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James Tiptree, Jr

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James Tiptree Jr (24 August 1915 – 19 May 1987) was the pen name of American science fiction author Alice Bradley Sheldon, used from 1967 to her death. She also occasionally wrote under the pseudonym Raccoona Sheldon (1974–77).

Quotes

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  • Anyone who shoots a real gun at you when drunk and angry is simply not husband material, regardless of his taste in literature.
    • Letter quoted in "James Tiptree Jr: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon" (2006) by Julie Phillips
  • Our fellow passenger was Major Grogan, who thirty years before had been the first white man to go from the Cape to Cairo. It took him three years, one whole year in the marshes of the Sudd; his two companions died. It is said he ate them; I think so. He looked like a sensible man.
    • As quoted in "James Tiptree Jr: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon" (2006) by Julie Phillips

Short fiction

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Ten Thousand Light-Years from Home (1973)

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Page numbers from the mass market paperback first edition, published by Ace Books, ISBN 0-441-80180-3, first printing
See James Tiptree, Jr's Internet Science Fiction Database page for original publication details
Italics as in the book
  • Man is exogamous—all our history is one long drive to find and impregnate the stranger. Or get impregnated by him, it works for women too. Anything different-colored, different nose, ass, anything, man has to fuck it or die trying. That’s a drive, y’know, it’s built in. Because it works fine as long as the stranger is human. For millions of years that kept the genes circulating. But now we’ve met aliens we can’t screw, and we’re about to die trying.
  • People, of course, seemed to need also to talk and talk, which was a pity because their talk was mostly without meaning.
    • The Peacefulness of Vivyan (p. 36)
  • The American black who goes to Kenya often discovers he is an American first and an African second, no matter what they did to him in Newark.
    • Mamma Come Home (p. 70)
  • “Stupid,” I husked to George. “Harem slaves don’t blow up the harem and themselves just to keep the new girls out. They wait and poison the new girls when they can get away with it. That does us no good.”
    “Nor do historical analogies, after a point.”
    “Analogic reasoning works when you have the right reference frame.”
    • Mamma Come Home (p. 71)
  • Did you know you get clobbered for calling a polyglot a linguist?
    • Help (p. 81)
  • Somewhere in his head a couple of neurones twitched, but they didn’t connect.
    • Forever to a Hudson Bay Blanket (p. 196)
  • Because dying, any time, is an experience you don’t survive.
    • Forever to a Hudson Bay Blanket (p. 213)
  • Entropy! The development of reliable knowledge is anti-entropic. Science’s task in a social system is comparable to the function of intelligence in the individual. It holds against disorganization, isolation, noise, entropy. But we, here—we’ve allied ourselves with an entropic subsystem. We’re not generating structure, we’re helping to degrade the system!
    • I’m Too Big but I Love to Play (p. 247)
  • You can understand why a system would seek information—but why in hell does it offer information? Why do we strive to be understood? Why is a refusal to accept communication so painful?
    • I’m Too Big but I Love to Play (p. 248)
  • Eerie blue, the wide old eyes reminded him of a place he had never seen.
    • Mother in the Sky with Diamonds (p. 276)
  • If it worked it would be like trying to wipe your eye with a blowtorch.
    • Mother in the Sky with Diamonds (p. 290)
  • She sounded sane as soap.
    • Mother in the Sky with Diamonds (p. 291)
  • He heard himself humming and decided to lock the whole thing into autopilot. No matter what shape that computer was in it would be saner than he was.
    • Mother in the Sky with Diamonds (p. 292)
  • What if a person is sure of his identity but it isn’t his identity?
    • Beam Us Home (p. 305)

The Women Men Don't See (1973)

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  • What women do is survive. We live by ones and twos in the chinks of your world-machine.
  • 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.

Quotes about

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  • "James Tiptree, Jr." was a science fiction writer whose very fine work began appearing in the 1960s. No one had ever met "Tiptree" and theories about "him" were rife. Finally "James Tiptree, Jr." was revealed to be a sixty-year-old biologist called Alice Sheldon. We corresponded extensively, both before this revelation and afterwards. I loved James and was sad to lose him but I loved Alice too (she sent postcards typed in blue ink with blue-ink octopi drawn on them) and was much sadder to lose her because her loss (her death) was permanent. Straight people, however sympathetic they may be, don't know the texture or the difficulties of gay lives. When I heard of her death I determined that she wouldn't go down in history as another happy, heterosexual woman (like Virginia Woolf) whose life was edited because her real desires were held to be somehow an "attack" on her character. Sheldon, like Woolf, was married and happily so but she was a lesbian. Therefore I wrote the above note to Extrapolation and donated her letters to what I considered the appropriate place.
    • Joanna Russ in The Country You Have Never Seen: Essays and Reviews (2007)
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