Tiptree

[vcmw]

Y'know, I care a lot about gender in genre, and I adored the works of James Tiptree, Jr.  Adored.  They were one of the things that got me through my early and extremely depressed adolescence.  I came home from one odd library crawl at 13 or so with Brightness Falls From the Air and Delany's Stars in my Pocket Like Grains of Sand and it was a good week.  I felt better.

But the fact that I felt better after reading those two books says a lot about my state of mind at the time, doesn't it?  I was, y'know, to put it mildly, a Very Depressed Young Person.  The kind of depressed that found Joanna Russ's sarcastic laceration and Tiptree's bleakness comforting.

I wish the Tiptree Award recommended more books that had pleasant and happy explorations of gender.  At this current moment in my life I work very hard on not being depressed, and there are whole sets of good books that I need to carve out a weekend to recover from.  I eye every possible Tiptree nominee warily.  When I was depressed, these books didn't unsettle me.  Russ and Tiptree seemed like cheering friends who would tell me it wasn't that bad.  It's not that the books the awards recommend are in any way bad.  It's that I'm usually quite dubious that they're going to be happy.  And I'm convinced that there are plenty of good books out there exploring gender in unusual ways where the main characters have, y'know, relatively pleasant lives in societies that aren't out to get them.

In fact, I know these books exist, because I read them all the time.  Tanya Huff, Tamora Pierce, Diane Duane, Elizabeth Moon, Tanith Lee.  Cassandra Clare, Holly Black, Sarah Rees Brennan.  Robin McKinley.  I was born in 1980.  By the time I was in older grade school, there were plenty of authors who were writing books with awesome girls who did stuff, with queer characters who didn't die, with relationships that were loving but not necessarily monogamous, etc.  With crazy romance between people who can change shape and gender whenever they choose, girl knights, boy caretakers, and all that good stuff.  So while I admire lots of things about the Tiptree, I tend to tiptoe into its list only when I get recommends from authors or readers who I know value that more comforting stuff too.

(Um, sometimes, also, it's that the book is arguing something I'm done thinking about.  There was nothing wrong exactly with Eon: Dragoneye Reborn as far as I'm qualified to tell, but it wasn't for me. I'm no longer interested in reading books where girls have to masquerade as boys to fulfill a heroic role.  That was great when I was 9 and coming off a long Pyle kick with Arthur and Robin Hood and Tamora Pierce gave me Alanna.  But now the Tamora Pierce heroines get to be girls from the start.  And so do the heroines in lots of other series, and the whole "I'm in a culture where girls can't Do Stuff and I must pretend to be a boy to Do The Stuff" doesn't work for me as a reader anymore.  I would, however, probably be open to reading a book about a boy who wanted to do some kind of adventure that only girls could do, and his attempt to masquerade as a girl to get this opportunity.  If it was played as straight adventure, rather than comedy - I think that there are ripe moments in our culture for exploring what we exclude boys from.)