In January, when we were driving across the swamps of the Yucatan, I found myself thinking about James Tiptree Jr.’s delightful story “The Women Men Don’t See.”
(Spoiler: the women in question are a nondescript mother and daughter who hide in the swamps of the Yucatan, waiting for the arrival of aliens who will free them from the repellent sexism of 1970’s government work.)
I don’t read a lot of hard science fiction, but I dearly love James Tiptree Jr.
Tiptree was the pen name of the writer Alice B. Sheldon, whose best stories are collected in the anthology Her Smoke Rose Up Forever. Guess who got that anthology for Christmas this year?
My earliest introduction to Tiptree’s work was the visionary story “The Girl Who Was Plugged In,” which is like The Matrix meets Keeping Up With The Kardashians: a heartbreaking mash-up of girlish yearning, cybernetic technology, post-traumatic stress, and reality TV. Unbelievably, it was written in 1973.
Like I said: visionary.
Another of Tiptree’s best works is the novella “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” Winner of both the Nebula and the Hugo award, this story definitely reflects the cultural context of the 1970’s: The smug male astronauts that Tiptree depicts truly cannot imagine how “girls” could be trusted to pilot space ships, let alone run their own society.
Alice B. Sheldon’s readers long believed that she was in fact James Tiptree, Jr., one of the elite white males she wrote about so well. The blind assumption of privilege that many of her characters possess is infuriating–and incredibly well done.
There’s a disturbing sense of entrapment in many of Tiptree’s stories: even if we transcend our humanity (like the lonely cyborg in “The Girl Who Was Plugged In”), we can’t escape our biological urges or our cultural conditioning. We are driven by forces we don’t understand.
Which brings me to the Tiptree story I love best: “Love is the Plan the Plan is Death.” In this Nebula-winning 1973 novella, a giant sentient spider struggles mightily when his emergent reason and capacity for emotion come into conflict with The Plan; namely, the cannibalistic urges of his species. How can you love someone, if the plan was always death?
