Welcome to the Website of the James Tiptree, Jr. Literary Award CouncilWhat is the Tiptree Award? | Why the Name Tiptree? | What’s New “If you can’t change the world with chocolate chip cookies, how can you change the world?” — Pat Murphy
What is the Tiptree Award?In February of 1991 at WisCon (the world’s only feminist-oriented science fiction convention), award-winning SF author Pat Murphy announced the creation of the James Tiptree, Jr. Award, an annual literary prize for science fiction or fantasy that expands or explores our understanding of gender. (To read her speech go to PatMurphy.pdf.) Pat created the award in collaboration with author Karen Joy Fowler. The aim of the award is not to look for work that falls into some narrow definition of political correctness, but rather to seek out work that is thought-provoking, imaginative, and perhaps even infuriating. The Tiptree Award is intended to reward those women and men who are bold enough to contemplate shifts and changes in gender roles, a fundamental aspect of any society. Why the Name “Tiptree”?
The award is named for Alice B. Sheldon, who wrote under the pseudonym James Tiptree, Jr. By her impulsive choice of a masculine pen name, Sheldon helped break down the imaginary barrier between “women’s writing” and “men’s writing.” Her fine stories were eagerly accepted by publishers and won many awards in the field. Many years later, after she had written some other work under the female pen name of Raccoona Sheldon, it was discovered that she was female. The discovery led to a great deal of discussion of what aspects of writing, if any, are essentially gendered. The name “Tiptree” was selected to illustrate the complex role of gender in writing and reading.
What’s New?
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2009 Tiptree Award Winners Announced!The James Tiptree, Jr. Literary Award Council is pleased to announce that the 2009 Tiptree Award has two winners: Greer Gilman, Cloud and Ashes: Three Winter’s Tales, (Small Beer Press 2009) Fumi Yoshinaga, Ooku: The Inner Chambers, volumes 1 & 2 (VIZ Media 2009)
Greer Gilman’s book, Cloud and Ashes: Three Winter Tales, prompted much jury discussion on its way to winning the Tiptree. It is a slow read – a dense, poetic, impressionistic book, heavy with myth. Many of its images and elements are drawn from folk tales and ballads of the British Isles; patterns repeat, but also mutate in kaleidoscopic fashion and then mutate again. The language was especially difficult. Sometimes we felt we were floating through it; sometimes drowning. It is a paradoxical work. To enter the novel you must give up on understanding every word. You have to read the book on an instinctual level, yet the effect of the book is almost entirely intellectual. Power shifts about, much of it gender-based; time eats itself like a mobius strip. These are stories about Story in a world in which power seems to belong to the male but reality to the female. We on the jury admired Cloud and Ashes for its originality and found it a beautiful and highly memorable work.
We chose Fumi Yoshinaga’s Ooku, Volumes 1 and 2 as our Tiptree winner with some trepidation. No one on the jury has read much manga; no one is an expert in Japanese history. What we fell in love with was the detailed exploration of the world of these books — an alternate feudal Japan in which a plague has killed 3/4s of Japan’s young men. In Ooku, the shogun and daimyo are women and much of the story takes place among the men in the Shogun’s harem. The first volume (set in a later time period than the second) shows us a world in which men are assumed to be weak and sickly, yet women still use symbolic masculinity to maintain power. The second volume focuses on the period of transition. Through-out the two books, Yoshinaga explores the way the deep gendering of this society is both maintained and challenged by the alteration in ratios. The result is a fascinating, subtle, and nuanced speculation with gender at its center. HONOR LISTAlice Sola Kim, “Beautiful White Bodies” (online at Strange Horizons 2009.12.07-14) Vandana Singh, Distances (Aqueduct Press 2008) Caitlin R. Kiernan, “Galapagos” (in Eclipse 3 edited by Jonathan Strahan, Night Shade Books 2009) Jo Walton, Lifelode (NESFA Press 2009) Maureen F. McHugh, “Useless Things” in Eclipse 3 edited by Jonathan Strahan (Night Shade Books 2009) Paul Haines, “Wives” (in X6 edited by Keith Stevenson, coeur de lion 2009) SPECIAL HONORL. Timmel Duchamp, The Marq’ssan Cycle (Aqueduct Press 2005-8) More details about the 2009 award can be found here. |
