This document originally appeared in the WisCon 20 Souvenir Book.
The James Tiptree Jr. Memorial Award is now in its fifth year. Thanks to the efforts of bakers and bake-sale-organizers, cookbook writers and t-shirt makers, quilt-makers and writers, the award that began as a joke is going strong.
To celebrate our fifth anniversary, Karen Fowler and I, with all the authority vested in us as Founding Mothers of the Award, decided that it was time to put together a list of stories and novels that might have won the Tiptree Award, back before the Tiptree Award existed. We colluded in this endeavor with Debbie Notkin, the illustrious chair of the first Tiptree Award jury.
So here's what we did. We contacted all the folks who had served on Tiptree juries over the years and we asked each person to nominate five works for a retrospective Tiptree Award. We got nominations-and along with the nominations we got complaints, questions, suggestions, and thoughtful letters.
Only five nominees?! Were we nuts?
"This is a difficult task," Pamela Sargent wrote. "This list could easily be a couple of pages long."
"You've asked me for five nominations for a Retrospective Tiptree Award," Gwyneth Jones wrote. "I don't know where to start."
When she sent along her list, Nicola Griffith wrote, "There are at least half a dozen more I'd like to see up there." They all were correct, of course, but our dutiful ex-jurors (even those who pointed out how unreasonable our request was) faithfully narrowed their selection to five.
Vonda McIntyre wrote, quite rightly, "This is kind of a no-brainer, isn't it? The first retrospective Tiptree should go to Uncle Tip. If you have to have a title, "The Women Men Don't See," but better for the body of work." Was James Tiptree eligible for the Retrospective Tiptree Award? That question hadn't occurred to us. Alice Sheldon did, of course, write the definitive Tiptree-Award-winning stories (and, while doing it, lived a Tiptree-Award-winning life). Ultimately, we decided that the existence of the award itself was a tribute to James Tiptree and that giving Alice Sheldon the retrospective award would be redundant.
People struggled to determine what criteria they should use in making their choice. "I started to think of books that had meant something to me when I first read them; books that challenged my assumptions, delighted me with their irreverence, made a difference in my young life. It really highlighted for me how much the award is of its time. "Maybe we shouldn't let people vote for things they weren't old enough to read when they were printed!" suggested Ellen Kushner.
Having given people one difficult task, we compiled the nominations to create a ballot. We decided to combine some nominations, grouping Joanna Russ's "When It Changed" with The Female Man, and grouping Suzy McKee Charnas's Walk to the End of the World with Motherlines. In both cases, the works seemed irrevocably joined.
We then sent our former jurors a ballot with an even more unreasonable demand. We asked them to choose three works from the list of nominees. It was very very difficult. We know that. With their ballots, people sent notes describing the reasons for their selection. Some people chose to vote for classics in the field, works that forever altered the way gender is used in science fiction. Other jurors chose works that stood out, in memory, as their strongest personal encounters with the field. As Gwyneth Jones wrote of her selection, "These are not the three books I think 'are the best' in a general way. They're my three closest encounters: the books that zapped me personally." Works by three authors clearly emerged at the top of the list: Motherlines and Walk to the End of the World by Suzy McKee Charnas; The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin; and "When It Changed" and The Female Man by Joanna Russ.
Many other works had substantial support among the jurors; there were many works that people wanted to select - if only we hadn't arbitrarily limited their choice to three. That list follows, annotated with comments from jurors. As you'll see it's an idiosyncratic list, reflecting the varied tastes of our jurors.
For me, this list has already served its purpose. There are books on it that I missed when they came out - and a few that I'd never heard of! For me, this is a list of future pleasures - books to seek out and appreciate. But I'd also like to note that this is not the final, complete, never-to-be changed list of what could have won a Tiptree Award. Like the award itself, the list may change over the years. Who knows? Five years (and hundreds of chocolate chip cookies) from now, we could torture another list of jurors with unreasonable requests.
--Pat Murphy