The 2015 Tiptree Award winners, honor list, and long list have been selected. Our congratulations to Eugene Fischer and Pat Schmatz, this year’s winners!

Honor List
Long List

Eugene Fischer, “The New Mother” (Asimov’s Science Fiction, April/May 2015)

While single-gender worlds are not new in science fiction, this is a rare consideration of the start of such a transformation, by way of a sexually transmitted disease that renders the infected person’s gametes diploid. For men, the result is infertility. For women, the result is the capacity to reproduce asexually: spontaneous pregnancies (unless they take a hormonal contraceptive) of genetically identical clones. As the story guides readers through the initial outbreak via journalistic and personal lenses, a range of reactions is highlighted: legislative action, scientific study, religious outrage, and burgeoning panic. This is a timely story, given the current political climate in the United States (where the story is set) with increasingly invasive attempts to police bodies across gender lines.

Pat Schmatz, Lizard Radio (Candlewick, 2015)

Kivali gives voice to the frustration often felt by children and young adults who do not “fit” as either male or female. In this dystopian society, children are given gender tests at an early age and then trained to live as the gender they tested for. Aspects of this world, for example, post-decision gender training, speak of the lived experience of many trans people forced to earn their transition by acting as female/male as possible. The book also points out the pitfalls of a codified, binary, externally decided approach to transgender lives when there are always people who fall outside of these expectations. Some of the mysteries of this world remain unexplained to the reader just as they are unanswered for Kivali, who finds her independence when a sudden upheaval in her life leads to a choice of conforming or forging her own path.

Honor List

In addition to selecting the winner, each jury chooses a Tiptree Award Honor List. The Honor List is a strong part of the award’s identity and is used by many readers as a recommended reading list. We are especially delighted that this year’s Honor List includes graphic novels and a television show, as well as written fiction. Honor List items (in alphabetical order by the author’s or creator’s last name) are:

Susan Jane Bigelow, “Sarah’s Child” (Strange Horizons, 19 May 2014)

A story of getting to see what happened on the path not chosen and having the chance to evaluate whether the original choice was the right one. Sarah dreams of the child she cannot bear in her assigned-male-at-birth body and struggles with her deep sense of grief. In a parallel universe she’s able to breach, Sarah’s son has an alternate mother, a woman born with a womb, but without the strength to come out to her family. Sarah and June—two women with the same identity, albeit in different bodies—each learn from the other how to be a more courageous version of themselves.

Nino Cipri, “The Shape of My Name” (Tor.com, 4 March 2015)

This quiet story of trans identity is tender and beautifully written, but does not pull its punches in terms of the personal hypocrisies of the characters, the compromises they make, or the ways that cruelty and pain are tied to the riskiness of love (and time travel). The relationship between the viewpoint character and their mother, in particular, is beautifully (if painfully) nuanced.

Carola Dibbell, The Only Ones (Two Dollar Radio 2015)

Told from the point of view of a young woman supporting herself through medical experimentation, the novel is thoughtful and astute in the way it explores the nexus of social and economic power with technology, racism, and sexism. It has important things to say about the way women’s bodies are treated as resources by institutions that exploit them for economic and political gain, and the ways in which desperate and disempowered women are forced into dangerous collaborations with their oppressors.

Matt Fraction (writer) and Christian Ward (artist), ODY-C, Vol. 1: Off to Far Ithicaa (Image 2015)

It’s the aftermath of a galactic war and instead of Odysseus, we have Odyssia and her crew.  This is not the first time Homer’s Odyssey has been retold; the gods are still as meddlesome and trying as ever and the heroine’s journey home is still set to take years.  What compels readers to return is the combination of non-linear storytelling and arresting visuals that complement the gender-flipped characters and their struggles against cosmic forces greater than themselves.

Alex Marshall, A Crown for Cold Silver (Orbit 2015)

A rollicking epic adventure with an appealing older female main character who clearly has issues beyond just dealing with whomever is trying to kill her and an extended (and extensive) cast who slowly wind their way through this world to band together. It upends most of the usual gender tropes one would find in the sprawling fantasy category, with women as likely as men to be in any particular role, and sexuality not particularly defining of anything except who you’re attracted to.

Seanan McGuire, “Each to Each” (Lightspeed, June 2014, Women Destroy Science Fiction!)

