I think the biggest surprise was that she was part of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera's circle. ( )

Julie Phillips has done a great service in writing this exhaustive biography of Alice B. Sheldon. Starting from before conception to her untimely suicide in 1987, Phillips explores Sheldon's remarkable life from African explorer, to WAC, to CIA photo analyst, to psychology PhD, to science fiction author (under 3 different names!), to suburban housewife, to feminist. She explores not only Sheldon's life but her stories and novels in detail, elucidating the themes that enlivened her writing.

Minutely researched, there are 50 pages of footnotes, there is also a chronology and two bibliographies. Despite the detail, the text is always lively and engaging, making you want to read just one more chapter before going to bed.

I would recommend this not only to fans of Tiptree and science fiction, but to anyone interested in biographies of remarkable people.

Listening to Silly Thing by Cook and Jones ( )

Dare I even TRY to write a review of this?! Or will it immediately turn into a personal memoir in wch I say things that'll make me even more unpopular than I already am?! Is that possible?! (Yes, of course, it's possible!).

Let's start w/ my personal relationship to feminism, shall we? Having been born in 1953, I was 16 when 1970 began. Feminism, as it seems to be currently referred to, may be sd to've started around this time. As a guy who had long hair living in a lower middle class suburb outside Baltimore, at this time, I was a total daily target for viciousness on the part of the average 'merican. Such comments as "We can't hire people like you!" (when I applied for a minimum wage job as an usher in a movie theater), "Get a job!" (heard from a passing car as I walked), the ever-popular: "Are you a bouy or a gurl?!" (nyuk, nyuk) - along w/ the other favorites: "Jesus", "Manson", & "faggot" - to list a few.

To me it was always self-evident that men & women were 'equal' & that society's attempts to force people into stereotyped behavior based on gender or anything else was plain ole suppression that no person of courage & intelligence wd submit to willingly. As such, I immediately considered feminists to BE MY ALLIES. Just as I thought it was perfectly ok for my tomboy/lesbian friend to be who she was, I thought it was perfectly ok for me to hate sports & macho behavior in general. Just as I thought it was perfectly fine for my women friends to not shave their legs or their armpits & to wear combat boots, I thought it was fine for me to dress in flamboyantly 'weird' clothes.

& who were my most immediate enemies in this regard? My mom & my sister. My dad cut out when I was 9 & I rarely saw him before that anyway. My mom remarried to an ex-marine when I was 15. He was the most sane one of the bunch. But before he came along the dominant family presence in my life were the mom, the sis, & my mom's mom. A thoroughly, absolutely oppressive little 'matriarchy'. Yeah you're such a smart boy - now CONFORM or we'll CRUSH YOU. So it's not like I had any illusions about women being all good & men being all bad. From my personal experience, they all ate shit.

My friends were the nurturers (sometimes), established society (of wch my family was exemplary) was both thoroughly hypocritical & out to destroy everything that I valued about myself & others. What good was being smart if I used it for anything other than making money & killing commies?!

Keep this background in mind (if you, dear reader, have even made it this far). Jump-cut to reading 'James Tiptree, Jr': I didn't find out about Tiptree until, probably, the late 1980s, early 1990s. Tiptree wd've long since been 'outed' as the pen-name of Alice Sheldon - an SF writer who originally presented herself as a man - until 9 yrs before she killed her husband & herself.

As such, I probably knew, right from the beginning of reading her bks, that James Tiptree, Jr, was a woman. I remember vaguely accumulating the rumors that she had worked for the CIA & that that had helped inform her bks w/ a bleak political 'realism', that she'd killed her husband when he got infirm & killed herself b/c she didn't want to live w/o him - or something like that.

Whatever the case was, Tiptree, for me, was a major talent, one of the rare SF writers that I cd find who took a hard look at social issues & 'human nature' in a way that I basically agreed w/. I liked that she'd fucked w/ gender expectations by using a male name, I liked the intensity of her story "The Women Men Don't See". I was happy to've discovered her work & was sorry there wasn't MORE of it.

But did I agree w/ sentiments such as the following quote from the afore-mentioned story?:

"'Women have no rights, Don, except what men allow us. Men are more aggressive and powerful, and they run the world. When the next real crisis upsets them, our so-called rights will vanish like - like that smoke. We'll be back where we always were: property. And whatever has gone wrong will be blamed on our freedom, like the fall of Rome was. You'll see.'"

Nah, I don't agree w/ it at all - & this is where I'm likely to go afoul of my more 'politically correct' friends (& enemies). There's more than one way to skin a cat & there's more than one way to exercise power. If power is measured only by physical force, then its more subtle manifestations, its more psychological manipulations can go unnoticed. Women have ALWAYS been very powerful in my life. Think of things like the feminist critique of the male gaze: what it makes me think of is 'commoners' being forbidden to gaze on royalty - men as the commoner & women as princesses. This, of course, doesn't apply to ALL women or men - but there's definitely a pattern in place & it's based on CLASS.

