When you think of women in Science Fiction, chances are you might think of the much-beloved recently deceased writer Ursula K Le Guin, or perhaps you might think of living authors such as Ann Leckie, or N.K. Jemisin.
Not many people outside of the SFF community know James Tiptree Jr.
I had not heard of her* until recently, when I discovered her work rather serendipitously (as so often is the case, once you hear about someone you hear about them from three distinct, seemingly disconnected sources). James Tiptree Jr. is the pen name of Alice Bradley Sheldon (1915-1987). In the 1970s, she published a series of profound, startling, short stories and novellas that captivated the SFF community.
It was not publicly known that Tiptree was a woman. She was guarded about her personal life, used a PO box rather than a real address. When her identity was discovered, she never quite reached the heights of before.
James Tiptree Jr’s stories are amazingly well crafted and have a contemporary, urgent feel to them. She explores themes such as sexuality, sacrifice, loss, gender roles, with uncompromising rawness. For some representative examples read Love is the Plan, the Plan is Death (short story), Her smoke rose up forever (novelette) and the proto-cyberpunk novella The Girl who was Plugged In.
Part of why my fellow philosophers don’t seem quite as enthusiastic about Tiptree as they are about other SF authors is that they have not read her. Tiptree’s best work are novellas, novelettes, and short stories. Her novels are not as critically well received, so to appreciate her you need to read her shorter fiction.
Short stories are still a niche market. There are beloved short story SFF markets with a wide audience, for example (to give some of my personal favorites) Uncanny, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Daily Science Fiction, Mysterion and Clarkesworld but it seems to me many people don’t like reading short fiction, which prevents short SF stories to reach the mainstream quite as much as SF novels are.
When I talk about my new passion for short fiction, people will sometimes say that short stories are not really working for them. When I ask why not, the reply is typically “I want to really immerse myself/lose myself in a story” and short stories are regarded as less immersive. Other reasons include that short stories would offer fewer opportunities for character development or world building, and so are inherently less interesting.
Let me offer here some reasons for why short stories, novelettes and novellas, can be a great literary form, independent and distinct from a full-length novel. The way we engage with short stories, and the way these works impact us is distinct from novels, but that does not make them a lesser art form. The best short stories show that less can be more.
In a short fiction, the author creates a self-contained world. She needs to be able to move and challenge the reader in a short span, typically from about 1000 to 20,000 words. Short stories, like novels, begin by offering the reader a series of promises. By the end of that short span of time, the story has to have delivered on those promises, or the story falls flat. The very best and memorable short science fiction packs emotional punch. Our engagement with the ideas is not purely intellectual, but also emotional. A clear example is Ted Chiang’s Story of your life, which, in its amazing brevity addresses not only the question of linguistic determinism but also of amor fati (the Nietzschean notion that you’d do all your life choices over again, you love your fate), but it is also the tragic story of the loss of a child.
A short story can begin very slowly and reflectively, and build up to a shocking or moving ending, just as well as a novel can, but in a much shorter period of time. For an example of a slow-burn story that delivers on its promises and leaves the reader feeling a bit devastated, you can read Caroline Yoachim’s Carnival Nine.
A short story can address profound philosophical questions and leave you wondering long after you finish reading it. For a recent example, take Rae Carson’s Badass moms in the Zombie Apocalypse. In fewer than 6000 words, this story examines antinatalism, the question of whether it is good (or perhaps selfish) to bring a child into a bleak world. By setting the events in a world ravaged by a zombie apocalypse rather than a world beset by climate change and pandemics, Carson is able to ask questions about the moral permissibility of bringing a child into the world. For another example, Adjoiners by Lisa Schoenberg (recently published in the anthology I co-edited with Johan De Smedt and Eric Schwitzgebel, Philosophy Through Science Fiction Stories) imagines the conditions under which you might commit a crime against yourself.
Short Stories can address pressing problems, such as Ken Liu’s touching Paper Menagerie on what it’s like to grow up the child of an immigrant parent and feeling torn between two cultures, and can even address problems before they arise, which is why James Tiptree Jr’s The Girl who was plugged in, which looks at Instagram influencers and how they shape consumer behavior in a dystopian future before we even had Instagram. Short fictions can also, in spite of their brevity, give us an expansive sense of the passage of time, for example, Underworld 101 by Mame Bougouma Diene (several earlier-mentioned stories have the same wide scope). Horror, delight, bewilderment, nostalgia, there’s nothing short fiction can’t make us feel.
Neil Gaiman once compared short stories to magical tricks, and I think this is a very apt comparison. Like a magician, a short story author has to evoke a world, characters, mood, emotions in with little means and in a short span of time. If the author achieves all this, it gives rise to a tremendous sense of wonder.
There is a poetic beauty in achieving what stories do in the sparseness of the short format. Though the pace can be slow, the author can nevertheless not afford to waste time. Everything she writes has to count and do work–set the mood, develop the characters, develop the plot. I disagree with my interlocutors who say that short stories are not immersive. They are immersive within their short span of time, and they leave you thinking long after you’ve finished reading them.
For this reason, it also makes sense to approach short fiction as an independent literary form, and not as some sort of step-up to full length novels. As writer Holly Shofield writes, there is an implicit assumption that you’ll write short fiction as some sort of practice for writing full length novels, and award-winning short fiction writers are often asked “When will your first book come out?” A perfectly acceptable answer is “Never”, if you see writing short fiction as the end goal. Likewise, if you as a reader want to dip into some fiction but lack the energy, concentration, funds, etc. to dive into a long novel, you might give short fiction a try.
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*On the use of female pronouns. I am unsure (I have not read her biography, an excerpt of which can be read here) what pronouns to use for an author who always consistently presented as male in their writing, for example also in letters to fans or fellow writers, but who didn’t present as male in real life. The use of male pronouns for James Tiptree Jr. is also defensible, I think.
Wondering freely 
Loved this piece, but how can you write about Tiptree without mentioning that Robert Silverberg, in a long and glowing introduction to one of Tiptree’s books, famously wrote, “It has been suggested that Tiptree is female, a theory that I find absurd, for there is to me something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree’s writing.”
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Yes that was quite something! Especially since writers since Alan Turing have noticed that it would be very hard to discern the gender of someone who is writing (hence the thought experiment leading to the Turing Test).
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