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vcmwNow that I'm done reading this book (thank heavens, my mood should lift now that I'm not wallowing in the crushing horror that pressed down on the subject's psyche) I've got to point out at least one (to me) incomprehensible lacuna in this book, and, separately, my main dissatisfactions.
For the incomprehensible lacuna, turn to the index. Look up Theodora Kroeber. You have two mentions, right? In mention one, page 39, Ms. Kroeber is an anthropologist and a member of the Society of Women Geographers, a group that Alice's mother was also a member of. The odds are good that Ms. Mary Bradley and Ms. Theodora Kroeber would have known each other at least peripherally, socially. Mary sounds pretty active in her organizations.
Then, on page 267, we get mention two. Ms. Kroeber (now identified as writer, and I'm sure she was probably both, just as Ms. Bradley was, but the shift in emphasis is telling, ain't it?) is mentioned as Ms. Ursula K. LeGuin's mother. By the way, I'm deliberately calling these women Ms. though I know it's ahistoric.
And then we get pages and pages of the correspondence between James Tiptree, Jr./Alice B. Sheldon and Ursula K. LeGuin, without even a comment, ever, about how the similar background of these two women, as well as their similar writing position, might have informed the friendship?
I notice on the back cover blurb from Ms. Ursula K. LeGuin that the book is praised for "never over-interpreting" and illuminating "a formidably complex psyche without invading it" but for my taste it stops a bit short. There's no need to muck rake or whatever, but surely a casual comment highlighting this connection would be useful? Two women writers whose mothers were similarly important social people in the same organizations, who both struggled with presentations of gender in fiction, and it's not worth highlighting their family/social connection with even a sentence? Bizarre.
Ok, on to the other - I thought the analyses of the short stories and novels were often very dissatisfying. By which I mean they seemed perfectly reasonable interpretations, but they radically weren't my interpretations. I never for a moment thought "Beam Me Home" had an unambiguously happy ending as a kid - I rather thought it was deliberately poised between "yay I was right and they came for me as I died - but too late and I'm still gonna die" to "well, that was a comforting hallucination that my mind is fleeing to in death, but it was just a hallucination" - that is, it could have been in many ways a non-sfnal psychological story under one reading. Only if you insist on reading it as sf is it tipped towards probability even slightly happy, since only if the aliens actually come does it have a necessarily sfnal element. That, and I thought that the setting was definitely war in Southeast Asia (Vietnam?), and that this gave the story a connection/contrast between the whole Age of Aquarius thing and the hideousness of war in dissolving empires. I didn't think that the explosion in "The Man Who Walked Home" was necessarily caused by his return - I thought it was a closed loop, with the destructive explosion flinging him forward - but he doesn't know this and is laboriously walking back to somewhere that was destroyed from the moment he left it.
I think that Brightness Falls from the Air is a brilliant book. At least, I did as a teen, and I haven't read it since. I thought it was about the horrors of beauty, and about the incredibly complex aversive reactions that the characters have to beauty. And I think it's really strange to talk about Brightness Falls from the Air and not to talk about We Who Stole the Dream. Which is to me one of the best stories in the oeuvre because it nails something so hard and small - and which would have been great when talking about Joanna Russ and James Tiptree, Jr arguing about the Victims and the Torturers - this story could be seen as a response to that, where the Victims are shown to be Torturers when they're at home, in the confidence of their own planet. That being the good guy is, in the worldview of this story, conditional on being powerless. And where will the Dream fly to?
As a kid and teen Tiptree was one of the writers who spoke to me more deeply than any other writer. And the biographer is at least a little wrong here - I was born in 1980 and don't recall clearly knowing that Tiptree was female until after I'd read several short story collections and Brightness Falls From the Air - 11 year olds are not famous for reading prefatory matter, and besides, I was mostly picking up old and 2nd hand copies of her work - stuff that had been bought for libraries on first publication, stuff that was floating around 2nd hand shops. I was pleased when I found out the story but it didn't shock me or upend my readings of the stories - I was too young for that.
