The presumed man called Tiptree, however, possessed singular literary virtues: besides his electric and creative style, he imagined like few the capacities for reasoning of aliens, mixed the galactic battles of the space opera with the transcendence of death and, surprise surprise, exhibited a not-always-evident feminist awareness, but one completely explicit in tales such as “ The Women Men Don’t See”. Smith himself, who would also end up being a close friend and trustee of Tip, would for years take it for granted that the author was a man and he reflected this in what would be their first and only interview as such. For some, he was a secret services official for others, a government servant and with speculation being the order of the day, writer Robert Silverberg would come to write that he must be “a man of 50 or 55, I guess, possibly unmarried, fond of outdoor life, restless in his everyday existence, a man who has seen much of the world and understands it well”.
The great works of the surprising Tiptree – “The Screwfly Solution”, “Houston, Houston”, “Do You Read?” and “Love Is the Plan the Plan Is Death” – would appear in the immediately subsequent years, but the first tales of this storyteller, whom nobody had ever seen in person, had been circulating for two years, and Tiptree and his sole means of contact – a post-office box in Virginia – would raise all kinds of speculations. Smith made the most of a tip from Harlan Ellison to send to the mysterious James Tiptree Jr., an interview designed for the modest magazine Phantasmicom. in 1970, a young science-fiction fan called Jeffrey D. Le Guin, today the mysterious Tip would no longer, however, make any sense: it is women like Sheldon who are heading up the best of science fiction, and prizes such as the Hugo and Ignotus Awards have confirmed this in recent times.Įxactly half a century ago, i.e. The majority of people, in fact, are ignorant of almost everything to do with this great renewer of the genre, known by the male pseudonym, taken from a jar of marmalade, of James Tiptree Jr. Nor that the prediction by Roberto Bolaño in Amulet – “Alice Sheldon shall appeal to the masses in the year 2017” – has finally come true. This year, 2020, fantasy and science fiction are celebrating such important centenaries as those of Joan Perucho and Isaac Asimov, but nobody remembers that in 2015 that of Alice B.
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