A woman called Alice

My family are apolitical in the way that really means conservative, (c- size may vary). Either way there was never much talk of politics at home. I learnt it all from books, ploughing through the contents of the local lending library like an sf obsessed Pacman.

It began with the classics, Wyndham, Asimov, Heinlein. Heady stuff but containing little to contradict the Telegraph editorials back at home. That changed when the New Wave began to arrive on the shelves. A decade late but in perfect time for adolescence and by the late seventies I'd graduated to feminist writers. Those women were like family. Ursula K. LeGuin the matriach I never knew (Granny, by all accounts was one, but she died when I was five), Joanna Russ the cool aunt, irreproachably radical chic. My other aunt was fiercer and stranger, James Tiptree Jnr nee Alice Sheldon.

It's come as a shock this week to find out that she died. Nearly twenty years ago and not peaceably. Too late to mourn but I dug out an old copy of Star Songs of an Old Primate to try and remember.

Your haploid heart

And so on and so on and so on

A momentary taste of being

The titles are so evocative. Three stories about biology and destiny. The first is an early version of the idea memorable mostly for the description of the haploid Flenni, living gametes, pure and tragically ephemeral distillations of male or femaleness. The third expands on this concept at greater length than it can really sustain and the underlying twist is better expressed in the second story where the questing instinct is divorced from reproduction but no less intense. Times were different then. Film makers still made Westerns, Gene Roddenberry's wagon train to the stars was in its first series and the Space Race hadn't quite been run. It must have seemed a fundamental drive, the need to explore new territories. Before explorers became bored aristocrats never further than a phone call from home.

Houston, Houston do you read?

An all-the-men-die post-apocalypse story. The first one of these I ever read was John Wyndham's Consider her ways in which the protagonist wakes up in an all female world run like an ant colony (subtext, women lack the necessary spark to run a human society without men). This story made me angry but my 12 year old self lacked the debating skill to dismiss the premise.

The Tiptree story felt something like the comeback I wish I'd been able to make. Instead of the POV character being a woman imagined by a man horrified at the idea of life without himself, her protagonist is a man slowly realising how alien he is in this new world and how irrelevant. It's a bleak view of things and in many ways no less biologically determinist than Wyndham's story but there's an air of impersonal conviction to the whole thing that compels.

According to the obituaries Alice Sheldon took the nom de plume Tiptree because,

I was tired of always being the first woman in some damn profession.

The feeling of being the irrelevant alien in the room was something I suspect she knew all too well.


midnightsjane's stirring post reminds me that today is International Woman's Day. It's kind of appropriate.