James Tiptree, Jr

"Anyone who shoots a real gun at you when drunk and angry is simply not husband material, regardless of his taste in literature."

"Our fellow passenger was Major Grogan, who thirty years before had been the first white man to go from the Cape to Cairo. It took him three years, one whole year in the marshes of the Sudd; his two companions died. It is said he ate them; I think so. He looked like a sensible man."

"Man is exogamous—all our history is one long drive to find and impregnate the stranger. Or get impregnated by him, it works for women too. Anything different-colored, different nose, ass, anything, man has to fuck it or die trying. That’s a drive, y’know, it’s built in. Because it works fine as long as the stranger is human. For millions of years that kept the genes circulating. But now we’ve met aliens we can’t screw, and we’re about to die trying."

"People, of course, seemed to need also to talk and talk, which was a pity because their talk was mostly without meaning."

"The American black who goes to Kenya often discovers he is an American first and an African second, no matter what they did to him in Newark."

"“Stupid,” I husked to George. “Harem slaves don’t blow up the harem and themselves just to keep the new girls out. They wait and poison the new girls when they can get away with it. That does us no good.” “Nor do historical analogies, after a point.” “Analogic reasoning works when you have the right reference frame.”"

"Did you know you get clobbered for calling a polyglot a linguist?"

"Somewhere in his head a couple of neurones twitched, but they didn’t connect."

"Because dying, any time, is an experience you don’t survive."

"Entropy! The development of reliable knowledge is anti-entropic. Science’s task in a social system is comparable to the function of intelligence in the individual. It holds against disorganization, isolation, noise, entropy. But we, here—we’ve allied ourselves with an entropic subsystem. We’re not generating structure, we’re helping to degrade the system!"

"You can understand why a system would seek information—but why in hell does it offer information? Why do we strive to be understood? Why is a refusal to accept communication so painful?"

"Eerie blue, the wide old eyes reminded him of a place he had never seen."

"If it worked it would be like trying to wipe your eye with a blowtorch."

"She sounded sane as soap."

"He heard himself humming and decided to lock the whole thing into autopilot. No matter what shape that computer was in it would be saner than he was."

"What if a person is sure of his identity but it isn’t his identity?"

"What women do is survive. We live by ones and twos in the chinks of your world-machine."

"Women have no rights, Don, except what men allow us. Men are more aggressive and powerful, and they run the world. When the next real crisis upsets them, our so-called rights will vanish like—like that smoke. We'll be back where we always were: property. And whatever has gone wrong will be blamed on our freedom, like the fall of Rome was. You'll see."

""James Tiptree, Jr." was a science fiction writer whose very fine work began appearing in the 1960s. No one had ever met "Tiptree" and theories about "him" were rife. Finally "James Tiptree, Jr." was revealed to be a sixty-year-old biologist called Alice Sheldon. We corresponded extensively, both before this revelation and afterwards. I loved James and was sad to lose him but I loved Alice too (she sent postcards typed in blue ink with blue-ink octopi drawn on them) and was much sadder to lose her because her loss (her death) was permanent. Straight people, however sympathetic they may be, don't know the texture or the difficulties of gay lives. When I heard of her death I determined that she wouldn't go down in history as another happy, heterosexual woman (like Virginia Woolf) whose life was edited because her real desires were held to be somehow an "attack" on her character. Sheldon, like Woolf, was married and happily so but she was a lesbian. Therefore I wrote the above note to Extrapolation and donated her letters to what I considered the appropriate place."