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From: jim@ISM780B.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.books
Subject: Re: Reading Material Followup
Message-ID: <23400001@ISM780B.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 29-Aug-85 00:27:00 EDT
Article-I.D.: ISM780B.23400001
Posted: Thu Aug 29 00:27:00 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 31-Aug-85 21:36:12 EDT
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Nf-ID: #R:reed:-180400:ISM780B:23400001:000:1255
Nf-From: ISM780B!jim    Aug 29 00:27:00 1985


>(BTW, did anyone here that before "James Tiptree, Jr."
>was discovered to be female, that MCP Robert Silverburg
>insisted vehemently that "he" must be male because of
>the male outlook or some such in "his" writing?  Chortle!)

I think highly of Siverberg's writing, but I was rather taken aback
by his statement in the intro to Tiptree's "Warm Worlds and Otherwise":

	"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.  I don't think the novels of Jane
	 Austen could have been written by a man nor the stories of
	 Ernest Hemingway by a woman, and in the same way I believe the
	 author of the James Tiptree stories is male."

Aside from the bad logic, I found quite bizarre the notion that such
stories as "The Milk of Paradise" and "Love is the Plan the Plan is
Death", with their intense concentration on the meaning of love, beauty,
and other emotional themes, are "ineluctably male".  While there is the
occasional Farmer, Varley, Sturgeon, and even Silverberg story, the vast
majority of male science fiction writers concentrate on war and mechanics.
I sincerely hope that Silverberg was humbled by his experience.

-- Jim Balter (ima!jim)