A post-humanist analogy of weaponized femininity, where essentialist notions of gender are deployed by a patriarchal military structure looking for the perfect soldier in a particular niche. The unintended result is a women-centered subculture with the power and opportunity to strike out on their own, for those with the inclination and independence to trade some of the trappings of humanity for that freedom. It’s a fascinating, nuanced, and furious exploration of a range of ideas around women and beauty, the military, body modification, and loyalty.

A Merc Rustad, “How to Become a Robot in 12 Easy Steps” (Scigentasy, March 2014)

A poignant and wry account of Tesla’s experience of mental illness and body dysmorphia that manages to weave together their experiences of depression, neuroatypicality, asexuality, and their desire for (and to become themself) a robot. The light but genuinely touching and hopeful ending balances the emotional and mental struggles they live through on the way.

Ian Sales, All That Outer Space Allows (Whippleshield, 2015)

This novel postulates an alternate 1960s America where science fiction is written and read almost exclusively by women, even though the space race is still a male-dominated field. In addition to serving as a meditation of what this means to a woman science fiction writer who is married to an astronaut in that alternate world, the book also reminds us of the women writers or our past through the main character’s fictional correspondence with her real science fiction writer contemporaries.

Taneka Stotts and Sfé Monster, editors, beyond: the queer sci-fi and fantasy comics anthology (Beyond Press, 2015)

A wide-ranging and entertaining collection of comics with queer characters, in which readers meet intentional and found families, dragon slayers, adventurers of all stripes, and robots deciding who they are going to be.

Rebecca Sugar (creator and executive producer), Steven Universe (Cartoon Network, 2013-15)

In the context of children’s television, this show deals with gender in a much more open and mature way than is typical for the genre, and has some of the best writing of any cartoon. Steven is a boy who is kind, caring, and whose magical skill (which he has inherited from his late mother) is that of protection. In addition to showing men and women who do not necessarily conform to standard American gender ideals, the show also gives us an agender/non-binary character and a thoughtful exploration of growing up through Steven and his friend Connie.

Catherynne M. Valente, Radiance (Tor, 2015)

Set in an alternate solar system in which life thrives on every planet in the solar system, space travel is relatively easy, and patent laws have restricted most films to remain silent, Radiance tells the story of a filmmaker who vanished during principle photography of her last film. Reading like a documentary in novel form, the book is written as transcripts, scenes from the woman’s own films, and fictionalized accounts of her life as told by her father (both before and after her loss). Radiance explores a universe in which film did not abandon women along with title cards.

Long List

Some juries choose to compile a “long list” of other works they want people to be aware of. Here is this year’s (extra-long!) long list:

• Christopher Barzak, Liz Gorinsky, and Matthew Cheney, editors, Queers Destroy Fantasy! (Fantasy, December 2015)
• Elizabeth Bear, Karen Memory (Tor, 2015)
• Helena Bell, “When We Were Giants” (Lightspeed, November 2015)
• Lila Bowen, Wake of Vultures (Orbit, 2015)
• Becky Chambers, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet (Harper, 2015)
• Zen Cho, Sorcerer to the Crown (Ace, 2015)
• Kelly Sue DeConnick (writer) and Valentine De Landro (artist), Bitch Planet, Vol. 1: Extraordinary Machine (Image, 2015)
• E. Chris Garrison, Girl in the Gears (CreateSpace, 2015)
• Caren Gussoff, Three Songs for Roxy (Aqueduct, 2015)
• M.C.A. Hogarth, Thief of Songs (De La Torre, 2015)
• Nalo Hopkinson, Falling in Love with Hominids (Tachyon, 2015)
• N. K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season (Orbit, 2015)
• Alice Sola Kim, “A Residence for Friendless Ladies” (Fantasy & Science Fiction, March/April 2015)
• Alexandra Pierce and Alisa Krasnostein, editors, Letters to Tiptree (Twelfth Planet, 2015)
• Yoon Ha Lee, “The Contemporary Foxwife” (Clarkesworld, July 2014)
• Rose Lemberg, “Grandmother-nai-Leylit’s Cloth of Winds” (Beneath Ceaseless Skies, 11 June 2015)
• Kirsty Logan, The Gracekeepers (Crown 2015)
• Alex Dally MacFarlane, “Pocket Atlas of Planets” (Interfictions, November 2015)
• Carmen Maria Machado, “The Husband Stitch” (Granta, 27 October 2014)
• Kuzhali Manickavel, Things We Found During the Autopsy (Blaft, 2014)
• Jei D. Marcade, “Sounding the Fall” (Escape Pod, 20 July 2015)
• Daniel José Older, Shadowshaper (Levine 2015)
• Mark Pantoja, “The Body Corporate” (GigaNotoSaurus, 1 September 2015)
• Kazuki Sakuraba, Red Girls: The Legend of the Akakuchibas (Haikasoru 2015)
• B.R. Sanders, Ariah (Zharmae 2015)
• Anita Sarkeesian, Tropes vs. Women in Video Games (Feminist Frequency 2013-15)
• John Scalzi, Lock In (Tor 2015)
• Malcolm A. Schmitz, “The Captain’s Sphere” (Crossed Genres, December 2015)
• Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam, “Everything Beneath You” (Beneath Ceaseless Skies, 8 Jan 2015)
• Genevieve Valentine, “Given the Advantage of the Blade” (Lightspeed, August 2015)
• Wendy N. Wagner, Megan Arkenberg, and Robyn Lupo, editors, Queers Destroy Horror! (Nightmare, October 2015)