Knowing about her depression and her gender/sexuality issues helps me to understand, looking back, why her stories spoke so deeply to me at that age - I was a young, suicidally depressed, gender-dysphoric bisexual girl. But perhaps because of that the stories seemed observational rather than interpretive or critical. For me as a pre-teen and teen reading Tiptree I was reading something that sounded like my internal perception, not something that made me question that internal perception. It's as an adult, reading the biographical material, hearing for the first time (other than in that (in)famous Silverberg intro, which was the intro to one of the pbs I had as a kid) the interpretation of this work by others who were adults when reading it that I get that sense of upset and shift.
Over all, I am happy to have read this biography because it helps me to contextualize Tiptree in terms of SF - and to help me understand why Tiptree tends to be discussed in context of certain writers. One aspect of the internal context of sf that is always hard for me to understand is how it is grouped, which tends to be based more on social association than it is on theme or anything else I read for. While I certainly associate Tiptree with Delany, for personal reasons I associate her as strongly with Tanith Lee - I read them at the same time, and the focus on madness, sexuality, and beauty resonated, as did the sexual fascination with a possibly destructive other. Yet Tiptree and Lee don't show up together often in people's conversation - perhaps because they don't seem to have socialized a bunch, perhaps because Lee's take on violent and destructive insane sexualized alienation is a lot less bleak than Tiptree's.
In some ways I think that Elizabeth Moon can be seen as the best resolution of Tiptree's gender disassociation - the writer who writes female characters who uphold codes of honor and explore strange worlds and struggle with motherhood and have embarrassing relations with their strong female relatives and try to decide how they feel about sex and DO get to pilot the spaceships and DON'T (pace "With Delicate Mad Hands") have to prostitute themselves and die of radiation poisoning to do it; the old women having first contact with aliens, even. Moon can give us Remnant Population and have the old women and the aliens and their contact incorporated into the ongoing life, not separating to the edge and dying in splendid isolation. Moon can have Kylara Vatta admit that she sort of likes killing, and have another woman to tell it too who shares that feeling, without being alienated from herself as female or becoming asexual or evil. It's strange to me that Tiptree and her incredible frustration and alienation from gender because of these problems is still given so much critical attention while we don't appear to have similar critical attention to writers like Moon who consistently create characters who address these problems without death and despair.
Much as I love Tiptree's work, I want to believe that we have new things to say about gender and alienation and the building of a world we can live in without fantasizing non stop about death. I'd like to believe we have new ways of thinking about the Other that don't involve sex and death and unleapable chasms that must be leaped only to fall and fall and die.
When we've got writers for the YA market who are MEN like L. A. Meyer writing adventurous strong swashbuckling female characters who accomplish great things and are still aware of and grounded in their sexuality in a voice that I, at least, find absolutely convincing (Bloody Jack and its sequels about Jacky Faber are one of my favorite things EVER), we've come a long way from the stories that Sheldon was pressed into in Alice in Elephantland. Here's a world of slavery and empire and pirates and wild animals and drinking and gambling dens and child prostitution rings and a woman romping through it and messing with everyone's expectations, cross dressing and flirting and ring leading and being admired and hated and envied in the way of a Tom Sawyer or other character - without being in any way not a woman. Jacky Faber gets the guns, and the swords, and she gets to be the captain. And it's not even set in a different planet!
So I guess, in sum: where's the analysis of this new reality? Where's the critical examination of how these authors have shaped this reality from their experiences? And what kind of summary of a life is it to say "Alli was never able to imagine a future for women, or for herself. But that doesn't mean her own story is a sad one."??? I want that future, dammit, and speaking for myself, the times in my childhood when I couldn't imagine that future were unspeakably sad. Just because I got up every day and made friends and took lovers and got good grades and sold poetry and did theater and all that didn't make it not sad that I took walks at night thinking about when I would be free to kill myself and lived every day feeling unable to touch the friendships offered me. That's sad, no matter how rich or meaningful it is. Nothing about it teaches me to laugh.
Reading a story and watching Jackie Faber beat Mike Fink and steal his riverboat teaches me to laugh. Reading a story and watching Sunshine draw on skills learned from her Grandmother (it's important that it's a grandmother) to rescue herself and the monster teaches me to laugh. Reading a story about dying alone because I can't connect doesn't teach me anything except that the person I was at age 7 isn't alone. That's a good lesson, but it can never be enough.
