Meet Me at Infinity
James Tiptree, Jr., was one of the great SF writers, so important that the Tiptree Awards for SF that explores and expands gender roles were named for her. James Tiptree, Jr., was the pseudonym of Alice B. Sheldon, a psychologist and ex-CIA employee, who won many Hugo and Nebula Awards, and was nominated for many more. Her fiction burst into prominence in the late 1960s, and her passionate works left an indelible mark on generations of SF readers thereafter. Among her most famous works are the novels
Up the Walls of the World
and
Brightness Falls from the Air,
and her collections of stories, including
10,000 Light-Years from Home, Star Songs of an Old Primate, Warm Worlds and Otherwise, The Starry Rift,
and
Ciown of Stars.
The revelation of her true identity sent shock waves throughout the SF world in the late 1970s, for, by correspondence, Tiptree had been a passionate player in the controversies of the day, especially the turbulent growth of feminism in SF.
In 1987, when Tiptree and her husband became gravely ill, she killed him and herself. After her death, her literary estate was left in the care of Jeffrey D. Smith, who has assembled all of her published but uncollected work for the present volume.
Meet Me at Infinity
collects a small number of stories, including her earliest published piece from
The New Yorker
and the late novella
The Color of Neanderthal Eyes,
that never appeared in one of her books. But for many readers the most significant part will be the constellation of writings about herself that Sheldon/Tiptree published for the most part in fanzines. They include an account of a heart attack while vacationing in the Yucatan, comments on other writers, and meditations on death and suicide as well as other colorful bits and pieces that made up her engaging persona.
In an era when the figure of James Tiptree, Jr., has become something of an icon, this book promises to be the most rounded presentation yet of who she really was.
By James Tiptree, Jr., from Tom Doherty Associates
Brightness Falls from the Air
The Color of Neanderthal Eyes
Crown of Stars
The Girl Who Was Plugged In
Houston, Houston, Do You Read?
Meet Me at Infinity
The Starry Rift
MEET ME AT INFINITY
Copyright © 2000 by Jeffrey D. Smith
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Edited by David G. Hartwell
A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty
Associates, LLC.
Design by Lisa Pifher
The poem on page 284 is from “The Affinity,” in
The Contemplative Quarry by Anna Wickham,
copyright © 1915 by James and George Hepbrun
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Tiptree, James.
Meet me at infinity / James Tiptree, Jr.—1st ed. p. cm.
“A Tom Doherty Associates book.”
Contents: Meet me at infinity: uncollected fiction—Letters
from Yucatan and other points of the soul: uncollected non-
fiction.
ISBN 0-312-85874-4 (alk. paper)
I. Title.
PS3570.I66 A6 2000 813’.54—dc21
99-058425
First Edition: April 2000
Printed in the United States of America
0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Meet Me at Infinity: Uncollected Fiction
Please Don’t Play with the Time Machine, or, I Screwed 15,924 Back Issues of
Astounding
for the F.B.I.
Press Until the Bleeding Stops
Go from Me, I Am One of Those Who Pall (a parody of my style)
The Trouble Is Not in Your Set
Letters from Yucatan and Other Points of the Soul: Uncollected Nonfiction
If You Can’t Laugh at It, What Good Is It?
Looking Inside Squirmy Authors
Comment on “The Last Flight of Doctor
Am”
Afterword to “The Milk of Paradise”
Afterword to “Her Smoke Rose Up Forever”
Introduction to “The Night-blooming Saurian”
Going Gently Down, or, In Every Young Person There Is an Old Person Screaming to Get Out
More Travels, or, Heaven Is Northwest of You
With Tiptree Through the Great Sex Muddle
Quintana Roo: No Travelog This Trip
Review of
The Lathe of Heaven
by Ursula K. Le Guin
How to Have an Absolutely Hilarious Heart Attack, or, So You Want to Get Sick in the Third World
Everything but the Signature Is Me
Dzo’oc U Ma’an U Kinil—Incident on the Cancun Road, Yucatan
Biographical Sketch for
Contemporary Authors
Contemporary Authors Interview
Note on “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?”
How Do You Know You’re Reading Philip K. Dick?
A Woman Writing Science Fiction
Meet Me at Infinity
is, inevitably, a book
about
James Tiptree, Jr., more than it is a book
by
James Tiptree, Jr. All of the other Tiptree books consist of a lot of excellent science fiction, with maybe a brief note by the author or an introduction by a friend or admirer. The lack of frills was deliberate, the purity of the stories maintained. There were to be no explications of concepts, no chatty reminiscences of the sources of inspiration.
And yet, Tiptree
was
chatty. Tip loved to tell you things, things about the stories, about other writers’ stories, about culture and nature, about people, and art, and life.
So this time we’ll do it differently. This time we’ll pay more attention to the storyteller than to the story. It’s okay; we aren’t going against the author’s wishes and we won’t betray any confidences. This book was largely compiled by Tiptree for publication years ago, and is finally being realized now.