Jurors

Each year, a panel of five jurors selects the Tiptree Award winner. The 2015 jurors were Heather Whipple (chair), Jacqueline Gross, Alessa Hinlo, Keffy M. Kehrli, and N.A. Sulway.

We are delighted to announce that we have a 2016 jury! The five jury members are:

Jeanne Gomoll (chair)
Aimee Bahng
James Fox
Roxanne Samer
Deb Taber

As always, the motherboard is looking forward to learning what this group of five people gets excited about (and right now, we’re watching the 2015 jury share their excitement with each other as they get ready to make selections).

It’s a great time to recommend works for the 2016 jury to consider.

SigmaHQ on Twitter discovered Tiptree ketchup, to go along with the famous Tiptree marmalade.

It turns out there’s an entire @tiptree hashtag on Twitter, unrelated to us, with all kinds of fun items, so check them out or stay tuned here.

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In keeping with our mission of making trouble, the folks at the Worlds Without End blog had to redesign their structure to include us:

The biggest hurdle was to update the site to accept short fiction — where before we only had full length books — because the Tiptree is a mix of novels and short fiction in the same award. After that came a lot of data entry to get all the books, especially the new short fiction, and dozens of new authors into the site — a task taken up by our Uber User members so three cheers for them!

As much as we like causing trouble, we are sorry when our friends have to do it. And having just done all that database work ourselves to get this site up, we know how much work it is! Thanks, WWE folks.

Worlds Without End is an awesome site, with all kinds of resources and suggestions. Take a look at their “Roll Your Own Reading Challenge.”

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And, finally, you can buy the awesome Letters to Tiptree e-book for ONE DOLLAR!

This volume, edited by Alexandra Pierce and Alisa Krasnostein, includes letters from at least six award winners and one motherboard member. And so many other great contributions! A paperback print version is available here.

The awesome folks at the University of Oregon took videos of the entire Tiptree symposium last month, and they’re now all available for your viewing pleasure.

Our founding mother Pat Murphy says:

I had an amazing time at last month’s James Tiptree Symposium at the University of Oregon. I have never been to a conference that left me so moved and so inspired. For me, the symposium was a reminder of all the reasons that Karen [Joy Fowler] and I started the Tiptree Award back in 1991.

• Welcoming remarks and Julie Phillips’s keynote speech. Julie (pictured above) wrote James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon.
• Excerpts from Tiptree’s correspondence with Ursula K. Le Guin and Joanna Russ; radio play of Tiptree’s story “The Women Men Don’t See”
• Panel on publishing, with Jacob Weisman (Tachyon Publications), L. Timmel Duchamp (Aqueduct Press) and Gordon van Gelder and Lisa Rogers (Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction)
• Ursula K. Le Guin, Suzy McKee Charnas, and David Gerrold on Tiptree, moderated by Karen Joy Fowler
• Jeff Smith discusses the Tiptree papers
• Audio recording of Tiptree/Sheldon making literary notes and reviewing Heinlein’s I Will Fear No Evil
• Award motherboard members and jurors on Tiptree and the Award, with Jeanne Gomoll, Pat Murphy, Heather Whipple, and Margaret McBride, moderated by Joan Haran.

Check out the videos; they’re the next best thing to having been there! And please consider donating to support our continuing work.

If you’d rather not use PayPal, you can contact us or send us an email.
 