For the incomprehensible lacuna, turn to the index. Look up Theodora Kroeber. You have two mentions, right? In mention one, page 39, Ms. Kroeber is an anthropologist and a member of the Society of Women Geographers, a group that Alice's mother was also a member of. The odds are good that Ms. Mary Bradley and Ms. Theodora Kroeber would have known each other at least peripherally, socially. Mary sounds pretty active in her organizations.
Then, on page 267, we get mention two. Ms. Kroeber (now identified as writer, and I'm sure she was probably both, just as Ms. Bradley was, but the shift in emphasis is telling, ain't it?) is mentioned as Ms. Ursula K. LeGuin's mother. By the way, I'm deliberately calling these women Ms. though I know it's ahistoric.
And then we get pages and pages of the correspondence between James Tiptree, Jr./Alice B. Sheldon and Ursula K. LeGuin, without even a comment, ever, about how the similar background of these two women, as well as their similar writing position, might have informed the friendship?
I notice on the back cover blurb from Ms. Ursula K. LeGuin that the book is praised for "never over-interpreting" and illuminating "a formidably complex psyche without invading it" but for my taste it stops a bit short. There's no need to muck rake or whatever, but surely a casual comment highlighting this connection would be useful? Two women writers whose mothers were similarly important social people in the same organizations, who both struggled with presentations of gender in fiction, and it's not worth highlighting their family/social connection with even a sentence? Bizarre.
Ok, on to the other - I thought the analyses of the short stories and novels were often very dissatisfying. By which I mean they seemed perfectly reasonable interpretations, but they radically weren't my interpretations. I never for a moment thought "Beam Me Home" had an unambiguously happy ending as a kid - I rather thought it was deliberately poised between "yay I was right and they came for me as I died - but too late and I'm still gonna die" to "well, that was a comforting hallucination that my mind is fleeing to in death, but it was just a hallucination" - that is, it could have been in many ways a non-sfnal psychological story under one reading. Only if you insist on reading it as sf is it tipped towards probability even slightly happy, since only if the aliens actually come does it have a necessarily sfnal element. That, and I thought that the setting was definitely war in Southeast Asia (Vietnam?), and that this gave the story a connection/contrast between the whole Age of Aquarius thing and the hideousness of war in dissolving empires. I didn't think that the explosion in "The Man Who Walked Home" was necessarily caused by his return - I thought it was a closed loop, with the destructive explosion flinging him forward - but he doesn't know this and is laboriously walking back to somewhere that was destroyed from the moment he left it.
I think that Brightness Falls from the Air is a brilliant book. At least, I did as a teen, and I haven't read it since. I thought it was about the horrors of beauty, and about the incredibly complex aversive reactions that the characters have to beauty. And I think it's really strange to talk about Brightness Falls from the Air and not to talk about We Who Stole the Dream. Which is to me one of the best stories in the oeuvre because it nails something so hard and small - and which would have been great when talking about Joanna Russ and James Tiptree, Jr arguing about the Victims and the Torturers - this story could be seen as a response to that, where the Victims are shown to be Torturers when they're at home, in the confidence of their own planet. That being the good guy is, in the worldview of this story, conditional on being powerless. And where will the Dream fly to?
As a kid and teen Tiptree was one of the writers who spoke to me more deeply than any other writer. And the biographer is at least a little wrong here - I was born in 1980 and don't recall clearly knowing that Tiptree was female until after I'd read several short story collections and Brightness Falls From the Air - 11 year olds are not famous for reading prefatory matter, and besides, I was mostly picking up old and 2nd hand copies of her work - stuff that had been bought for libraries on first publication, stuff that was floating around 2nd hand shops. I was pleased when I found out the story but it didn't shock me or upend my readings of the stories - I was too young for that.
