We always love the amazing t-shirts Freddie Baer designs for the Tiptree Award. This year we think she’s outdone herself.
T-shirts will be on sale at WisCon 40, coming up in just a little over a week! See you there?
Fran Wilde, host of the amazing long-running podcast “Cooking the Books,” interviews three motherboard members: Jeanne Gomoll, Ellen Klages, and Debbie Notkin in a podcast entitled “Twenty-Five Years of Moving the Conversation Forward.” As you can imagine, much hilarity (and some substance) ensues.
Cooking the Books showcases the intersection between SF&F and food. Fran is a lovely, generous, and amusing host, and the whole series is terrific. You can get it on iTunes or through the link above. But go to the link, because that’s where you’ll find the recipe for Space Babe’s blueberry crumble.
Fran is also the author of Updraft, and the forthcoming Cloudbound. You can support Fran’s hard work cooking the books on Patreon. And you can always support the Tiptree Award moving the conversation forward, through the “Donate” button at the bottom of this page.
We’re delighted to see that “The New Mother” by Eugene Fischer, co-winner of this year’s award, is also a finalist for the Theodore Sturgeon Award. Fischer’s story is on an excellent list which also includes “Emergence” by previous winner Gwyneth Jones and “The Game of Smash and Recovery” by previous winner Kelly Link (and lots of other great stuff). Special thanks to The Sturgeon Award and SF Signal for giving us a link to the text of of “The New Mother” (see above)!
The Sturgeon Award recognizes the best science fiction short story each year. It was established in 1987 by James Gunn and the heirs of Theodore Sturgeon, as an appropriate memorial to one of the great short-story writers in a field distinguished by its short fiction.
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If you ever doubted the Tiptree Award’s position that holding a bake sale can be a radical act, a feminist organization at the University of Queensland has underscored the point in a powerful (and apparently threatening) fashion.
Here’s Madeline Price, writing for The Guardian (warning: her piece contains some very ugly comments from the men who were angered by the idea):
If someone had told me, one week ago today, that a simple bake sale aiming to educate students about wage disparity in Australia would rile up a university campus to the point of death threats to the organisers, would reach media sources across Australia, the UK and US, and would result in the single most successful bake sale ever to be held on campus, I would have told them not to be silly; no one cares about a bake sale.
I also would have been wrong. …
The idea was that each baked good would only cost you the proportion of $1 that you earn comparative to men (or, if you identify as a man, all baked goods would cost you $1). For example, for a woman of colour in the legal profession, a baked good at the stall would only cost you 55 cents. …
This innocuous bake sale drew a vitriol of negative, derogatory and threatening online comments from people threatened by a discussion about equality and feminism; a discussion that we now, so obviously, need to be having in a public space.
As with all keyboard warriors, however, they never materialise in real life. The actual bake sale event was filled with positivity, support and enthusiasm for starting the conversation about wage disparity, the online behaviours of others, and, most importantly, global gender equality.
But while the keyboard warriors remained behind their screens, the threat to the safety and lives of women, the silencing of women in public spaces, and the wage disparity around the world are still very real issues that impact upon women and other marginalised groups in everyday life. These are the issues that the vitriol of online comments regarding the bake sale brought to light.
The Tiptree Award has generally been remarkably cushioned from this kind of hatred and threat. We extend our support and sympathy to all the people who have not been so lucky.
“The mission of the National Book Foundation and the National Book Awards is to celebrate the best of American literature, to expand its audience, and to enhance the cultural value of great writing in America.”
The Tiptree Award’s own true founding mother, Karen Joy Fowler, second from the left in the top row will be one of the five judges on the fiction panel (top row). Categories are fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and young people’s literature. All of the other judges are stellar, of course, but ones that stood out to me are Melissa Harris-Perry (judging nonfiction), Joy Harjo (judging poetry) and Ellen Oh, of We Need Diverse Books (judging young people’s literature).
Nominations are now open (they cost $135 per entry!) and will be open until May 16. Winners will be announced in November.
Go Karen!
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!
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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:
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.
About 150 people attended last weekend’s James Tiptree Jr. Symposium at the University of Oregon, celebrating the University’s acquisition of James Tiptree, Jr./Alice Sheldon’s papers, donated by Jeff and Ann Smith, as well as the centenary year of Alice Sheldon’s birth. The symposium was organized by Linda Long, Carol Stabile, Jenee Wilde, and many other people from the University of Oregon. We extend our heartiest thanks to all of them!
In attendance were both Tiptree Award founding mothers (Pat Murphy and Karen Joy Fowler), several Tiptree Award winners, including Suzy McKee Charnas, Molly Gloss, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Nisi Shawl, two special Tiptree Award winners (L. Timmel Duchamp and Julie Phillips) and three motherboard members in addition to the founding mothers (Jeanne Gomoll, Debbie Notkin, and Jeff Smith), as well as a host of other fascinating people. Jeff Smith’s report on the symposium is here.
The event began with a keynote speech by Julie Phillips, author of James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon, a definitive and fascinating account of Sheldon/Tiptree’s very complex life.
Julie spoke about Tiptree’s friendships-by-letter with Ursula K. Le Guin and Joanna Russ (both of whom also donated their papers to the University of Oregon collection). She read excerpts from letters, and spoke about the effect of the discovery that “Tiptree” was a woman on her close correspondents, and on the science fiction field. In distinction to the use of Internet pseudonyms for personal gain of various kinds, Julie said “Alice Bradley Sheldon used her pseudonym for good; she used it to figure out something about herself.”
Ursula Le Guin came to the podium to read her response to the letter Tiptree wrote her “confessing” that she was actually a woman.
The first day of the symposium also included several students from Professor Carol Stabile’s feminist science fiction class reading their selections from Tiptree’s letters, and an audiotape of Tiptree’s famous story, “The Women Men Don’t See.” Linda Long and Jenee Wilde, both of the University of Oregon Special Collections, led a tour of the exhibit available through February in the Knight Library. The Tiptree Award quilt could not be hung downstairs with the exhibit because of the size of the quilt and the historic status of the building (so no hooks can be installed), but it was beautifully on display on a table in the special collections room:
The Tiptree Award hosted a party on Friday night at a nearby hotel. All thanks to Margaret and Dale McBride, Leslie What, James Stegall and Gré, without whom we could not have had such a wonderful event.
The second day of the symposium featured a panel of science fiction editors (L. Timmel Duchamp of Aqueduct Press, Lisa Rogers and Gordon van Gelder of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Jacob Weisman of Tachyon Publications), followed by a panel of authors who knew Tiptree.
In the afternoon, Jeff Smith answered questions from students in Professor Stabile’s class and from the audience, Julie Phillips elaborated on her keynote and answered more questions, and we closed with a panel on the Tiptree Award itself.
When Joan asked how many people in the audience had been on a Tiptree jury, about half of us raised our hands. At the end of this panel, Nisi Shawl came down from the audience and she and Pat led us in a rousing chorus of the song from the year Catherynne M. Valente’s The Orphan’s Tales won the award.
A good time was had by all! And perhaps the most exciting thing is that the folks at University of Oregon are talking about making this an annual event, focusing next year on Joanna Russ! Start thinking about your trip to Eugene in late 2016. You won’t regret it.