“This Wondrous Death”: Power, Sex and Death in the Science Fiction of James Tiptree, Jr.

Abstract

James Tiptree, Jr. is surely one of the most controversial figures in the field of science fiction. The controversy surrounding Tiptree begins with the very question of his identity.¹ In his introduction to Tiptree’s 1975 short story collection Warm Worlds and Otherwise, science fiction author and critic Robert Silverberg asked the questions that were on the minds of many in the science fiction community: “Who Is Tiptree? What Is He?” Silverberg infamously concluded that “there is to me something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree’s writing” (1975: xii). But during the winter of 1976–1977, the SF world learned that “James Tiptree, Jr.” was in fact a pseudonym of Dr. Alice Sheldon. The extraordinary Dr. Sheldon had served as a photo-intelligence officer in the U.S. Army Air Forces during World War Two, eventually rising to the rank of major. Her early biography was actually not too different from that of William Marston’s fictional WAC intelligence officer, Diana Prince. Alice Sheldon had gone on to work for the newly created Central Intelligence Agency after the war. Dissatisfied with her work at the C.I.A., she had re-invented herself at least twice: first as an experimental psychologist, then (perhaps more radically) as a “male” author of science fiction stories.