James Tiptree, Jr.: The double life of Alice B. Sheldon

Julie Phillips biography of James Tiptree, Jr./Alice B. Sheldon is one of the best biographies I've read. (For those who don't know, Tiptree was an award winning author of science fiction in the 1960s & 70s. In 1976 her cover was blown, and people discovered she was Alice B. Sheldon, a woman in her fifties who had worked in military intelligence, the CIA, and as an experimental psychologist.)

Phillips manages, on the one hand, to describe the external facts of Sheldon's life as well as providing a compassionate portrait of Sheldon's inner life and struggles.

And for me, it's the juxtaposition of her exterior life, that which others see, with her interior life, what she thinks, dreams, and hopes that makes this woman fascinating. On the outside, it looks like a pretty good life. But like many of us, Alice is often more focused on the things she wishes were better, or different, particularly her role as a woman and a writer. And I can identify with many of them.

New Releases on the Horizon

Here are some books to be published later this year (or possibly into 2017) that I'm interested in. And they fit in well with this week's top ten Tuesday theme as well. Check out the "Speculative Fiction in Translation" post at Tor.com if you're interested in more translated science/speculative fiction titles.




 Everfair by Nisi Shaw is a steampunk alternate history of the Congo. Thanks to Jordan at Forever Lost in Literature for highlighting this on her blog this week.





Invisible Planets is a collection of science fiction stories by Chinese authors translated by Ken Liu. Due out in November 2016.






 Iraq + 100 is a collection of speculative fiction stories by Iraqi authors, imaging what Iraq will be like in 2103, edited by Hassan Blasim.






Memoirs of a Polar Bear by Yoko Tawada, tranlsated by Susan Bernofsky, is about a family of writers and performers in East Germany.






Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi & winner of the 2014 prize for Arabic fiction. Jonathan Wright is translating it into English. (Arabic cover shown.) Hadi al-Attag roams the city of Baghdad, collecting the parts of people who have been dismembered in explosions & sewing them into one body. When a displaced soul enters the body, it comes to life and sets about taking revenge on those who killed its parts.





Spanish Women of Wonder is a collection of stories written in Spanish and translated into English by Sue Burke. This was a kickstarter project, and I'm sure these authors will be new to me. (No cover available.)

2018

And finally, though this isn't a translation, it's one I'm really excited about: Ursula LeGuin's Earthsea novels are being published in an omnibus edition with illustrations by Charles Vess!

The devil's alphabet by Daryl Gregory

An intriguing story of the ongoing struggles of a small town that became victim to a virus which killed a third of its people, but didn't spread outside the village. Except for a few “skips” like Paxton, the protagonist, who don’t get sick, the inhabitants become:

• Argos: abnormally tall, angular, and strong, and they cannot reproduce (Deke & his wife)
• Betas:  hairless and dark; Beta women women reproduce parthenogenically (JoLynn and her daughters)
• Charlies: corpulent and in late middle age the men start secreting an addictive hallucinogenic substance through their skin. (Paxton’s father, Reverend Martin is a Charlie, as is Rhonda, the mayor of Switchcreek, TN)

Paxton returns home for the funeral of his childhood friend JoLynn and with his friend Deke seeks to find out whether JoLynn really committed suicide. And to make things more complicated, the same virus breaks out in a city in Ecuador.