Only Connect has long wished to write about James Tiptree, Jr (James who, I hear you ask) and now that an award-winning biography of the author is out, there is more reason to do so. Those who follow science-fiction seriously will know that Tiptree was one of the brightest stars of the 70s SF (science fiction) firmament, choosing to work more with short stories than the novel. Tiptree won the Nebula in 1973 and the Hugo in 1974, the two most coveted awards in SF. But he did not turn up in person to take them. And thereby hangs a tale.

For Tiptree was not Tiptree, and James was not James. James Tiptree, Jr was in fact Alice Bradley Sheldon (a childhood picture right), a CIA agent and a former soldier in the US Army. This double identity was known only to her and her husband for over a decade, till an enthusiastic fan tracked her down in the late 70s. By then, she was regarded as one of the major writers of American SF, but no one — not even peers like Ursula Le Guin, with whom she corresponded — had any notion that she was a woman.

Alice chose the name Tiptree from a jam label in a supermarket, and thought it was suitably male: “A male name seemed like good camouflage… I’ve had too many experiences in my life of being the first woman in some damned occupation,” she would later say. Her style of writing led her readers to automatically assume that she was a man (this raises all kinds of interesting and uncomfortable questions about gender and writing, but we’ll leave them for the classroom). Most of her fans knew that Tiptree was a pseudonym, but they suspected the likes of the reclusive J.D. Salinger, or even Henry Kissinger.

Being an ex-CIA operative, it was not difficult for Alice to create a new identity and sustain it undetected. In this day and age of the Internet and cyber-identities, this is literally child’s play but one can only marvel at the ingenuity which Alice kept her real and literary selves apart. In fact, once her identity was revealed, her output fell off noticeably. “Now,” Sheldon wrote in 1986, “I was just another woman, with my own tale of woes. No magic.”

And as if this were not enough, Alice spent a childhood full of wonderful adventures. She travelled to Africa with her parents at the age of six, and was called the “First White Child Ever Seen by the Pigmy Tribes” in The New York Times. Out of the trips of the Sheldon family came a book by her mother called On the Gorilla Trail. The picture you see — Alice saying goodbye to Africa — is from the book. This was in 1921.

Alice Sheldon took her own life in 1987. For more on this remarkable woman, Only Connect recommends The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon, by Julie Phillips.