& here's the crux of why I almost immediately started to HATE Alice Sheldon. From the beginning it's spelled out very clearly: Sheldon came from a rich family, she got to go on trips to Africa w/ her hunter parents - her mom was an acclaimed African travel bk writer. By the time Alice S was a little girl she already had illustrations published in one of her mom's bks. Do you think I, as a supposedly top dog white male, had opportunities like this as a child? No fucking way. Sheldon was a debutante - when she was being written about in the newspapers as the next promising rich woman I was being put in jail as a bum.

SO, when I read about Sheldon whining about being a "second class citizen" I think: WELL, I must be about 10th class then b/c her life seems pretty fucking cush to me! Do you think she was loading trucks for a living, like I sometimes do, when she was 56, like I am now? Fuck, no, she wasn't working at all - she was deciding wch country house in wch country she shd spend the next coupla mnths while she devoted herself to writing - for wch she was getting pd. When she & her husband decided to try their hand at chicken hatching they BUY the hatchery - how many citizens do you think can do that?! & what CLASS are they?!

Now I'm an intellectual, easily as intellectual as Sheldon, & I'm loading trucks & doing other manual labor like painting walls - hoping I'll have enuf time to write a bk that, if it gets published, I'll certainly never get royalties from - &, Sheldon, the rich woman, was pd (some wd say poorly - I disagree) from the get-go. Naturally, it helped to have a writer mom w/ writer connections. Do you think I WANT to be loading trucks instead of writing & working on my other projects? Nope. I HAVE TO TO SURVIVE. Sheldon was NEVER in such a bad place. SO, 2nd class? Only if there are many, MANY classes below her. Wch there were then & still are. SO, to hell w/ her, right?

&, yet, Julie Phillips' bio is pretty thorough & even-handed. She doesn't oversimplify Sheldon & we're lucky enuf to get views of Sheldon as NOT just a sexist whining spoiled rich creep. She liked women & men for some things, disliked them for others & seems to've spent alotof time JUST TRYING TO FIGURE OUT WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON HERE?! For wch I respect her - & w/ wch I can identify.

She even gave serious thought to the role BIOLOGY plays & that's something that many current-day politicos seem to want to ignore out of existence. For me, it's pretty damned obvious that people are DRIVEN by what I call B.O.D. (Biological OverDrive). I have a biological imperative, it runs my life - my not insubstantial higher cognitive functions are more important, in some ways, to my conscious mind, but B.O.D. is much older & MUCH stronger & ultimately runs the show.

I'm an extreme depressive. I've been suicidal since the onset of puberty - & I don't see it as EVER going away. Sheldon seems to've been similar. She distracted herself w/ writing, I distract myself w/ creativity in general. I think my OBSESSIVE creative urges are part & parcel of my sexual drive to IMPREGNATE, constant drive to impregnate. The only time I'm TRULY HAPPY is when I'm fucking - the rest of the time I'm just biding time 'til I can fuck again. &, yet, I haven't intellectually wanted to have kids most of my life. So there's some tension there, right? & I think Sheldon experienced a similar tension. Maybe if I had kids I wdn't think about killing myself every day, maybe my biological imperative wd finally leave me in peace.

I cd IDENTIFY w/ Sheldon (except for the class differences). Shit, she even submitted a story to "Analog" magazine & had it published in 1968 (her 1st published story). I SUBMITTED MY 1ST SHORT STORY TO ANALOG IN 1967 OR 1968. I was 13 or 14, Sheldon was 52. My story was, understandably, rejected.

Sheldon's problems w/ drugs were foisted on her by a society that promotes drugs like they're the savior of emotional turmoil. They're not - self-medicators completely lose touch w/ who they are & the drs who enable them are FOOLS looking for the easy way out. I suspect that Sheldon's eventual suicide probably was helped along by the paranoia of the speed habit she developed partially thanks to the military's par-for-the-course mad scientism. Page 121: "Sometime that year, an army doctor diagnosed "fatigue" and prescribed a new wonder drug, Benzedrine." It makes me think of the army denying for 13 yrs that Agent Orange was harmful to soldiers in the Vietnam War. Tell that to a friend of mine's dad - Oh, uh, you can't - he's DEAD.

Yes, Sheldon was an aerial reconnaissance foto analyst during 'WWII' & was w/ the CIA for a few yrs after. Her husband stayed w/ the CIA & supported her when she decided to stop working to concentrate on other things.

In the end, I can't do justice to this bk - or any other one that I'll ever review. Writing a bio is quite a challenge. Phillips didn't know Tiptree/Sheldon personally & that endangers the project w/ remoteness. But Phillips pulls it off in a convincingly scholarly way & I congratulate her for it. & how does she treat Sheldon's writing? Intelligently, I think. But there's one section I tend to disagree w/:

"The voice had already been slipping before the revelation [of Tiptree's identity as Sheldon:], and after the revelation it was gone. None of Alli's later work shows Tiptree's old authority. The early stories have an assured, almost aggressive insistence on the rightness of their telling. The later fiction is tentative and distant."

