Imaginary Worlds - The Mysterious James Tiptree

Episode Date: March 11, 2015

Science fiction writer James Tiptree Jr. wouldn't talk on the phone or appear in person. He developed friendships with contemporaries like Ursula le Guin and Philip K. Dick purely through letters. And he became a mentor to Chelsea Quinn Yarbro when she was an up-in-coming writer. But James Tiptree Jr. didn't really exist. He was the pen name of a 60-year old suburban housewife named Alice Sheldon. Biogrpaher Julie Philips says Sheldon's real life story was even more surreal than her alter ego. With readings by Erik Bergmann. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky. What's wrong with her? Well, what's wrong with any furtively unconventional middle-aged woman with an empty bed? That's actor Eric Bergman, reading from The Women Men Don't See by James Tiptree Jr. In Tiptree's story, a small plane crashes in the jungle. At the end, aliens show up. And the protagonist is kind of this old-fashioned hero.

He tries to fight them off until he realizes that the women he was trying to save engineered the plane crash so they could find the aliens. Take us with you. Please. We want to go with you, away from here. Ruth!

Esteban, get that boat. I lunge and lose my feet again. The aliens are chirping madly behind their light. Please, take us. We won't mind. We don't mind what your planet is like. We'll learn. We'll do anything. We won't cause any trouble. Please. Oh, please.

The skiff is drifting farther away. But I can only shuffle nightmare-like in the ooze, hearing that damn voice box wheeze. Not come. More. Not come. Althea's face turns to it, open-mouthed grin. Yes, we understand, Ruth cries. We don't want to come back. Please, take us with you. Chelsea Quinn Yarbrough is a writer in the Bay Area today.

And when she was just starting out, about 40 years ago, she wrote some fan mail to James Tiptree. And not only did he write her back, but he became a mentor to her. As soon as I would see an envelope and it's purple ink on the front, ah, it's Tip. That's because he used a purple typewriter ribbon. She would send him rough drafts of what she was working on. Say, well, I know there's something wrong with this. What is

it? And write back something like, there's nothing wrong with it. You just left out the last 20%. Oh, yeah. Oh, I see. Okay. Tiptree was mysterious. He wouldn't talk on the phone or meet in person. His mailing address was McLean, Virginia. And there's always a part of me that goes, I know what's in McLean, Virginia. The CIA. And there was a sort of a joke going around amongst some of the writers about Tiptree about whom, you know, everybody knew it was a pen name. That was obvious from the beginning. And I know that a couple of writers would do things like, you know, begin notes to Tiptree by saying, you know, dear Dr. Kissinger. Then one day she opened her mailbox and she saw a letter with that purple typewriter ribbon.

Ah, it's Tip. But what was inside that letter was nothing she expected. Saying, you know, would you be very offended if the person you've been communicating with the last four years wasn't a man? James Tiptree Jr. didn't exist. He was the pen name of a 60-year-old housewife named Alice Sheldon. My answer to that was that I sent her a telegram, and it said, you know, tips, news, wonderful. Now will you please call me?

So did she call you? Yeah, I was about to go up to help the family trim the Christmas tree, and there was a call just literally going out the door. And my husband went back and answered it and said, It's for you. And I thought, you know, oh, damn. But I went back, and I got the phone, and this rather low, slightly gravelly voice said, Quinn, and I said, yes. She says,

this is your Uncle Tip. Now, the funny thing is the real life of Alice Sheldon was like something out of a novel. Her parents were explorers. I mean, they used to take her to Africa on safaris, and some of the animals in the Natural History Museum in New York were shot by her parents. Her mother even wrote a children's book about their family called Alice in Jungleland. Quinn Yarbrough read it when she was a kid. I did a book report on it, and I said,

you know, this sounds like a wonderful kind of experience to have if you're a kid. My fourth grade teacher was very much convinced that this could not possibly have actually happened because no parents would be so irresponsible as to take their child to Africa. In some ways, African exploration and those kind of colonial narratives are forerunners of science fiction because they're about the exploring party meeting the alien and meeting the other. Julie Phillips wrote a biography called James Tiptree Jr., The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon. She started reading science fiction very early on. very early on. I mean, not only early on in her own life, but early on in the history of science fiction, really from the beginning of the pulp era in the 1920s. She was reading amazing stories, and she was reading weird tales. And she knew more about science fiction by the time she started

writing than almost anybody in the field. Alice Sheldon grew up to have adventures of her own. She was in the OSS and then the CIA. She did field missions in Eastern Europe. Some of it was dangerous. But she was frustrated because, you know, the glass ceiling back then was not glass. It was like marble. Now, her husband, Ting, was his nickname.

