Reading about Gender

I have always appreciated the existence of the Tiptree award, whose presence (in my opinion) acknowledges the vast power of speculative fiction to examine not just the implications of hard science, full of quarks and protons and string theory, but what are traditionally known as the "softer" sciences, such as anthropolgy.

The Tiptree award is named for James Tiptree Jr. aka Alice Sheldon, a writer who presented themself as male to correspondants and in the SF world for years before being "outed". One of the Nebula nominees this year is Julie Phillips' excellent biography, and recognizes science fiction and fantasy works that expand or explore our ideas about gender.

The reading featured writers whose work appears in one or more of the award anthologies (the one being released right now is the third), and it was a fine line-up. Ruff led off with an excerpt from his upcoming novel BAD MONKEYS and DuChamp followed with an excerpt from TSUNAMI, the third book in her series, the Marq'ssan cycle (which I highly recommend and will talk about in another post). Gunn broke the pace a bit by reading a piece of Star Trek slash fiction in which Kirk and Spock are having a child, followed by Dalkey reading from her Tiptree piece, "Lady of the Ice Garden", which appeared in the first anthology, and McIntyre reading an excerpt from the wonderful "Little Faces", also up for a Nebula award this year.

Afterwards there was a lively discussion about gender and science fiction, which ranged from 13th century French literature to contemporary transexuality. I would have gone to see any of these readers solo -- having all of them reading together was awesome.