1973 was a banner year for Tiptree; in her pioneering, Hugo-winning cyberpunk novella The Girl Who Was Plugged In, set in a media-dominated future, a deformed homeless girl is enlisted to control the vacant body of a celebrity as a “remote” worker. This tale was ahead of its time in its portrayal of global corporations, product placement, and cultic devotion to celebrities. Tiptree also won a Nebula short story award for depicting alien psychology, making use of her academic background; “Love Is the Plan the Plan Is Death” is narrated from the point of view of an enormous alien arachnid.
In the mid-seventies, Tiptree wrote stories with a feminist twist: “The Women Men Don’t See” (1973), in which a crashed airplane’s passengers encounter temporarily stranded aliens, ends with the human women deciding to leave Earth with the aliens due to the limitations on women in Terran culture, which Tiptree clearly chafed at in her own life. 1976’s Houston, Houston, Do You Read? told the tale of human male astronauts from the present day who travel in time to a future in which males have died out, where the astronauts must confront their sense of insignificance. Houston won a Nebula Award for best novella and tied for the 1977 Hugo Award.
“Tiptree” ended up being more than just an author name; it expressed an aspect of Alice Sheldon. But eventually she wanted to write from another dimension of herself and created “Raccoona Sheldon,” another pseudonym for her other works. In a circumstance indicative of the level of sexism in publishing at the time, she had difficulties selling the Raccoona Sheldon stories until “Tiptree” wrote to publishers on “Raccoona’s” behalf, describing Raccoona as an old friend and student of Tiptree’s. The first Raccoona stories were often received as light in contrast to the short fiction authored under the Tiptree name, but a few Raccoona outings went much deeper, including 1977’s Nebula-winning novelette The Screwfly Solution. It was a tale of men compelled by aliens to commit femicide to depopulate Earth for alien colonization and was eventually adapted as a made-for-TV film in Showtime’s Masters of Horror series in 2006. It was also the last story Alice wrote before her identity was revealed.
Tiptree communicated a great deal with editors and other writers by post but kept her actual identity secret for years; however, Tiptree did mention “his” mother was from Chicago and an explorer. Upon publication of Mary Bradley’s obituary in 1976, inquisitive Tiptree fans connected the dots; Alice Sheldon was revealed, overturning many suppositions by SF authors and others regarding “female writing” vs. “male writing.” Many were convinced Tiptree was male due to such things as a seemingly “masculine” level of experience with the military and intelligence fields, including Harlan Ellison and Robert Silverberg. She made efforts at damage control by reaching out to longstanding contacts such as Ursula K. Le Guin, hoping to tell them before they heard. Numbers of them were supportive, including Le Guin, whose response was very positive, but the fallout of the revelation worsened the depression with which Alice had long struggled. Her confidence and her work suffered. Early one morning in 1987, she shot her sleeping eighty-four-year-old husband in the head, then turned the gun on herself; people close to the Sheldons, including his son by an earlier marriage, Peter, believe it was a suicide pact. SF authors Karen Joy Fowler and Pat Murphy later founded the James Tiptree, Jr. Award for F/SF literature that “expands or explores our understanding of gender.”
Tiptree/Sheldon was complex in sexual orientation as well as gender identity; although she clearly had long-term connections with men, she stated, “I like some men a lot, but from the start, before I knew anything, it was always girls and women who lit me up.” Of the army, she declared she had “felt she was among free women for the first time.” One is left wondering what this brilliant author could have expressed in a more liberated time.
A male name seemed like good camouflage. I had the feeling that a man would slip by less observed. I’ve had too many experiences in my life of being the first woman in some damned occupation.
Alice Bradley Sheldon (known as James Tiptree, Jr.)
For many women writers, it took a masculine pen name to get published
Amandine Lucie Aurore Dupin, Baronne Dudevant: The famous French novelist George Sand
Mary Ann (or Marian) Evans: The great English Victorian novelist George Eliot
Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, and Emily Brontë: The beloved Brontës, published under the names Acton, Currer, and Ellis Bell, respectively.
Marion Zimmer Bradley: Lee Chapman, John Dexter, and Morgan Ives were all noms de plume of Marion Zimmer Bradley, the bestselling author of The Mists of Avalon
Olive Schreiner: She used the name Ralph Iron to write her acclaimed The Story of an African Farm
Frances Miriam Berry: The first woman humorist in the United States, she used the name Frank to get published
Adele Florence Cory: As was eventually revealed, she used the pseudonym Lawrence Hope. According to Womanlist by Marjorie P.K. Weiser and Jean S. Arbeiter, Adele Florence Cory was “respectably married to a middle-aged British army officer in India, who wrote passionate poems in the 1890s. One described the doomed love of a married English lady for an Indian rajah in the Kashmir. When Hope’s real identity was unmasked, all London was abuzz: was she telling the truth?”
MADELEINE L’ENGLE the physics of love and a wrinkle
in time
Just over a century ago, Madeleine L’Engle was born in 1918 in New York City, the only child of two highly creative socialites: father Charles was a journalist who also wrote novels and plays, and mother Madeleine was a pianist. They often left young Madeleine in the care of an Irish Catholic immigrant housekeeper they called Mrs. O; L’Engle later recalled time with her as being full of “laughter and joy, the infallible signs of the presence of God.”
When she wasn’t with Mrs. O, she spent hours alone; as soon as she was able to hold a pencil, the imaginative Madeleine started writing. Having read all the books she had, she created her own stories and poetry. Her father’s old manual typewriter was eventually passed along to her, which furthered her efforts as a novelist. But in 1930, Madeleine’s life changed when her parents moved to Europe; she was deposited at Chatelard, an elite girls’ boarding school in Switzerland. Besides missing her family terribly, she didn’t fit in with the boarding school cliques and couldn’t stand having no private space. She was forced to develop a “force field of silence” within which she “could go on writing my stories and my poems and dreaming my dreams,” which in time helped her become a writer, she later said.
In 1933, the whole family moved back to the US. Madeleine was soon sent away to another boarding school in Charleston, South Carolina. Although making friends was still challenging, she was able to find a place for herself at Ashley Hall. She joined the drama club, both performing and trying her hand as a playwright, following in her father’s footsteps. Her interest in various kinds of writing became a consuming passion. But her life was changed again when death touched her family, first taking her grandmother; then just before her eighteenth birthday, word came that her father was in the hospital, desperately ill with pneumonia. Young Madeleine traveled to Jacksonville to say farewell, but he had died by the time she arrived. Disconsolate, she pledged to herself in her journal that she had to succeed with her writing for her father’s sake as well as her own. A faraway or absent father marked a number of her novels; this is seen in A Wrinkle in Time, in which Meg, the teenaged heroine, rescues her father and triumphs over evil by the power of love.
Madeleine went on to graduate from Smith College with a BA in English in 1941 and moved back to New York to begin her theater career. On tour and on Broadway, she stole time to write while waiting in the wings, making use of her internal cloak of silence. Her first novel, The