In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

sI NGUlAR I Ty AN d AlIce sHeldO N I was always just being me. Alice Sheldon In the 1920s, as she is growing up, Alice Sheldon is known as a loner, one of a kind. She remains a oner all her life. At six years of age, on an African trek with her parents, she walks or is ported some 1,000 miles in search of the mountain gorilla. At nine she becomes an avid reader of Weird Tales and other pulp science fiction . At sixteen, in the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC, she has her first art exhibit and sale—a nude for which she served as her own model. At nineteen she meets a man at a Christmas Eve party and four days later elopes to marry him. At twenty-six, divorced, she works as an art critic for the Chicago Sun. At thirty-one, in August 1942, she enlists in the WAAC, serves as a supply officer, gets transferred to the Pentagon to study photo intelligence, is assigned to the European theatre , meets and marries her second husband, Ting, a CIA man, seducing him by beating him in a game of blindfold chess. At thirty-two she and Ting buy and run a chicken hatchery in Toms River, New Jersey. At thirty-seven she moves with Ting to Washington, DC, and works for the CIA. At forty-one she enrolls at the American University, encouraged to pursue psychology by Rudolf Arnheim. At fifty-one, she earns a Ph.D. in perceptual psychology at George Washington University. At fifty-three, she places her first science fiction story with Analog. Even she could not have imagined such an unpredictable life-course. She was a oner but also a loner, gregarious yet alienated, adventurous yet shy as a night animal (as we have noted, one of her noms de plume was Raccoona). She said she submitted her first science fiction stories anonymously because “The one thing in the world I wanted was something I’d done solo, all by myself, unhelped” (Brown 1985), yet she hated the attention that she received when her cover was blown: “All my wonderful anonymity is gone; the reader is tied to the specific person ” (Contemporary Authors 1983, 445). At 65, still faithfully married to 106 AU T H ORI N G Ting, she confided in a letter to Joanna Russ that at heart, though not in deed, she was a lesbian.1 As we have noted, her last communication with the rest of the world was to announce her suicide yet plead to be left alone to accomplish it. In her fiction and elsewhere, she wrote often about singular beings, human and nonhuman, alienated from others yet finally in tune with themselves. Responding to the news that she had been identified as James Tiptree Jr., she wrote to Jeffrey D. Smith, the editor who had helped spread the discovery, about her secret reading of science fiction as a child during summers in the Wisconsin woods: “I’ll tell you one thing: You haven’t read fantasy or SF unless you have retired, with a single candle, to your lonely little cabin in the woods, far from the gaslights of the adult world and set your candle stub up in a brass basin and huddled under about sixteen quilts . . .” (Tiptree, 2000, 310). In a letter to the Saturday Review, responding to a man who had argued that men are naturally more creative than women, she wrote about men and women, “Rather than belaboring each other over the head to prove that we are the real lovers of humanity, let us just look at each other, plain and simply, as individuals” (Phillips 2006, 157). In “The Women Men Don’t See,” the short story of hers most people have read, and sadly sometimes the only work they have read, two women depart Earth with some extraterrestrials, choosing an unknown life as aliens with them rather than continue their life on Earth alienated by men and their “huge authoritarian organizations for doing unreal things.” In “The Milk of Paradise,” a more characteristic short story, Timor is the only human on a muddy alien world ironically named Paradise, where he is raised by ugly creatures called Crots; then he is returned to Earth, where he is repelled by everything human; finally he is taken back to Paradise, where he is received again by Crots, at first to his horror and then to his love. 1. “I like...

Share