That wd include her 2nd & last novel, "Brightness Falls from the Air" &, oddly, b/c I'm not sure I ENTIRELY disagree w/ Phillips, this is probably the Tiptree/Sheldon bk that sticks w/ me the most - & I don't think it's b/c it has more conventional plotting. For me, it has the clearest & most well-developed critique of 'human nature'. I miss you Alli Sheldon - & I wish you hadn't committed suicide - I'd like to think there's a better way out for 'our kind'. ( )

James Tiptree, Jr. wrote some truly astonishing science fiction stories, works that were bleak, poetic, and beautiful, filled with themes of love and death, sex and gender, power and empathy, and twin longings for the alien and for home. He was also a prolific letter-writer, forming many long-distance friendships in the SF community... and a notorious recluse who would never agree to meet anyone in person or even talk on the phone. There were many rumors about his true identity, including one that he was so secretive because he worked for the CIA. When Tiptree's secret finally came out -- that "he" was, in fact, a woman named Alice Sheldon -- it was to a chorus of both shocked surprise and "Aha, I knew it!"

Sheldon's life was a complex and fascinating one, from accompanying her famous explorer parents on their African expeditions as a small child, to the murder-suicide that finally ended her life. At various points, she was a painter, an army officer, a psychological researcher, and the co-runner of a chicken hatchery. Oh, and yes, she did in fact also work for the CIA.

This biography covers all of that, but its main focus is Sheldon's psychology, and on the matters that obsessed and troubled her and found reflection in her work. Including, most particularly, the question, as author Julie Phillips puts it, of "what is a woman and am I one." It's a question she never did seem to unravel, even with the assistance of a male alter ego. Which seems like no surprise at all to me, being as it is, a tangled, thorny complicated mess of social expectation, biology, sexuality, personal identity, and power dynamics. Hell, I can't unravel it, either, and I was born many decades later into a world where the expectations and the limits placed on women were already significantly changing.

Anyway. This is an interesting, thoughtful, and thought-provoking bio, and I do recommended it to those interested in Sheldon's life and work. ( )

It has long been tradition in many literary genres – science fiction and the “western” primary among modern ones – that female writers would publish under either a male pseudonym or under gender-neutral first names or only initials. This was often a marketing issue, encouraged (or even demanded) by editors and publishers who were firmly convinced that their reading public simply would not buy material produced by women writers.

Thus, Leigh Brackett (whose given name was vague enough for her to get away with it), Alice Marie Norton (who became André), Mary (M.J.) Engh, Carolyn Janice (C.J.) Cherryh … and Alice B. Sheldon, who turned the science fiction world on its ear as James Tiptree, Jr., in the late 1960s.

But Sheldon was not simply choosing a male pen name to slide under readers’ radar. She created a whole persona – a man who wrote tough, often violent, fiction, who “out-Hemingway’d Hemingway” in one critic’s words, and a voice that would allow her to express many of the deep conflicts arising out of a personality tormented by everything from some very deep mommy and daddy issues to intensely repressed sexual attraction to women.

Julie Phillips has created a tour de force with her detailed biography of Sheldon, drawing on letters, journal entries, interviews with family members, friends, and professional colleagues as she presents a portrait of a woman who could neither accept nor reject the limitations placed on well-bred young women of a certain social class in the mid-20th century. Always, always, Alli Sheldon was looking to escape – the duties of a daughter, the confines of marriage, the strictures of sexual identity, the appropriate behaviors and careers for women – yet was never able to make that final break. She fought herself, she took refuge in multiple heterosexual affairs, she frittered away her college years, she dabbled in art, she joined the military but was frustrated by the lack of true opportunity there. She smoked too much, loved too hard, abused too many prescription medications, always looking for her true voice. Her true escape. Her true self.

And somehow James Tiptree, Jr. – a name chosen, she said “as a lark, from a jam label in a grocery store” became not only the identify she affixed to her science fiction stories, but very much an alter-ego. Tiptree could say things no one would listen to, coming from a fiftyish Virginia housewife. He could establish, via a voluminous correspondence with other writers, editors, and publishers, an all-us-boys-together persona and flirt outrageously with his female correspondents. He could give his heroes randy thoughts about the women in his stories – women, who for some reason, seldom seemed interested in traditional (if secondary to the main plotline) romances.

Toward the end of Tiptree’s writing career, in the late 70s, Phillips shows us a creative mind struggling to free itself from its own construct, becoming more and more frantic to replace Tiptree with yet another persona as she begins to write from a frankly feminist viewpoint under the name Racoona Sheldon. At the same time, Alli is struggling with her aging mother’s failing health, her much-older husband’s decline, and the grim economic reality that even Hugo and Nebula award winning science fiction writers can seldom make much of a living at the craft.

The conclusion, already known to those who followed Tiptree’s career, casts a pall over the final portion of the book as it plays out to its inevitable end, making it heartbreaking for the reader who has followed this demanding and tortured woman through a life in which goals seem always just out of reach. Still, this is an important book, both as biography and as a study of the rise of the feminist movement of the late 20th century, and the fact that it came too late for many women. ( )