hen award-winning author James Tiptree Jr. was outed as a woman named Alice Sheldon in 1977, the entire SF field found its ideas about gender under challenge. Established in 1991, the award that bears Tiptree's name has continued to question what readers and writers believe about gender
identity, sexuality and human relations ... all while celebrating some of the most intriguing and experimental new fiction written in the field each year.
Edited by Karen Joy Fowler, Pat Murphy, Debbie Notkin and Jeffrey D. Smith, the James Tiptree Award Anthology 1 is a collection of Tiptree-winning fiction as well as selections from the award's annual recommended reading list. These stories are interspersed with essays: articles that discuss the Tiptree's history, Alice Sheldon's life and various other issues surrounding gender and feminism in speculative fiction. Contributors include well-known writers like Ursula K. Le Guin, Suzy McKee Charnas and Joanna Russ, as well as rising stars like Kelly Link.
Each year the award's jury is left to find its own interpretation of the award's defined subject area—works that explore and expand gender roles in speculative fiction. (As an interesting note, this first anthology is very much dominated by the 2003 jury selections.) The result is a book that includes a tale about a transgendered ghost, Sandra McDonald's "The Ghost Girls of Rumney Mill," a story about the development of male pregnancy, "Birth Days," by Geoff Ryman, and a violent male-versus-female clash in Carole Emshwiller's "Boys." The anthology concludes by publishing all of its award winners and reading lists to date. It is a list of exceptional stories and novels that could keep a reader busy for years, especially one who has happily devoured the samples on offer in this volume.
A fictional gender agenda
Since most SF readers pick up an anthology looking for first-rate fiction, let's start there: These stories are utterly terrific. Matt Ruff's excerpt from Set This House in Order is especially tantalizing, an intriguing story of two people with multiple personality disorder—one a man who knows about his illness, the other a woman baffled by the lost time and chaos that underpin her life. Ruth Nestvold's powerful "Looking Through Lace" tells of a linguist who has been assigned to study a women's-only language on a planet that has no system of writing. Richard Calder's wry "The Catgirl Manifesto" lays out an academic study of a sexual trend ... a fictional fashion craze that threatens to undercut modern society.
For readers who like a break between dips into fictional worlds, the essays provide a perfect break. Tiptree's candid confession letter about the evolution of her secret identity is riveting, and Le Guin's dissection of genre-based snobbery is a must-read for anyone working in the field. These essays invite comparisons to the "extras" frequently found on DVDs—they enlighten, add information and serve to enhance the enjoyment of the fictional entries.
The editors take a big chance by publishing three versions of a classic fairy tale in the closer for this anthology. The first, Hans Christian Anderson's "The Snow Queen," serves as a template for the others, reminding readers of the savagery and outdated attitudes embedded within this tale. Kara Dalkey then takes the same story for a spin through Japan folklore in the haunting "The Lady of the Ice Garden." Finally, Kelly Link works through a slipstream transformation of the narrative, sending the reader on a personal quest—complete with loneliness, self-doubt and bloody feet—in pursuit of the story's faithless boy. Each piece follows essentially the same plot. However, the radically different approaches to this story serve as a demonstration of how the envelope of gender can be pushed—of, in other words, the very thing the Tiptree award is all about.
