What a Day for Science Fiction
Yes, we readers of imaginative literature really hit the jackpot on this date. Two of the most original thinkers we have mark birthdays today.
Alice Sheldon was born on this date in 1915, but she's better known to the sf world as James Tiptree Jr. For a long time she kept her identity secret. Some suggest that Robert Silverberg withdrew from science fiction for a few years at least in part because he publicly insisted that Tiptree could not possibly be a woman.
In any event, her stories landed like a nuclear bomb. Her novels lack the same force, but there's nothing like "The Last Flight of Dr. Ain," "The Women Men Don't See," "Love Is the Plan, the Plan Is Death," "And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill's Side," "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?", "Your Faces, O My Sisters! Your Faces Filled of Light!" and half a dozen others. She wrote about scientists who murder the human race to save the Earth, about women who leave the planet with aliens they just met because it's got to be better than the men they know, about sex and murder and death and joy. There was a critic, I can't remember which one, who suggested that Tiptree cut every other author in existence in her ability to narrate huge, long, sustained action sequences, and that's certainly true, but to me above all it's the imagination of Tiptree that lies at the root of her staying power; just check out those titles. Then her husband developed Alzheimer's and she shot him and herself. Where is her like now?
Orson Scott Card, born on this date in 1951, is a very different animal. He's a good writer of short stories, about aliens who worship humans as gods because they die, about a man who saves a colony of humans from carnivorous aliens by amputating human body parts and cooking them, about a man who defeats a death sentence by dying hundreds of times. It's his novels that have brought him fame, though, especially two novel series informed by both his tremendous imagination and his Mormon faith.
He's won awards for the Speaker for the Dead series, starting with Ender's Game, the story of a young boy in training as a fighter pilot in Earth's war against a rapacious alien species. The Alvin Maker series, more fantastical, tells the tale of a messianic figure growing and learning in an America where magic works and several nations (one Puritanical, one an English colony, and several others) share space.
The Science Fiction Encyclopedia claims that Card's uniqueness comes from his concentration upon the past rather than the future, upon the efforts of his characters to find a way home rather than new worlds to conquer, and upon the family rather than upon individuals or states. I wouldn't presume to argue.
If you believe, as some do, that those who share a birthday or an astrological sign also share certain characteristics, consider this: In the works of both Tiptree and Card, there's an overlay of sadness that you don't find too often in imaginative literature. That's all to the good, if you ask me. Science fiction ought to include the whole of human life, or why was it invented?
In any case, happy birthday to Orson Scott Card in North Carolina, and James Tiptree Jr. wherever she is now.
Benshlomo says, Some days you just get lucky.
Alice Sheldon was born on this date in 1915, but she's better known to the sf world as James Tiptree Jr. For a long time she kept her identity secret. Some suggest that Robert Silverberg withdrew from science fiction for a few years at least in part because he publicly insisted that Tiptree could not possibly be a woman.
In any event, her stories landed like a nuclear bomb. Her novels lack the same force, but there's nothing like "The Last Flight of Dr. Ain," "The Women Men Don't See," "Love Is the Plan, the Plan Is Death," "And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill's Side," "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?", "Your Faces, O My Sisters! Your Faces Filled of Light!" and half a dozen others. She wrote about scientists who murder the human race to save the Earth, about women who leave the planet with aliens they just met because it's got to be better than the men they know, about sex and murder and death and joy. There was a critic, I can't remember which one, who suggested that Tiptree cut every other author in existence in her ability to narrate huge, long, sustained action sequences, and that's certainly true, but to me above all it's the imagination of Tiptree that lies at the root of her staying power; just check out those titles. Then her husband developed Alzheimer's and she shot him and herself. Where is her like now?
Orson Scott Card, born on this date in 1951, is a very different animal. He's a good writer of short stories, about aliens who worship humans as gods because they die, about a man who saves a colony of humans from carnivorous aliens by amputating human body parts and cooking them, about a man who defeats a death sentence by dying hundreds of times. It's his novels that have brought him fame, though, especially two novel series informed by both his tremendous imagination and his Mormon faith.
He's won awards for the Speaker for the Dead series, starting with Ender's Game, the story of a young boy in training as a fighter pilot in Earth's war against a rapacious alien species. The Alvin Maker series, more fantastical, tells the tale of a messianic figure growing and learning in an America where magic works and several nations (one Puritanical, one an English colony, and several others) share space.
The Science Fiction Encyclopedia claims that Card's uniqueness comes from his concentration upon the past rather than the future, upon the efforts of his characters to find a way home rather than new worlds to conquer, and upon the family rather than upon individuals or states. I wouldn't presume to argue.
If you believe, as some do, that those who share a birthday or an astrological sign also share certain characteristics, consider this: In the works of both Tiptree and Card, there's an overlay of sadness that you don't find too often in imaginative literature. That's all to the good, if you ask me. Science fiction ought to include the whole of human life, or why was it invented?
In any case, happy birthday to Orson Scott Card in North Carolina, and James Tiptree Jr. wherever she is now.
Benshlomo says, Some days you just get lucky.
posted by benshlomo at 9:51 AM
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