James Tiptree, Jr. by Julie Phillips

Author:Julie Phillips
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466889118
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

CHAPTER 26: FIRST CONTACT (1969)

There does seem to be a surprise when people just speak honestly. […] It always startles me because I can’t imagine what value non-communicating communication has. Of course you know that my tell-all is temporarily chopped at the one limit that leads directly to my mundane persona, but since I regard that persona as kind of an insignificant accident, it isn’t much of a limit. Anything real, just ask me—and jump back before the flood. I suspect most of us are just like that, why else are we in the word game? To communicate …

—JAMES TIPTREE, JR., TO JEFFREY D. SMITH

By March 1969, when “The Last Flight of Dr. Ain” appeared in Galaxy, Tiptree had been selling stories for over a year, and the close-knit world of science fiction writers and readers was starting to take notice. When “Ain” came out, Tip’s friend and later agent Virginia Kidd recalled, “everybody noticed that story and was impressed by it.” Damon Knight wrote asking Tiptree to submit to Orbit, his influential series of original anthologies. In an interview in the May issue of If, Lester del Rey singled out Tiptree as a new writer to watch.

Tiptree’s new colleagues were curious about him. Knight invited Tiptree to another of his projects, the Milford Science Fiction Writers’ Conference. In January, Harry Harrison suggested Tip come up to New York for a few days and socialize. “You can meet the writers, talk things up, go to a couple of parties, meet some people (editors) for lunch, get the feel and the swing and the feedback of your peer group.”

Alli let Tiptree decline on grounds of secret business.

N.Y. sounds great, if Ground Control will kindly press the right buttons. They may not. Did I mention that writing here is done in time filched from what are laughingly known as my legitimate responsibilities? (That’s why you keep getting mss typed at 3 AM.) No one here knows me as a writer, and for reasons I hope you won’t make too close a guess at for awhile, it’s got to stay that way.

But despite himself, Tiptree was getting more and more involved, not just with writing, but with the intense, gregarious, garrulous world of science fiction.

Science fiction is interactive. Writers (and their fans) meet at conventions, argue all day, drink together all night, and influence each other in a way unlike any other literature. They talk about ideas, stories, politics, and recipes. They work in and from a rich soup of letters, gossip, affairs, rivalries, and friendships. They draw from a common pool of images and imaginary settings, using spaceships, androids, and aliens to build the genre that Tiptree called a “towering, glittering mad lay cathedral.”

Science fiction is inclusive. It is read by boys with faces full of acne and brains full of cyberspace, girls with stringy hair and fierce imaginations, awkward people, brilliant people in search of like minds. Damon Knight, in his history of the 1930s fan and writer group the Futurians—a

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