Alice Hastings Bradley Sheldon (1915–1987) was a US psychologist who wrote groundbreaking science fiction as James Tiptree Jr. and as Raccoona Sheldon. As Michael Swanwick wrote in his introduction to Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (2004), “strangest of all were three writing desks [in Sheldon’s house], each with its distinct typewriter, stationery, and color of ink. One belonged to James Tiptree Jr. A second was used exclusively by Raccoona Sheldon. The third was for Alice Sheldon, a sometimes scientist, artist, newspaper critic, soldier, businesswoman, and retired CIA officer, who on occasion moved to one of the other desks.” In 1991, the authors Karen Joy Fowler and Pat Murphy founded the James Tiptree Jr. Award, which is given annually to a work of science fiction or fantasy that expands or explores our understanding of gender.
Tiptree used the pen names initially to protect her academic work, but speculations about her gender within the field of science fiction led to controversy and often heated discussion. The evolving understanding of Tiptree’s identity is interesting to track. In 1972, Frederik Pohl wrote in Best Science Fiction, “James Tiptree Jr. is a writer I…have never met. I rather think the chances are we never will, because every time [I] suggest we get together for a drink, it turns out that he is that week off to Borneo or Brooklyn or Swaziland.” The editor Terry Carr, in Best Science Fiction of the Year #3 (1974), wrote in the story note for Tiptree’s “The Women Men Don’t See,” “Like any branch of literature, science fiction reflects the trends of current thinking. Last year Joanna Russ won a Nebula Award for a feminist story entitled ‘When It Changed’; this year James Tiptree Jr. offers a male viewpoint on the same subject. As you might expect, other than the basic theme, there’s very little similarity between the two stories.” Ursula Le Guin, a year or two after the truth became known, may have gotten in the last word with this comment accompanying Tiptree’s story “Slow Music” (in Interfaces: An Anthology of Speculative Fiction, 1980): “James Tiptree Jr. is a pseudonym. He is a woman. She is also Raccoona Sheldon. They are an experimental psychologist of great insight, a writer of surpassing strength, and a person of infinite reserve, generosity, and charm.”
Tiptree wrote primarily short stories, publishing only one novel, Up the Walls of the World (1978). She worked in a variety of styles, often combining the trappings of “hard” science fiction with “soft” science fiction like sociology and psychology. Tiptree stories retain their power even today, and demand rereading, because they resist easy interpretation. Nor are Tiptree’s characters mouthpieces for ideas or rhetoric, and the unconventional structures of her stories render them mysterious and luminous—in a way similar to Carol Emshwiller’s and also Margaret St. Clair’s stories from the 1950s and early 1960s, which can be read as precursors to the hyperrealistic mental landscapes that dominate Tiptree’s fiction.
“And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill’s Side” takes the pulp “sense of wonder” about space travel and pushes back against it with a portrayal of alien contact in a gritty dystopic future. Few prior stories manage to anticipate the complexities of such a situation. Much about this culture clash points to how fiction of the 1960s and 1970s, within the New Wave and outside of it, wanted to portray a more “real” reality. Tiptree’s story also shares thematic resonances with Samuel R. Delany’s “Aye, and Gomorrah,” which sharply interrogates other assumptions made by classic science fiction.