Ting was also in the CIA. And he stayed. She left. And just being a housewife just didn't really fit her. She decided to get a PhD in psychology. But she got bored. Just for fun, late one night, wrote up these science fiction stories and sent them off to magazines. And she wanted a forgettable name, she said. She wanted a name that editors wouldn't remember having rejected. And, you know, obviously she intended the whole thing as a big joke, so she was in the grocery store. She saw a jar of Tiptree Jam.

She said, hmm, James Tiptree, and her husband said, James Tiptree Jr. And so she typed that name onto the letter and sent the stories off. And then she got letters back, of course, saying, you know, dear Mr. Tiptree, we'd like to accept your story. Hold on. Why a male name? Men were the people who wrote science fiction. There were very few women writing science fiction in 1967. Even Ursula Gwynn had been publishing maybe for five years.

She had actually sent a story around under a woman's name in the 1950s, and it had been rejected. So I don't, maybe that had something to do with it. So how did it feel to be James Tiptree Jr. all of a sudden? It was liberating. He, this voice, took over at a certain point. Not only took over in the stories, which I think he had done from the beginning, really, but took over in her correspondence. And of course, the details of her life story often made more sense coming from a man than coming from a woman. They were, you know, they were giving him high points for being able to describe dangerous things well. You know, this is really convincing stuff. This doesn't sound like, this doesn't sound like somebody made it up after watching a TV show. Yeah. Admitting that you can have a hero who's scared was sort of brand new territory in the

whole, in the whole genre. That's interesting. I never thought that that was what was sort of brand new territory in the whole genre. That's interesting. I never thought that that was what was one of the many groundbreaking things about her stories. At least that's what people were saying when they were first reading them, when they were first published. Now, of course, things have changed since then, and, you know, scared heroes are okay. Yeah. But I think one of the reasons they are is that Tiptree wrote about scared heroes very believably.

Tiptree was held up as a feminist male role model. Here was this kind of manly man who also had a sensitive side, and that was interesting to women for the same reason. And because he was a great flirt, he was a man created by a woman, which made him like a Mr. Darcy or a Heathcliff or something like that. Yeah, very attractive. Yeah. And everybody wanted to believe. There was a small, but as some of our male colleagues refer to it, shrill feminist element in the science fiction community back then.

And I think that one of the things that happened is that you get people like Tiptree, who seemed to be able to straddle the fence for what was obvious when we found out. But it was one of those things that kept nudging some of those rather more conservative types in to have to reconsider what they had assumed about females. I mean, one of the things that Heinlein used to do that just drove me crazy, you know, he would always make a point of having a woman in an important position. And that was sort of his idea of feminism. Even though this woman had no women friends and no appreciable difference, you know, from essentially a sidekick. Now, there's nothing wrong with that, but I don't believe in Boy Scouts with boobs.

I really don't. When I started working on this podcast, I realized that my weakest spot is probably literature. So I've been just reading a lot to just catch up for the last, like, six months. And I started noticing, because when I talked to my wife, I was like, you know, like rendezvous with Rama. I was like, how can Arthur C. Clarke be so visionary in so many ways? And so absolutely dumb, deaf, dumb and blind in so many others. Yeah. The only woman on the ship is a secretary. And there are genetically engineered chimps who have more responsibilities. Yep, yep, yep. And it just like blow my mind. And the thing about not wanting women to be up in the space station

because zero gravity would be distracting because their boobs would be bouncing around. Oh, come on. Get real. Now, the female characters in James Tiptree's stories actually weren't that much more developed. But they always had their own agendas. They were often a mystery to the male protagonists, who usually had one thing on their mind. And that's another reason why very few people guessed that Tiptree was actually a woman, because the author of these stories

clearly knew what it was like to lust after women, even if the characters were often washed-up old men who could only remember nostalgically their sexual prime. Pillar of the urgently slender waist curving into her white Levi's, the shirt so softly holding swelling softness, everything so white against her golden tan, smelling of soap and flowers and girl so clean the pathos of her vulnerable body swells in him he balls his fist to hide the bulge by his fly

oh jeez I mean Jesus let her not look Pilar but she does look up then brushing her misty hair back, smiling dreamily up at him. In Julie Phillips' biography about Alice Sheldon, she writes that Sheldon was attracted to girls from an early age. There were a few botched attempts to act on her impulses, and they were rebuked. And she loved her husband. He was her rock. a few botched attempts to act on her impulses, and they were rebuked.

