I’m currently reading ‘Ten-Thousand Light Years’ from home by the above author and I know that ‘he’ was actually Alice Sheldon writing under a pen-name. I checked the wikipedia article on her for a little background and its a little contradictory stating that it was basically a huge shock when her identity was revealed but also saying that in an earlier volume of her work another sci-fi author wrote an introduction stating that there was no possibility that the author of the obviously masculine stories was a woman.
My question is when and why did the rumours as to James Tiptree Jrs true gender begin?
Just as a sidenote I haven’t read many of her stories and while some of the concepts are interesting so far I’m not a fan of her writing style and pessimistic tone of her work.
I’ve absolutely no idea- never heard of James Tiptree- but I wonder if the name was at all an homage to Billy Tipton (a multimarried male singer/musician posthumously revealed to be anatomically female). I clicked on the thread due to a brief name confusion.
No, it had nothing to do with Billy Tipton. It came from a marmalade jar:
The Wikipedia entry explains things reasonably well. It was well known that “James Tiptree, Jr.” was a pseudonym. Because Sheldon had worked in the intelligence community and had mentioned this in letters to various people she wrote using the Tiptree pseudonym, people assumed that Tiptree was using a pseudonym because he or she had to keep his or her writing career separate from his or her work in the intelligence community. Sheldon apparently occasionally attended science fiction conventions (or otherwise communicated with science fiction people), where she just introduced herself as Alice Sheldon with no mention of Tiptree. Because of this, people in the science fiction community knew something about her background. In her letters to people using the Tiptree pseudonym, she mentioned various parts of her background without ever mentioning her sex. Eventually somebody who had met Sheldon at a convention (or had heard second-hand about her) and had read the Tiptree letters (or had heard second-hand about them) noticed the similarity in backgrounds.
I’m guessing it might have been sort of an open secret in the SF community. There were people who knew she was a woman and I have to believe that “secret” was passed around.
Apparently it became public information after her mother’s death in 1976. “Tiptree” said that “his” mother had just died and from the information “he” gave about “his” mother, people identified her as Mary Hastings Bradley. Once it was known that Bradley was James Tiptree’s mother, people learned that Bradley had a daughter Alice and not a son.
As I understand it, it was not an open secret in the science fiction community. As I understand it, Sheldon had never mentioned her sex to anyone in her Tiptree letters. Do you have a citation showing that it was an open secret?
You want me to provide a cite for something I said was a guess?
But I stand by what I said. Sheldon had publishers and editors in the SF community who had met her and knew she was a woman. She attended SF conventions and corresponded with fans and many people noticed that her background was the same as “James Tiptree’s”. She apparently did nothing more to conceal her gender than avoid openly stating she was a woman. So there were probably dozens of people who knew James Tiptree was Alice Sheldon.
Little Nemo, who told you that there were publishers and editors in the science fiction community who had met Sheldon (or had corresponded with her) and knew that she was Tiptree? That contradicts everything I’ve read about her and been told about her. It also apparently contradicts everything Exapno Mapcase has read about her and been told about her too. Where do you get this knowledge that we don’t have? Incidentally, has anyone read the biography of Tiptree/Sheldon by Julie Phillips? That’s supposedly pretty definitive on her life.
Where are you getting your knowledge? I’m assuming nobody in this thread is Ben Bova or Terry Carr or Damon Knight or Donald Wollheim or anyone else who was active in SF publishing in the early seventies. But don’t assume that the people who were signing contracts with and writing checks to James Tiptree didn’t know her real name. It would have required active concealment for Alice Sheldon to have hidden her identity from people like this and there’s no evidence that she took such measures.
Compare this to authors like “Cordwainer Smith” or “Trevanian” or “A.J. Quinnell” or “B. Traven” or others who have actually made some effort to conceal their real identity. They worked through third parties, didn’t correspond with people and talk about their lives, and never made public appearances at genre conventions. But even with these people, their real identities were often an open secret in the publishing business long before they were publicly revealed.
All “Tiptree” did was never publicly announce that she was a woman. But that was enough in the seventies for people to assume that she was a man. The default assumption was that any SF author must be male until proven otherwise. When the truth came out, I’m guessing a lot of people were embarassed by the assumptions they had made so they retroactively inflated the level of secrecy on her gender to minimize their mistake.