This website has been literally years in the making. The challenge of getting every winner, honor list and long list work into a comprehensive, well-organized database was the major hurdle, and there were several other challenges. We could never have done it without the amazing Frances d’Ath, whom we found through an ad we placed on Geek Feminism. Aside from all of her paid work, she contributed a great deal of volunteer time, particularly in populating the database. If you are looking for a technically skilled, artistically inclined webmistress who will be patient with your every whim, go to Frances.

Things to notice:

• Recommendations are now open for the 2016 awards! Feel free to recommend early and often. Recommending your own work is absolutely fine.
• The awards database has a separate page for each work, and is fully searchable. Database search is easily reached from the link in this paragraph, or the permanent link in the upper right-hand corner of the site.
• The store is not fully e-commerce compatible, but everything (anthologies! cookbooks! temporary tattoos! more!) can be purchased through Paypal or by check.
• Our logo and branding, including spacebabe, are all designed by the irreplaceable Jeanne Gomoll, Motherboard member and force for good. The original spacebabe design comes from Alex Toth.
• Please subscribe to our mailing list for occasional updates.
• Your donations and/or volunteer time make the award better.
• New fellowship applications will open sometime this year. Please check out our 2015 fellowship winners, of whom we are extremely proud.
• Of course, this year’s award winners and honor list will be announced in late March or early April.
• Videos from December’s Tiptree Symposium are available for viewing. The first one is here, with links to the others (there are seven altogether).

Julie Gomoll provided invaluable testing and design help.

All websites are works in progress. If you have suggestions or comments, or you find problems, email us.

Ah, dear friends. This is a hard blog to post, but….

After twenty years of having the honor and pleasure of being the emcee for the Tiptree Auction at Wiscon, I am retiring.

I’m sad, but it’s the right decision. I am no longer a spry young thing. Young at heart, always, but the body is different now, and less able to caper and cavort for hours at a time. Plus, I injured my back in 2014, which has limited my mobility and flexibility, not to mention the ease of traveling. Add to that a general WisConian sense of transition, transformation, and change — and it’s time.

It feels like the end of an era. But what an era it was.

In 1994, on the weekend of my 40th birthday, I was in Worcester, Massachusetts for Readercon, the guest of my friend, Pat Murphy. Ursula LeGuin was the Guest of Honor, and Nicola Griffith was the winner of the Tiptree Award. I knew nothing much about all that, just that the prize was given by an organization that Pat had founded.

One of the committee members in charge of the evening’s banquet and awards ceremony told Pat that some generous people had donated a few items — t-shirts, a handful of books — to benefit the Award, and asked if Pat was willing to auction them off.

Pat was already emceeing the awards and interviewing Ursula, so she said, “No, but I bet my friend Ellen will do it.”

“Sure,” I said. What the heck? It sounded like fun.

And so it was that, at the end of a very long evening, I got up on stage in a hotel ballroom for an impromptu performance, convincing an audience to buy random objects for startling sums of money. Forty-five minutes later, the Tiptree coffers had a thousand dollars, and I was suddenly, accidentally, notorious.

A man asked Spike, “Who is she?”

A total stranger came up to me. “Where else in Worcester are you performing?”

It was a heady experience.

In 1995, I came to Wiscon for the first time. More generous people had donated items, and I did another auction during a Friday afternoon programming slot. It was small, but the Tiptree people were happy, and the audience seemed to have a good time.

The next year, the audience was a little larger. More stuff was donated. The Tiptree Auction was becoming a Thing, and I found myself, a newbie to Wiscon, an odd sort of celebrity.

Stuff kept happening. I joined the Tiptree Motherboard, the organization
thrived with the support of the community, and the auction and I somehow became an Institution.

In the beginning, I felt like my class-clown, childhood self was finally vindicated. Every May, I got to get up on stage — with a microphone — in front of a huge audience — and make people laugh. I also got to spend time on eBay and at garage sales, looking for items that would tickle the Madison fancy. Old space toys, bottles of Lysol, copies of Alice in Elephantland. I spent June through April trying to find things to delight you.

Which is cool enough. But somehow, it just kept getting better. You all started playing right back. I’ll let you in on the secret to the auction’s success: the audience is the real star.

When it works, it’s an energy exchange. I say something funny — you laugh. That makes me feel good, and relaxed, and funnier, and you laugh more and it grows and grows. After a while, you didn’t come just to watch, but to actively participate in the fun.

