Meet Me at Infinity: The Uncollected Tiptree, Fiction and Non-fiction. James Tiptree, Jr. 2000.
Forgive me for paraphrasing one of Tiptree’s own short story titles. That story, one of my favorites of hers, is not in this collection. I can’t say that any of the fiction that is included here should rank with her best work - you can tell why it hadn’t been collected previously. But I think reading this volume - both the fiction and the non-fiction - gave me a better understanding of who Tiptree/Sheldon was than a biography of her could have.
In the fiction, you can see all of the elements that made Tiptree great: the ambivalence around gender and gender performance, the fascination with weird alien sex (“Trey of Hearts” is essentially, and hilariously, soft-core pornography), the hope in space travel and the despair at what we’re all making of earth. None of these stories, again, are earth-shaking, though they’re all solid. They feel like messages from a secret club, in a way - if you’re already familiar with Tiptree’s best work, reading these stories makes you think “yes, that’s her.” It’s not a word I would usually associate with her writing, but there’s a certain kind of coziness in that. It’s a comfortable group of pieces.
It’s the non-fiction that’s revelatory, and that section of this collection makes it essential for Tiptree admirers - her fiction can be placed in the context of her life and her life’s concerns. Alice Sheldon was a fascinating, complex, sad woman. She was a veteran, one who saw the very worst of WWII’s aftermath and particularly its effects on women and girls. She was clearly - though maybe she wouldn’t have used this word - traumatized by the suffering she witnessed. She was a prickly, lonely person, who had some difficulty making friends as herself and adopted the Tiptree persona at least partly as a way to forge connections to others. She was devastated when she lost her pseudonymity, all the more so because publishers, once they knew the gimmick, weren’t as interested in work by Alice Sheldon as they were in work by James Tiptree, Jr.
She was a devoted friend, despite deceiving some of her friends as to her identity, and she was heartbreakingly grateful for friendship when it was given. She was clearly ambivalent about her gender, to the point where one has to wonder what choices she might have made if more options had been known to her. Even using the pronoun “she” to refer to Sheldon feels a little wrong, though it’s the one she claimed in her personal life, for the most part, and absent some kind of gender smoking gun I don’t feel I have the right to bestow another on her. Tiptree was more than a pseudonym - he was a set of clothes Alice liked to occasionally wear, and she hated losing him.
Alice was a Star Trek fan, and another poignant aspect of this collection is realizing that despite the darkness of most of her work, she had so much faith in the power of science fiction to illuminate or transform, and she saw Trek as a beautiful future that might really be achievable. She found happiness in that world, and wanted so much to write in it herself. She was a very sad person, finally, who had a terrible death.
Tiptree is one of my favorite genre writers; the fiction in this book wouldn’t mean much if you don’t already love Tiptree’s other work. But even if you don’t, getting to know Alice Sheldon is worth it. She was worth a lot.