But as I’ve said, this is speculation on my part. I was certainly not an SF “insider” back in the seventies (and I’m not now). I wasn’t working in the business or attending conventions so I don’t know what the gossip was about SF authors. But I’m pretty sure there was gossip back then. It would have been extraordinarily unusual if there hadn’t been.
In other words, you’re guessing. You haven’t actually heard anyone who was around when it was announced that Tiptree was Alice Sheldon say that he knew that she was a woman because it was an open secret. I’ve been going to science fiction conventions since the 1970’s. I’ve been reading about science fiction since the 1960’s. Everything I’ve ever read and everything I’ve ever heard has indicated that everybody in the science fiction field was surprised by the announcement that Tiptree was female. Apparently Exapno Mapcase feels the same way. Unless you’re more plugged into the science fiction community and more well read in the literature about science fiction than I am (and I’m pretty well plugged in and pretty well read), I don’t see why your guesses are supposed to be better than mine.
Now, has anyone read the Julie Phillips biography of Tiptree/Sheldon?
Tiptree was nominated for at least one SF award where the nomination cited “his” ability to portray female characters. This caused Tiptree to withdraw, saying that less-established writers should have chance. It was flatly asserted by Silverberg (?) that “he” couldn’t be female. As far as the intros of Tiptree’s works state, it was not known, not an open secret, and was shocking when revealed. I’m sorry I’m not where my books are, but the published assertions are that it was not known.
This is the source of my question, if it was a huge shock where did the rumours that he was a she come from in the first place? There must have been some sort of suspicion prior to the revelation or the author writing the intro wouldn’t have had to state that he believed she couldn’t be a woman in the first place.
Thanks for the answers everyone.
James Tiptree Jr./Alice Sheldon was just ahead of the tech-curve, she’d have love the internet…
There was some suspicion. Silverberg’s famous comment that Tiptree couldn’t be a woman was in response to some people suggesting she was. But there was no proof.
The story was broken by a fanzine in 1977 when a writer noticed certain similarities between Tiptree’s biography and Sheldon’s. The main clue was a mention of the death of her mother. Obituaries for her mother mentioned Alice Sheldon and her (non-writing) career. Since Tiptree was honest about everything but her gender, someone noticed the similarities and broke the story.
No one in the field has ever stated they knew Tiptree was female prior to that article.
And AFAIK, Tiptree did not attend conventions or other science fiction gatherings, and made no public appearances (at least, not until the story got out). Her interactions with the field were conducted solely by mail.
> And AFAIK, Tiptree did not attend conventions or other science fiction
> gatherings, and made no public appearances (at least, not until the story got
> out). Her interactions with the field were conducted solely by mail.
Thanks for correcting me on that. So what did she write to? Did she write letters to science fiction magazines? Did she write to science fiction authors? How were the contents of her letters so well known?
I don’t know the details, but I do know she did write to science fiction fanzines, at one point being the sole “man” in a round robin discussion of women in science fiction.
She seems to have been a prolific letter writer. Tiptree’s biography (in Google Books) quotes from letters to Harlan Ellison (who came very close to discovering the truth), and to and from people like Joanna Russ, Richard Geis, Barry Malzberg, Harry Harrison, Terry Carr, and Robert Silverberg (pp 288-291).
As I said, though, none of these people ever guessed the truth.
Quoted in the NYT as coming from an introduction written by Silverberg in 1975 (if you follow me). The article goes on to say that fans found out “a few months later” that Tiptree was actually Sheldon.
Silverberg certainly knew a heck of a lot about the SF world at the time, being both author and editor, and while it’s not clear that there was a “rumor” that Tiptree was female–it might have simply been someone pushing the envelope because no one knew–it was obviously not generally known.
So while the answer to the OP is not totally clear “somewhere around 1975” is a good guess.
Because it makes general communication while concealing aspects of yourself so much easier than previously. We mostly have to take it on faith that the people we’re communicating to on the internet are the gender or anything else that they claim they are.
I read that she was a psychologist so maybe it was some lengthy and grand psychological experiment on everyone else.
