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the swimming pool is empty
Saturday, 16 September 2006 04:25 pmIt's been a bookish sort of 10-day vac. Yesterday I finished reading the new biography of James Tiptree Jr., apparently written over ten years by one Julie Phillips. It shows. This was a beautifully researched, meticulously written, empathetic, insightful and generally socks-knocking-off piece of writing. It was also, weirdly enough, reviewed as a major article in the New York Times, suggesting that we are suffering, slowly but inevitably, the drift of sf into the mainstream. I'm not quite sure if I should be glad or twitchy.
Anyway, James Tiptree. Amazing science fiction writer writing mostly in the 60s and 70s, producing hard-hitting, sexy, often blackly comic, rather bleak and amazingly feminist stories, two of which my third-year sf students basically fail to get year after year. Tiptree was also the pen name for Alice Sheldon, which means she wrote as a male persona, a deception jealously guarded for most of her writing life - she existed as a post office box and a bunch of in-persona correspondance with fellow sf writers. Given her personality - depressive, dramatic, unstable, lacking in self-esteem, amphetamine-using and a closet lesbian frustrated and alienated by her female identity - the persona became absolutely essential to her writing, the only way she could actually express herself. Her writing was never as easy or successful after her actual identity was discovered, and she killed her husband and herself a few years later.
I am somewhat stunned by how this life story has hit me, given that it's basically as depressing as hell. Tiptree is one of my favourite sf writers of all time; I respect her work intensely. It's somehow reassuring to discover that a figure I admire so much can turn out to be a mass of insecurities and disfunctions, experiencing a successful career only very late in life (she was in her 50s when she was first published), and continually dogged by a sense of inadequacy. If she could be all that and still produce "The Women Men Don't See" or "The Screwfly Solution", perhaps there's hope for the rest of us. Especially for me.
Anyway, James Tiptree. Amazing science fiction writer writing mostly in the 60s and 70s, producing hard-hitting, sexy, often blackly comic, rather bleak and amazingly feminist stories, two of which my third-year sf students basically fail to get year after year. Tiptree was also the pen name for Alice Sheldon, which means she wrote as a male persona, a deception jealously guarded for most of her writing life - she existed as a post office box and a bunch of in-persona correspondance with fellow sf writers. Given her personality - depressive, dramatic, unstable, lacking in self-esteem, amphetamine-using and a closet lesbian frustrated and alienated by her female identity - the persona became absolutely essential to her writing, the only way she could actually express herself. Her writing was never as easy or successful after her actual identity was discovered, and she killed her husband and herself a few years later.
I am somewhat stunned by how this life story has hit me, given that it's basically as depressing as hell. Tiptree is one of my favourite sf writers of all time; I respect her work intensely. It's somehow reassuring to discover that a figure I admire so much can turn out to be a mass of insecurities and disfunctions, experiencing a successful career only very late in life (she was in her 50s when she was first published), and continually dogged by a sense of inadequacy. If she could be all that and still produce "The Women Men Don't See" or "The Screwfly Solution", perhaps there's hope for the rest of us. Especially for me.