Knowing about her depression and her gender/sexuality issues helps me to understand, looking back, why her stories spoke so deeply to me at that age - I was a young, suicidally depressed, gender-dysphoric bisexual girl. But perhaps because of that the stories seemed observational rather than interpretive or critical. For me as a pre-teen and teen reading Tiptree I was reading something that sounded like my internal perception, not something that made me question that internal perception. It's as an adult, reading the biographical material, hearing for the first time (other than in that (in)famous Silverberg intro, which was the intro to one of the pbs I had as a kid) the interpretation of this work by others who were adults when reading it that I get that sense of upset and shift.
Over all, I am happy to have read this biography because it helps me to contextualize Tiptree in terms of SF - and to help me understand why Tiptree tends to be discussed in context of certain writers. One aspect of the internal context of sf that is always hard for me to understand is how it is grouped, which tends to be based more on social association than it is on theme or anything else I read for. While I certainly associate Tiptree with Delany, for personal reasons I associate her as strongly with Tanith Lee - I read them at the same time, and the focus on madness, sexuality, and beauty resonated, as did the sexual fascination with a possibly destructive other. Yet Tiptree and Lee don't show up together often in people's conversation - perhaps because they don't seem to have socialized a bunch, perhaps because Lee's take on violent and destructive insane sexualized alienation is a lot less bleak than Tiptree's.
In some ways I think that Elizabeth Moon can be seen as the best resolution of Tiptree's gender disassociation - the writer who writes female characters who uphold codes of honor and explore strange worlds and struggle with motherhood and have embarrassing relations with their strong female relatives and try to decide how they feel about sex and DO get to pilot the spaceships and DON'T (pace "With Delicate Mad Hands") have to prostitute themselves and die of radiation poisoning to do it; the old women having first contact with aliens, even. Moon can give us Remnant Population and have the old women and the aliens and their contact incorporated into the ongoing life, not separating to the edge and dying in splendid isolation. Moon can have Kylara Vatta admit that she sort of likes killing, and have another woman to tell it too who shares that feeling, without being alienated from herself as female or becoming asexual or evil. It's strange to me that Tiptree and her incredible frustration and alienation from gender because of these problems is still given so much critical attention while we don't appear to have similar critical attention to writers like Moon who consistently create characters who address these problems without death and despair.
Much as I love Tiptree's work, I want to believe that we have new things to say about gender and alienation and the building of a world we can live in without fantasizing non stop about death. I'd like to believe we have new ways of thinking about the Other that don't involve sex and death and unleapable chasms that must be leaped only to fall and fall and die.
When we've got writers for the YA market who are MEN like L. A. Meyer writing adventurous strong swashbuckling female characters who accomplish great things and are still aware of and grounded in their sexuality in a voice that I, at least, find absolutely convincing (Bloody Jack and its sequels about Jacky Faber are one of my favorite things EVER), we've come a long way from the stories that Sheldon was pressed into in Alice in Elephantland. Here's a world of slavery and empire and pirates and wild animals and drinking and gambling dens and child prostitution rings and a woman romping through it and messing with everyone's expectations, cross dressing and flirting and ring leading and being admired and hated and envied in the way of a Tom Sawyer or other character - without being in any way not a woman. Jacky Faber gets the guns, and the swords, and she gets to be the captain. And it's not even set in a different planet!
So I guess, in sum: where's the analysis of this new reality? Where's the critical examination of how these authors have shaped this reality from their experiences? And what kind of summary of a life is it to say "Alli was never able to imagine a future for women, or for herself. But that doesn't mean her own story is a sad one."??? I want that future, dammit, and speaking for myself, the times in my childhood when I couldn't imagine that future were unspeakably sad. Just because I got up every day and made friends and took lovers and got good grades and sold poetry and did theater and all that didn't make it not sad that I took walks at night thinking about when I would be free to kill myself and lived every day feeling unable to touch the friendships offered me. That's sad, no matter how rich or meaningful it is. Nothing about it teaches me to laugh.
Reading a story and watching Jackie Faber beat Mike Fink and steal his riverboat teaches me to laugh. Reading a story and watching Sunshine draw on skills learned from her Grandmother (it's important that it's a grandmother) to rescue herself and the monster teaches me to laugh. Reading a story about dying alone because I can't connect doesn't teach me anything except that the person I was at age 7 isn't alone. That's a good lesson, but it can never be enough.
