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James Tiptree Jr


(Alice Hastings Bradley Sheldon)
USA flag (1915 - 1987)

Alice Hastings Bradley Sheldon wrote most of her fiction as James Tiptree--she was making a point about sexist assumptions and also keeping her US government employers from knowing her business. Most of her books are collections of short stories; Her Smoke Rose Up Forever is the best selection. Sheldon's best stories combine radical feminism with a tough-minded tragic view of life; even virtuous characters are exposed as unwitting beneficiaries of disgusting socio-economic systems. Even good men are complicit in women's oppression, as in her most famous stories 'The Women Men Don't See' and 'Houston, Houston, Do you Read ?' or in ecocide. Much of her work, even at its most tragic, has an attractively ironic tone which sometimes becomes straightforwardly comedy - it is important to stress that Tiptree's deep seriousness never becomes sombre or pompous. Her two novels Up the Walls of the World and Brightness Falls from the Air are both remarkable transfigurations of stock space opera material--the former deals with a vast destroying being, sympathetic aliens at risk of destruction by it and human telepaths trying to make contact across the gulf of stars. When both she and her husband became debilitatingly ill, she shot him and killed herself.
 

Genres: Science Fiction
 
Omnibus editions show
 
James Tiptree Jr recommends
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Cautionary Tales (1978)
Chelsea Quinn Yarbro
"Science fiction with fangs and claws... A rich book, no story like any other."

Anthologies containing stories by James Tiptree Jr
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The Big Book of Cyberpunk Vol. 1 (2023)
(Big Book of Cyberpunk, book 1)
edited by
Jared Shurin
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Sense of Wonder (2023)
A Century of Science Fiction
edited by
Leigh Ronald Grossman
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This Way to the End Times (2016)
Classic Tales of the Apocalypse
edited by
Robert Silverberg

More anthologies 


Awards
Nebula Awards Best Short Story nominee (1970) : The Last Flight of Doctor Ain
Hugo Best Short Story nominee (1973) : And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill's Side
Hugo Best Novellette nominee (1973) : Painwise
Nebula Awards Best Short Story nominee (1973) : And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill's Side
Hugo Best Novella winner (1974) : The Girl Who was Plugged in [short story]
Hugo Best Novellette nominee (1974) : Love is the Plan, the Plan is Death
Nebula Awards Best Novellette nominee (1974) : The Girl Who was Plugged in [short story]
Nebula Awards Best Short Story winner (1974) : Love is the Plan, the Plan is Death
Nebula Awards Best Novella nominee (1976) : A Momentary Taste of Being
Hugo Best Novella winner (1977) : Houston, Houston, Do You Read? [short story]
Nebula Awards Best Novella winner (1977) : Houston, Houston, Do You Read? [short story]
Hugo Best Short Story nominee (1978) : Time-Sharing Angel
Nebula Awards Best Novellette nominee (1982) : Lirios: A Tale of the Quintana Roo
Hugo Best Short Story nominee (1983) : The Boy Who Waterskied to Forever
Hugo Best Novella nominee (1986) : The Only Neat Thing to Do
Nebula Awards Best Novella nominee (1986) : The Only Neat Thing to Do
World Fantasy Best Collection nominee (1987) : Tales of the Quintana Roo


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