And she loved her husband. He was her rock. And he was actually totally cool with the whole tiptree thing. But Julie Phillips says it just wasn't enough. I mean, that is a huge theme in her stories, the idea that your sexual feelings are not under your control and that they're going to lead you to your doom really runs throughout her work. Which is one of, I think, the sad things about Alice Sheldon's story is that some of the things that she was expressing as Tiptree were very dark. There was real pain in her inability to be herself. And knowing her true identity just adds layers to a story like Houston, Houston, do you read me? Calling Major David in Sunbird. It is the older woman, a gentle voice. This is Luna Central.

We are the service and communication facility for spaceflight now. We're sorry to have to tell you that there is no space center at Houston anymore. Houston itself was abandoned when the shuttle base moved to White Sands over two centuries ago. In this story, a group of male astronauts discover they're not just off course. They've actually somehow gone through a wormhole or something and just ended up hundreds of years in the future. And they're rescued by a ship full of women. At first, the guys think this is like a fantasy come true. Bud is grinning broadly. They all are. Cavemen, he chuckles. All the chicks land preggers. Eventually they discover that men on Earth were wiped out by a plague.

The human race, the female human race, has been reproducing by cloning. And the women on this ship actually don't have any plans to bring these 20th century specimens back to Earth. I'm a man. By God, yes, I'm angry. I have a right We gave you all this We made it all We built your precious civilization

And your knowledge and comfort and medicines And your dreams All of it We protected you We worked our balls off keeping you and your kids It was hard, it was a fight A bloody fight all the way. We're tough. We had to be. Can't you understand? Can you for Christ's sake understand that?

Another silence. We're trying, Lady Blue sighs. We are trying, Dr. Lorimar. Of course we enjoy your inventions, and we do appreciate your evolutionary role. But you must see there's a problem. As I understand it, what you protected people from was largely other males, wasn't it? We've just had an extraordinary demonstration in that. You have brought history to life for us. Her wrinkled brown eyes smile at him, a small tea-colored matron holding an obsolete artifact. But the fighting is long over. It ended when you did, I believe. We can hardly turn you loose on earth, and we simply have no facilities for people with your emotional problems.

Alice Sheldon was growing discontent. She felt like Tiptree was having all the fun while she was living this stifling life in the suburbs. She even created another fake writer called Raccoona Sheldon. called Raccoona Sheldon. No one's sure why exactly, but this new female persona who had her real last name might have been a Trojan horse for Sheldon to finally reveal herself and retire Uncle Tip. But it just didn't work creatively. She didn't feel the same sense of liberation that she felt writing as James Tiptree. And then in 1976, her cover got blown. One of her fans found her mother's obituary, listing Alice Sheldon as the only descendant. That's when Chelsea Quinabro got that letter, asking her not to be angry.

One of the things I told her after we were in vocal contact, I said, you know, she said, you know, she had expected people to be angry with her, apparently because she got away with it. And I said, well, I was disappointed on two points. One of them is that you didn't know me better than that after all this correspondence. And number two, I've been taking a certain amount of solace when our male colleagues drive me nuts to think, well, at least Tip understands. And now I know why. But she says there was a subtle backlash.

She was now no longer one of the gang. She was one of them. Of them? Them. Women. Ah. The gang being the boys. Right. And all of a sudden, there were deprecating remarks. You know, well, of course, you know, Tiptree would write that kind of a story. Well, now that you know that Tiptree is she, that doesn't suddenly change the quality of the story or the fact that, you know, this is the only kind of story that she can write.

