Writing Technology: The Sheldon/Tiptree Effect

Throughout my childhood one of my strongest memories is a dark wood bookcase in the living room where my parents collectively housed several hundred books. The topics ranged from texts on psychology to horror novels to romance. For years I read and reread many of these books, losing myself in wherever they took me. I was quite enamored with the psychology and horror books and then by lucky happenstance those two subjects seemed to converge when I encountered a short story known as “The Screwfly Solution” in which society faces a devastating collapse and perhaps its end. After many years of forgettings, rememberings, and misrememberings I randomly and asked Google one day if it could find me something from Tiptree about a disease: a request which was granted. Shortly thereafter I wrote a story, then another. In a literal sense I was inspired by this story to seriously pursue writing.

At this point in my writing habit I can identify several factors in that piece that inspired me. One of the biggest was that over the years I was pushed by my memory of it to pursue knowledge. I wanted to know if it was true what the story said about the screwfly. I wanted to know if the story events could really happen to us and if so, how? And if not that, then what? Ironically at one point I was intensely actually studying the screwfly and thinking “This sounds so much like a story I read when I was a kid.” The screwfly, also known as the screw-worm, was eradicated in the United States in 1982 and in many places in South American throughout the 1990′s and in continuing efforts using a sterilization technique that became the basis for the pest’s namesake story. This was it. What I had read so many times over the years and returned to in my thoughts so often was this incredible and frankly quite frightening story exposing real-life science in a fictional setting. The technique used to eradicate the screwfly aren’t appreciated or even known by many people outside of science class, but in that story it became disturbingly relevant when applied to my own species.

James Tiptree Jr, revealed in 1977 as Alice Sheldon, was an intelligence officer in the Army Air Forces (direct precursor to the Air Force), one of the earliest members of the CIA, and an experimental psychologist. The last name “Tiptree” came from a jar of Tiptree marmalade, though as the years went on it was altered warmly by friends and fans to “Uncle Tip” or just “Tip”. Her roles in the military and in the CIA were intelligence, while her later scientific work was primarily concerned with the mind. When she turned to writing, she was lauded for exploring gender identity and roles, and in such a distinctively male voice that compatriot Robert Silverberg said “There is something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree’s writing … his work is analogous to that of Hemingway … that prevailing masculinity about both of them — that preoccupation with questions of courage, with absolute values, with the mysteries and passions of life and death as revealed by extreme physical tests.”

While “The Screwfly Solution” is credited to Raccoona Sheldon, I was inspired to seek out more of her work and found I had read other of her stories that similarly affected me, without realizing it was the same author. When I personally found out Tiptree was actually a woman, THE woman, I was bowled over. Here was a woman writer, a scientist, the themes of whose stories often explore the result of some scientific or technological advancement. She was asking the same questions I was and am asking. Her thinking had inspired mine and all that time she was secretly a woman. That Google search changed everything. While much has been made, rightfully, of her forays into sexuality, exogamy, and the eventual end of human society, running underneath those themes is the pulse of a woman in love with science. In “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” Earth is a world populated solely by women who manipulate genes to ensure the survival of the (female) human race. CP in “With Delicate Mad Hands” is a girl so tormented by lack of acceptance on Earth that she is driven to become one of the best spacecraft pilots her world has known, and eventually her skill and determination lead her (by sketchy means) to the peace and happiness she has sought all along. While not all of Tiptree’s stories feature women protagonists and not all of them contain the sometimes-cataclysmic effects of technology on humanity, what her stories frequently do feature is the assumption that women are not afraid of science and technology and are neither unable or unwilling to make use of those tools and disciplines for their own ends. They embrace them and they do what they can because they feel they must.

What is it we look to technology for if not some form of wish fulfillment? We wish the screwflies would leave our livestock alone. We wish the world were more peaceful. We wish to find whatever it is we’re looking for and we continually work to make that happen by applying science to the problem and developing new technologies based on what we learn. In Tiptree’s works the rumination is not on the technology itself but on what drives it and what can be driven by it. The human drive to discover what is happening around us and then how to change it to suit us are channeled into tales which eventually expose the human consequences of that technology.

As a writer of science fiction I am deeply indebted to Alice Sheldon for simply being herself: a woman interested in science and technology and what can be wrought with them. Her skill in telling a story and portraying strong, competent women characters in roles traditionally given to men in fiction of the time: scientist, pilot, keeper of humanity’s final memoir, were the impetus which gave me the confidence to pursue science fiction writing. I am not a scientist. I am not an engineer. I am not a mathematician. I can, however, write about people – particularly women, operating in those capacities and perhaps inspire a future generation of scientist, engineers, and mathematicians in the tradition of sci fi writers who have inspired scientists. Just as Larry Niven’s “Ringworld” was inspired by Freeman Dyson’s sphere, the Waldo suit was inspired by Heinlein’s short story “Waldo“. I can’t speak to Sheldon’s goals or to Tip’s, but my goals are to carry on her work of exploring the role of science and technology in our lives and the consequences on both society and individuals, and to inspire other young women to look at the world with new and more curious eyes.