James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life Of Alice B. Sheldon

Author: Julie Phillips

In the mid-60s, sf editors started to receive stories from a new writer none of them had heard of before, James Tiptree, Jr. Right from the start they were good stories, within a year or two they were excellent stories, and before long they were winning awards all over the place. But the author remained a mystery. Nobody met Tiptree, nobody spoke to him on the phone, the postal address was a PO Box in Langley, Virginia, which led to the rumour that Tiptree was in the CIA. But nobody knew. The stories said extraordinary things about sex and love and the nature of women, so someone said Tiptree was a woman, but Robert Silverberg declared the stories were obviously masculine. Another writer appeared, Raccoona Sheldon, not as good as Tiptree, but clearly Tiptree-esque. Then someone began to investigate, and discovered that Tiptree (and Raccoona) was really Alice B. Sheldon, daughter of a 1930s writer, who worked in photo-analysis in the war and studied psychology. After this, Tiptree continued to write, but the stories were never quite as good, and in 1987, seriously ill herself, she killed her invalid husband and committed suicide. It's an extraordinary life story, and Julie Phillips's account is quite simply one of the best and most gripping literary biographies you are ever likely to read. We are starting to get biographies of sf writers (there'll be another one on this list); there is, for instance, an interesting biography of the Australian writer George Turner (George Turner: A Life by Judith Raphael Buckrich), a rather poor one of Eric Frank Russell (Into Your Tent by John L. Ingham), and a recent two-volume biography of Robert Heinlein that has been severely criticised (Robert A. Heinlein by William Patterson), but frankly none of them are a match for this book.