And, I mean, it was blatantly obvious because there was this rubble heap of published stuff that you could look at and say, oh, yeah, it all works. Alice Sheldon had wanted to come out for a while, but once she was exposed, her writing actually became more cautious and less experimental. And she discovered that this fake persona was really kind of an excuse to do what she wanted to do already, which was to be a recluse. which was to be a recluse. In Julie Phillips' book, she prints these heartbreaking letters between the late writer Joanna Russ and Alice Sheldon. And in the letters, Russ admits that she was in love with James Tiptree and therefore is in love with Alice Sheldon. And she encourages Sheldon to ditch the husband and move to a lesbian commune.

But Sheldon writes back and says she's too old. She's too set in her ways to change. She talked about suicide for probably like about 10 years. And then her husband became very ill. He's 84. He's nearly blind. He's needing more and more care. She's not really capable of providing that care. She's more and more depressed. She doesn't want to live after he dies. to a suicide pact and she shot him and then she shot herself. And it's a little bit unclear in the book whether he actually agreed to the pact or not, but I actually think that he did. How would he not agree to it? Did she just shoot him?

I don't think he was a, well, you know, that's one interpretation of what happened that she, you know, just decided to shoot him. But I think that he wasn't particularly happy about it but he could kind of see the point he was not going to live that much longer she had said very early on when she was still just my my my uncle tip that um and i assumed that she that that he was talking about a wife rather than the other way around. And had said that, you know, because of what they'd gone through in the war, they'd promised each other that when they reached the point that they couldn't live together, they'd die together. But when I found out that that's what she, I said, well, they're just keeping the bargain. In fact, you know, it seemed to be of a piece with the way that she related to the world. The most surprising thing to me

about James Tiptree or Alice Sheldon is that I had never heard of them. I mean, she's still a legend in the science fiction community. Well, there's an award that's actually named after Tiptree, but it is an award about writers who deal with gender in really interesting ways. But I have to wonder, if those stories really had been written by a man,

would he be more famous? Would there have been film adaptations like Philip K. Dick? And this story is so relevant today. You know, I mean, there's a writer named Joanne Rowling, who was told by her publisher, she could not use her name to sell a book about a boy wizard. She had to change it to J.K. Rowling. And you just, I keep reading stories about women on Twitter who changed their avatars to a man to see if people treat them differently. And they sure do. So you're looking at, you know, how you're clearly going in the direction of how being a man shaped

her identity. And this is what you're really interested in, it sounds like. Yeah, I guess so. I think, you know, again, as a man, I feel like she, I'm, yeah, I guess so. But it's interesting. You feel like Tiptree was just a name, that she was still Allie. She was Allie writing those stories. She was Allie writing those letters. And that Tiptree was just, it wasn't so much of a muse. Yeah, that's, no, I think that Tiptree gave her,

I think that Tiptree gave her access to parts of herself that she didn't have access to as Allie Sheldon. That he allowed her to express parts of herself. I mean, it's all her. It's always all you. You're never completely pretending to be someone else. You always have to fill it in with bits of your own psyche. And these were bits of her own psyche to which she didn't have enough access as a woman and to which she felt she did have access as a man. And I would like to ask you

as a man who's read the stories, who's read about her life, what's the, what is the appeal of this woman writer to men? Or is it, do you really hear the masculine voice? You really feel like this is a man speaking to you as a man among men sort of? I do. That's actually, I think that's what struck me so much was that there, there are certain things about being a man and things you're not proud of either. You know, she captures the male gaze, you know, so well, but it means something so different to her. She was just writing herself. I don't know. She had done a lot of observing men over the years.

I think that she had a few things to say about men and what it was like to be a man too. Yeah. But it sounds like to some extent, you know, to be more kind of modern in the thinking is just the idea that gender is fluid. Well, that's what I was saying about self-creation. She was defying the categories and questioning all the categories in a wonderful way. And obviously that is something that appeals to men too, that men find it really liberating in some way to see all those categories called into question in the same way I think that women do. So maybe I'm just as guilty of putting her in binary boxes.

Maybe the generation that's going to truly embrace Alice Sheldon hasn't even come of age yet. Or to put a sci-fi spin on it, maybe they aren't even born. Well, that's it for today's show. Thanks for listening. Special thanks to Julie Phillips, Chelsea Quignabro, and Eric Berkman. If you like the show, please leave a comment in iTunes. You can also like it on Facebook. I tweeted emulinski. The show's website is imaginaryworldspodcast.org.

Panoply.