Her Smoke Rose Up Forever
Is there any hope for us?

For how many of us, me in my way, you in yours, are not our pens the weapons with which we can do something-a tiny something-about wrongs? Even if only to name them?

And "name them" she did: from behind the facade of a Virginia post office box and under a pseudonym swiped from a jar of marmalade, Alice B. Sheldon wrote a group of stories that remain among the finest achievements of modern science fiction. At first distinguished primarily by an unremitting manic energy, Sheldon's work soon began to embody the intense and tragic vision of a thoughtful humanist. The destruction of the natural environment, the enigma of human sexuality, the insidious overpopulation of the species, the feverish hyper-intensity of communication, the cultivation of technology too terrible for human control—such were the themes through which Alice Sheldon explored the apocalypse and beyond.

Here are such classic SF stories as the Hugo Award-winning "Girl Who Was Plugged In," in which a social outcast relinquishes her humanity to a remote-control manikin; the Nebula Award-winning "Love Is the Plan the Plan Is Death," in which an exposition of alien existence becomes a parable of physiological determinism; and the multiaward-winning "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?" in which a futuristic feminist Utopia renders male aggression superfluous. Central to the Tiptree oeuvre is the magnificent "On the Last Afternoon," in which a dying Earthman must make an anguished choice between social responsibilities toward his fellow human beings and his own desire for a personal immortality among the stars. In the end, Sheldon's tortured protagonist fails either to save his race or to redeem himself; through his pointless death, he becomes a classic paradigm for the existential plight of modern man, torn between tyrannic biological drives while striving to transcend his own humanity.
American Science fiction, Fiction, general, Fiction, science fiction, general, Science fiction, american, American fiction--women authors
James Tiptree, Jr.
Alice Bradley Sheldon (August 24, 1915 - May 1987), aka James Tiptree, Jr., was an American science fiction writer. She was born in Chicago, Illinois, the daughter of Herbert Bradley, a lawyer, African explorer, and naturalist, and Mary Hastings Bradley, a prolific writer.  As a child, she travelled the world with her parents, including an African safari in 1921-22.  Initially, she worked as a graphic artist and a painter.  In 1934 she married William Davey, and they divorced in 1941.  Also in 1941, she became an art critic for the Chicago Sun, but she left that position in 1942 to join the U.S. Army Air Forces photo-intelligence group.  In 1945 she married her second husband, Huntington D. Sheldon, and became Alice Sheldon.  In 1946 she was discharged from the Army, and she and her husband started a business.  Her first published story, "The Lucky Ones," appeared in The New Yorker in November of 1946

In 1952 she joined the C.I.A. as an agent in the Near East.  She resigned in 1955 to enrol in American University.  She earned her B.A. in 1959, then her doctorate in Experimental Psychology from George Washington University in 1967.  She began writing science fiction using the pseudonym "James Tiptree Jr."  Although her true identity became known in 1977, she continued using the Tiptree pseudonym name for another decade.  In May of 1987, at age 71, she took the life of her 84-year-old husband and then took her own.

Over the course of her career she wrote almost one hundred short stories and several novels.  She received two Hugo Awards: 1974 Best Novella for "The Girl Who Was Plugged In", and 1977 Best Novella for "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?"  She received three Nebula Awards: 1973 Short Story for "Love Is the Plan the Plan Is Death," 1976 Novella for "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?" and 1977 Novelette for "The Screwfly Solution" (published under her other pseudonym, Raccoona Sheldon).  She also received the World Fantasy Award in 1987 for the collection Tales of the Quintana Roo.