Gender flips, large wars and small: Or, how I learned to stop worrying and love James Tiptree, Jr.

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by Chris Lombardi

It's a voice I hardly remember not having heard: the writer in the edgy science-fiction anthologies, the voice cool as ice, the material borderline radical. Not a writer I much liked at first, but the stories stayed with me: "The Girl Who was Plugged In" (turned later into an episode of Paradox ), whose plaintive cyborg "Delphi" predated Blade Runner ; "The Women Men Don't See," one of whom asks the alien invaders to take her away when they come, rather than leave her on Earth.

When I read those stories the first time, I was young - and didn't at first hear the echoes not only of a woman but one who'd been around the block a few times. If I had, I would not have been as confused about James Tiptree, Jr . as famous male writers like Robert Silverberg were. Silverberg wrote in the 1970's that the mysterious writer couldn't be female, "for there is to me something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree’s writing."

Look closely at this bit of the latter story, and see if you hear those echoes.

"Come on, why doomed? Didn't they get that equal rights bill?"

Long hesitation. When she speaks again her voice is different. "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."

Now all this is delivered in a gray tone of total conviction. The last time I heard that tone, the speaker was explaining why he had to keep his file drawers full of dead pigeons. "Oh, come on. You and your friends are the backbone of the system; if you quit, the country would come to a screeching halt before lunch."

No answering smile. "That's fantasy." Her voice is still quiet. "Women don't work that way. We're a—a toothless world." She looks around as if she wanted to stop talking. "What women do is survive. We live by ones and twos in the chinks of your world-machine.

"Sounds like a guerrilla operation."

In truth, the "guerrilla operation" was her life - the life of Major Alice Bradley Davey Sheldon, who her mom called "Alli," and the subject of a 2005 biography by Julie Phillips , "James Tipree, Jr: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon."

By "double," Phillips is speaking of Sheldon's 22-year career as the mystery figure of the science-fiction genre, in which "he" won Huge and Nebula awards by the bushelful before being "outed" by someone who finally tracked down the 61-year-old retired WAC officer living in Virginia.

But where Phillips sees double, I see triple: a woman who re-invented herself at least three times, each time remaining a step ahead of the country she loved.

The first time, it was by impulsively marrying at 18 a man she met at her debut, William Davey, leaving behind her rich and famous parents--lawyer Herbert Bradley and author Mary Hastings Bradley — who had taken her to Africa In 1921, where the New York Times called a pigtailed seven-year-old Alli “the First White Child Ever Seen by the Pigmy Tribes.”

I caught up with her after her second reinvention, in 1943, when she joined the Women's Army Corps.

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Posted by WVFC - December 23, 2008, at 01:32PM | in Bad-Ass Women