Overview
The incandescent speculative fiction of an elusive American visionary–now in an authoritative Library of America edition.
"Tiptree's narratives of alien worlds and alienation make up one of science fiction's most vivid and influential bodies of work." —The New York Times
In 1967, after a long career in military intelligence, and having almost finished her Ph.D. in behavioral psychology, the 52-year-old Alice B. Sheldon sent her first short story to a science fiction magazine. Spotting a jar of marmalade on the shelf, she styled herself James Tiptree Jr.—a pseudonym that soon became a full-fledged persona and remained a closely held secret. Writing and corresponding as Tiptree, Sheldon took the SF world by storm, publishing dozens of incandescent speculative tales that won multiple Hugo, Locus, Nebula, and World Fantasy awards and the sometimes astonished admiration of new wave writers like Samuel R. Delany, Philip K. Dick, Ursula Le Guin, Joanna Russ, and Robert Silverberg (who declared in print that Tiptree simply had to be a man).
Now, Library of America presents the most comprehensive collection of Tiptree/Sheldon’s shorter fiction ever assembled, featuring the best of her two-decade career and including several pieces long out-of-print. Here are:
Tiptree is “as close as American science fiction (perhaps even America) has ever come to the author of Orlando and Mrs. Dalloway” (as volume editor Stephanie Burt has put it)—full of intense stylistic energy and a sense of the entropic, the tragic, in our lives and the life of the cosmos.
"Tiptree's narratives of alien worlds and alienation make up one of science fiction's most vivid and influential bodies of work." —The New York Times
In 1967, after a long career in military intelligence, and having almost finished her Ph.D. in behavioral psychology, the 52-year-old Alice B. Sheldon sent her first short story to a science fiction magazine. Spotting a jar of marmalade on the shelf, she styled herself James Tiptree Jr.—a pseudonym that soon became a full-fledged persona and remained a closely held secret. Writing and corresponding as Tiptree, Sheldon took the SF world by storm, publishing dozens of incandescent speculative tales that won multiple Hugo, Locus, Nebula, and World Fantasy awards and the sometimes astonished admiration of new wave writers like Samuel R. Delany, Philip K. Dick, Ursula Le Guin, Joanna Russ, and Robert Silverberg (who declared in print that Tiptree simply had to be a man).
Now, Library of America presents the most comprehensive collection of Tiptree/Sheldon’s shorter fiction ever assembled, featuring the best of her two-decade career and including several pieces long out-of-print. Here are:
- “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?,” her now-classic fable of stranded astronauts and near-future feminism
- “Love Is the Plan and the Plan Is Death,” in which the instincts of an insect-like alien narrator reflect eerily on the human condition
- “The Screwfly Solution,” a terrifying account of environmental collapse and human annihilation in a virus-induced orgy of incel femicide
- “The Girl Who Was Plugged In,” arguably the first and perhaps the best cyberpunk story ever written; and many more.
Tiptree is “as close as American science fiction (perhaps even America) has ever come to the author of Orlando and Mrs. Dalloway” (as volume editor Stephanie Burt has put it)—full of intense stylistic energy and a sense of the entropic, the tragic, in our lives and the life of the cosmos.
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