I don’t know any better way to build community than by shared laughter.

Backed by a shared mythology.

Space Babe.

She started out as email shorthand for one of the designs that Jeanne Gomoll and I were considering for a temporary tattoo. Another little fundraiser. The female space pirate with a blasting ray-gun was just “the space babe.”

She became so much more.

Growing up as science-fiction readers and proto-feminists, those of us of a certain age had to piggyback our imaginations onto whatever the men who controlled popular culture doled out to us. But from the get-go, Space Babe was ours.

I ran with her, shamelessly, and with a huge grin on my face. I made decades-old souvenirs of a popular culture icon that had not actually existed. A back-story with no narrative, just imaginary collectibles. If I leave behind a legacy from my auction years, I hope it’s her. I found that I love making art as much as I love performing.

See, my Dad was a painter, and a photographer, and a craftsman. And when I was a kid, I kept overhearing my mother say to her friends, “Oh, the girls all take after me, I’m afraid. Jack is the only artist in the family.” I cringed, hearing that, because I liked making things. But I knew — because I was told — that I wasn’t very good at it. I couldn’t draw — still can’t — and my art projects in school were judged as colorful, but inferior, lumps. Never the ones picked to be displayed on the bulletin board.

The first time I dared to make something for the auction, I was terrified no one would want it. But you did. You gave me permission to make art. And those are some of my favorite memories — being down in my basement for hours at a time, messing about with paints and glue (and Photoshop), turning up in Madison with boxes of things that I made myself, and that amused other people.

My mother is long dead, so she’ll never know that today my art is in private collections in Vienna and London and New York. But I do. And I thank you for opening a part of me that I hadn’t even let myself dream might exist.

Performer, artist, author. I would be none of these today without your support. I have loved the applause, the acclaim, the “celebrity, ” and am forever grateful for how that contributed to my recognition as a writer, especially early in my career.

Like most people, I have many personas. The auctioneer is loud, fearless, funny. The words that come out of my mouth on stage are spontaneous, stream-of-thought, in-the-moment, and ephemeral. Your acceptance of her gave me the courage to allow a much smaller, quieter voice to emerge. My writing is planned and thoughtful. The words you see in print are honed and carefully chosen.

So thank you for allowing me the space for both voices to be heard. For reading my fiction, and for applauding when I got up on stage and put on my chicken suit or shaved my head or did The Happy Dance.. I don’t know any other performer who has gotten the chance — even once — to and do a three-hour, one-woman show.

Well, sort of. It has never really been a one-woman show at all. Although I’ve been the public face of the auction, I’ve always have had a team behind me doing the hard work — sorting, preparation, and logistics. And other folks collecting the money and doing the math.

Jeanne Gomoll — a national treasure — was, for a long time, the person accepting donations, setting up the display of items, and making sure the trains ran on time. Scott Custis hauled boxes down from their attic every year. Jim Hudson, a mensch if there ever was one, handled the accounting, a most important part of any fundraiser. In recent years, Nevenah Smith streamlined the process and added her own flair to the event.

It’s been twenty years. There are dozens, maybe hundreds, of people who have supported the auction, the Tiptree Award, and/or Wiscon whose hard work, technical expertise, and enthusiasm made me look good up there.

To them, and to all of you — I enjoyed every minute.

Thanks for a great run.

— Ellen

PS-1: Fundraising for the Tiptree Award will go on. We will continue to offer you choice items in return for your support.. There will be future auctions, some live, perhaps some online. I may even participate in them, but not as a solo act.

PS-2: The auction was one of the centers of my life for a very long time. But because each of them was one long improvisation, happening as fast as I could talk, I honestly don’t remember much about individual moments. I’m hoping that you do, and that you’ll use the Comments to share your memories with me.

Founding mother Karen Joy Fowler won a World Fantasy Award for Best Collection for What I Didn’t See and Other Stories from Small Beer Press. The title story is about James Tiptree (Alice Sheldon)’s mother and its title is a reference to Tiptree’s famous story “The Women Men Don’t See.”

We’re on Twitter (@JamesTiptree).

Follow @TiptreeAward

In August,this year’s Tiptree jury chair, Lynne M. Thomas and her co-editor Tara O’Shea won the Hugo Award for Best Related Work for their anthology Chicks Dig Time Lords: A Celebration of Dr. Who by the Women Who Love it