’t subscribe to Salon Premium).

Aug. 10, 2006 | People are understandably fascinated by the lives of great artists. We scrutinize them for the formative experience or the light-bulb flare of inspiration — whatever it is that pushes a human being beyond the rim of the merely good and results in a work for the ages. But in a way, the lives of the near great are just as illuminating. They’re more like us in both their fears and their limitations, and they’re often better at showing us where the threshold is by not quite managing to cross it. With them, you can see the precise point when nerve failed, perseverance ran out, vision faltered.

Take the case of James Tiptree Jr., who for a few years during the heyday of science fiction’s “New Wave,” in the 1960s, wrote stories that combined, in the words of biographer Julie Phillips, “exhilarating speed with unsettling shifts of perspective and resonant moral and psychological depths.” The reclusive Tiptree carried on involved, intimate correspondences with at least a dozen other writers and editors. They knew that their friend had gone on safari in Africa at the age of 6, learned to fly a plane and shoot a gun, worked for military intelligence during World War II and for the CIA afterward, published a short story in the New Yorker and obtained a Ph.D. in clinical psychology. What they didn’t know was that he didn’t exist, or not exactly. The person writing under the name James Tiptree Jr. was actually Alice Sheldon, a woman in her 50s, living with her husband in suburban McLean, Va.

Phillips spent a decade working on this absorbing biography, so its publication on the heels of the revelation of a couple of notorious literary frauds is pure coincidence. Yet “James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice Sheldon” offers a rich exploration of the attractions and perils of writerly personas, and no doubt a more revealing one than we’ll ever get from JT Leroy and James Frey. Alice Sheldon, as Phillips portrays her, was a woman who struggled all her days to do justice to her own knotted and painful experience of life; she came closest in Tiptree’s fiction. But this biography conveys the pervasive sense of a gift thwarted on the verge of consummation, and Phillips’ meditations on why that happened make this book exceptional. 

Link   

Well that does it; I’m convinced. I’m seeking out this new book as soon as I can.

Even my sister and brother in law the koolaid drinkers love Tiptree.   An anecdote from my 2004 blogpost: 

[Sheldon/Tiptree] and her husband “Ting” (short for Huntington) in later years spent much time in the state of Quintana Roo in Mexico. The Quintana Roo is part of the Yucatan Peninsula; the area which contains Cancún, Cozumel, Isla Mujeres and Tulum. It is the home of the modern-day descendants of the Mayans. “Alli” and Ting had a great love for this area, and Alice wrote several memorable stories about it, collected in the volume TALES OF THE QUINTANA ROO, published in 1986.

I gave my sister and her husband a copy of that book one of the first years they went down to Akumal, a still relatively sleepy little town sixty miles south of Cancún, in the heart of the Quintana Roo. When they returned I was delighted to hear that they had not only read the book cover to cover during their stay in Akumal, but also were so thoroughly spooked by the stories they stayed awake an entire night, sitting on the beach with a lone lit candle, watching the moonlight on the waves.