TIPTREE, James Jr

   Pseudonym of US writer and psychologist Alice Hastings Bradley Sheldon (1915-1987), who was widely assumed to be a man, despite the deeply felt rapport she displayed for women in stories like "The Women Men Don't See" (1973), until her identity was exposed in 1977; she also wrote severalstories as Raccoona Sheldon. She was born in Chicago, spent much of her childhood in Africa and India and worked in the US Government for many years, including a period in the Pentagon; this much was known about JT, but was wrongly assumed to describe a masculine career. Her mother, Mary Hastings Bradley, was a well known geographer and travel author of 35books; her father was a lawyer and traveller. After a short pre-WWII career as an artist and the later work whose details she shared with her pseudonym, she left the CIA in 1955 and attended college, acquiring a PhD in experimental psychology in 1967. She began writing as JT in 1967 - though she had, in fact, as Alice Bradley, published her first, non-sf, story, "The Lucky Ones" for The New Yorker, as early as 1946.Though she wrote some novels, JT will be best remembered for her many extraordinary sf stories. Her first efforts - she began with "Birth of a Salesman" for ASF in 1968 - were not, perhaps, very remarkable, showing some dis-easeand an intermittent tendency to protest too vehemently that she-the JT telling the tale - was just folks; but within a few years she shot into her prime, and between 1970 and about 1977 produced at great speed and with great concentration her finest work. Almost all of her best stories appeared in 4 collections - Ten Thousand Light-Years from Home (coll 1973; reset with fewer errors 1975 UK), Warm Worlds and Otherwise (coll 1975), Star Songs of an Old Primate (coll 1978) and Out of the Everywhere andOther Extraordinary Visions (coll 1981); a later, very thorough selection, HER SMOKE ROSE UP FOREVER: THE GREAT YEARS OF JAMES TIPTREE, JR. (coll 1990) ed James Turner, also concentrated on the work from this period. Byte Beautiful (coll 1986) assembled an odd mixture of early and late work. Crown of Stars (coll 1988) restricted itself almost exclusively to the stories JT wrote in a final splurge of creative energy in the mid-1980s. The Girl who was Plugged In (in New Dimensions 3 [anth 1973] ed Robert SILVERBERG; 1989 chap dos) - which won JT her first HUGO - andHouston, Houston, Do you Read? (in Aurora [anth 1977] ed Vonda MCINTYRE and Susan J. Anderson; 1989 chap dos) - which won a NEBULA and a Jupiter AWARD and shared a Hugo - were separate appearances of novellas from herprime. The Color of Neanderthal Eyes (1988 FSF; 1990 chap dos) is the only major late item not assembled in Crown of Stars.Several themes interpenetrate JT's best work - SEX, exogamy, identity, FEMINIST depictions of male/female relations, ECOLOGY, death - but the greatest of these is death. It is very rarely that a JT 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. "And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill's Side" (1971), for instance, seems initially to read as astraightforward rendering of the effects vastly superior ALIENS have upon Homo sapiens; only retroactively is it made clear, through the apt sexualand ANTHROPOLOGICAL analogies worked into the basic story, that these effects are utterly ravaging, that humans exposed to aliens become afflicted with a fatal cargo-cult mentality, bound into a sexual submission very like death. In "The Last Flight of Doctor Ain" (1969; rev 1974), only gradually do we begin to realize-through a reportage-like,impersonal reconstruction of certain events - that the woman whom Doctor Ain seems to be accompanying across a heavily polluted, wounded Earth isactually the Earth herself personified in the Doctor's mind; and that, as he passes around the globe, he is infecting mankind with a redesigned leukaemia virus, hoping - probably in vain - to save her, whom he loves, from the human species, which he does not. In what may be JT's finest and most intense longer story, "A Momentary Taste of Being" (1975), the human race, en route to the stars, discovers that its racial role is to act as gamete in a cosmic coupling, and that the drives that make us human are merely displacements of that central mindless imperative. It is one of the darkest GENRE-SF stories ever printed. In shorter compass, it is matched by others, like "On the Last Afternoon" (1972), "Love is the Plan the Plan is Death" (1973) - which won a Nebula - "The Screwfly Solution" (1977) and "Your Faces, O my Sisters! Your Faces Filled of Light!" (1977), bothoriginally as by Raccoona Sheldon, and "Slow Music" (1980).JT's most famous single story, "The Women Men Don't See", may appear to escape this pattern, as only the male narrator seems bound to a quietus, while the two women he travels with - but fails, symptomatically, to comprehend - seem bound starwards into a new life. But the ironies of the tale are very evident, and characteristic of JT's inconsolable complexities of vision. It may be true that the ageing and surprisingly sympathetic narrator mayrepresent a suicidal blindness on the part of humanity; but the women who choose to leave are, in fact-by electing to become companions of utterly unknown aliens in the depths of space - also expressing the power of thanatos upon our species. JT's surface was often airy and at times hilarious, and her control of genre conventions allowed her to convey the bleakness of her abiding insights in tales that remain seductively readable; but she was, in the end, incapable of dissimulation.There were 2 novels and 2 collections of linked stories. In Up the Walls of the World (1978), apparently written around the time her health began to break, shedeliberately broadened her techniques in the fabrication of an extraordinarily full-blown SPACE OPERA whose 3 venues - the interior "spaces" of a vast interstellar being derangedly destroying all suns inits path; an alien planet inhabited by skatelike telepathic flying beings whose sun is being destroyed; and contemporary Earth, where a government-funded experiment in ESP begins terrifyingly to cash out-interpenetrate complexly and with considerable narrative impact. From telepathy to COSMOLOGY, from densely conceived psychological narrative to the broadest of SENSE-OF-WONDER revelations, the novel is something of a tour de force. But stresses - particularly a sense that the whole structure was willed into existence - do show; and BRIGHTNESS FALLS FROM THE AIR (1985) demonstrates how difficult it had become for her tomaintain control over the intensities of her vision, which had, if anything, darkened as the 1980s began. In this novel an assortment of characters variously confront, on a distant planet, the fact that death agonies felt by another species generate a literal nectar for our own; but moments of overt sentimentality, as well as excesses of subplotting, tend to intrude. The Starry Rift (coll of linked stories 1986) assembled loose, somewhat sententious tales set in the same universe; and Tales of the Quintana Roo (coll of linked stories 1986) gathered a mild sequence ofvisions of the eastern coast of southern Mexico.Like the novels, the short fiction of JT's last years, though substantial by the standards of other writers, suffered from an increasing incapacity of narrative voice and structure to contain emotion. The best of them are perhaps "Yanqui Doodle" (1987) and "Backward, Turn Backward" (1988). Alice Sheldon had beenmarried to Huntington Sheldon since 1945. In the early 1980s he contracted Alzheimer's Disease. In 1987, herself in precarious health, she shot himand killed herself.

   About the author: The Fiction of James Tiptree, Jr. (1977 chap) by Gardner DOZOIS; James Tiptree, Jr., a Lady of Letters: A Working Bibliography (1989 chap) by Gordon BENSON Jr and Phil STEPHENSEN-PAYNE.

   See also: ASTEROIDS; ASTOUNDING SCIENCE-FICTION; BIOLOGY; CYBERPUNK; ENTROPY; GODS AND DEMONS; HOLOCAUST AND AFTER; The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION ; MEDIA LANDSCAPE; MYTHOLOGY; OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM; PERCEPTION; PSYCHOLOGY; SATIRE; SCIENTIFIC ERRORS; TIME TRAVEL; WOMEN SF WRITERS.