Alice Bradley Sheldon was born in 1915. Her autobiography appears later in this book, and is packed with interesting stories itself. What’s important to us, and what she felt was one of the most important things she ever did herself, is that in 1967 she wrote four short stories and sent them off to science fiction magazines. Unwilling to be published in SF magazines under her own name, she used a pseudonym. And under that pseudonym, for a period of time, she became one of the best science fiction writers in the world.
“James Tiptree” had a lot of friends in the science fiction field, but he couldn’t meet any of them. He could and did carry on voluminous correspondences with dozens of people, but he couldn’t talk to any of them on the telephone. His reclusiveness made him an object of curiosity, but his secret was too big for him to give away gracefully.
Eventually, his cover was blown, and Alice Sheldon stood in his place. Alii still wrote letters (she loved letters; notice how many characters write letters in her stories), but she could talk to people as well. She could even meet them, though she preferred not to. She could still write science fiction, still write
good
science fiction, but it was different. In the first phase of her SF career, when Tiptree was “alive,” she wrote the stories as if she were James Tiptree. Later, she wrote them without that filter. For one thing, she told me, she had tried to scrub out all traces of her natural sentimentality out of Tiptree’s fiction, but didn’t feel the need to after the secret was out. (For continuity’s sake she still used the Tiptree name.)
How much the disclosure itself affected her writing is impossible to say. Tiptree’s stories were changing, possibly due to their increasing length, even before his traumatic unmasking. In one of the letters used for “Everything but the Signature Is Me,” her first public statement to the SF field as Alice Sheldon, she wrote, “As to who or what will be writing next… I dunno. It may be that Tiptree is written out for a while. With each story I dug deeper and deeper into more emotional stuff, and some of it started to hurt pretty bad.” She said that if she could see her first novel,
Up the Walls of the World
(Berkley Putnam 1978), through publication and “let Tiptree rest a while, he may do that.” And about “Slow Music,” the story she was working on at the time (in
Out of the Everywhere,
Del Rey 1981): “It reads like a musical fade-out or coda to Tiptree’s group of work.” She even kills Tiptree off as a character in that story, an event which may or may not have been in the first draft.
The Tiptree persona existed for ten years, from 1967 to 1976. Alii Sheldon wrote for about another ten, from 1977 until her death in 1987. The Tiptree years were more productive, but not by a great degree. The first half of her career, though, was certainly the one for which she is best known. Her later essays in this collection mention her disappointment that the mysterious male writer was more highly regarded than the “ordinary” female one. Still, she wasn’t ignored. She had stories nominated for Hugo Awards (“Time-Sharing Angel,” “The Boy Who Waterskied to Forever,” “The Only Neat Thing to Do”) and for Nebula Awards (“Lirios: A Tale of the Quintana Roo” and “The Only Neat Thing to Do”). She won the World Fantasy Award for
Tales of the Quintana Roo,
but that was bestowed posthumously.
Alice Sheldon’s life ended May 19th, 1987, by her own hand. She had long been under a doctor’s care for depression, and had a history of suicidal threats stretching back to adolescence. She was married, though, and her feelings for her husband, and the difficult time he would have if she killed herself, kept her from pulling the trigger. When his health deteriorated to the point where she felt that there was no quality left to it, she shot him and then herself. She left several notes, mostly instructions to their lawyers, but also a suicide note—dated September 13, 1979, and kept until needed.
This collection spans Alice Sheldon’s writing career, from her first published story in 1946 to her first science fiction story in 1955 to her last long novella in 1986, and includes the letters and informal essays she wrote for publication. The fiction section contains mostly minor work, stories she passed over for her other collections but which are interesting in the context of her life and the development of her ideas; they seem more relevant to this book than they would have in others. The nonfic-tion section started coming together in April 1976, when Tiptree was still Tiptree, and a small press asked about the possibility of collecting her essays on the Mayas. (These essays had been appearing in my amateur magazines, which had print runs of three hundred or less, and we wanted to see them circulated more widely. My friendship with Tip grew out of my publishing these letters and essays, and developed to the point where she named me the literary trustee of her estate.) The project migrated from publisher to publisher, with Jeffrey Levin of Pendragon Press and Donald G. Keller and Jerry Kaufman of Serconia Press making contributions to its focus, before ending up at Tor Books under the stewardship of David G. Hartwell. By Alli’s death it looked a lot like it does here. She had given it the
Letters from Yucatan and Other Points of the Soul
title, and had even decided to include some of the short stories that ended up in the front section here. (“Press Until the Bleeding Stops” and “A Day Like Any Other” were in her version of the manuscript.) She had also made some slight revisions to some of the letters. She had intended to revise them more heavily closer to publication, and perhaps add some bridging material. Fortunately, they’re fine without it. Here, then, is the James Tiptree who peeked out from behind Post Office Box 315 in McLean, Virginia, to say hello, and the Alii Sheldon who could actually present herself in public—as she wanted herself presented.