Even so, that seems more sad that evil.
Maybe the award should be renamed The Please Let Us Have Universal Health Care Including End Of Life Care And Care For Caretakers Award.
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Indeed–it seems on the face of it that folks are reinterpreting the past based on current ideology, rather than any new actual facts of the particular case. I think the Tiptree Motherboard is making a defensible case here, and they’re justified in not making a snap decision.
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With Campbell, there’s absolutely no doubt he thought and published deeply white supremacist material, and operated professionally under the influence of those bigotries.
With Alice Sheldon, everybody actually present and interviewed in their lives (friends and family of both of them) says there was a pact, they talk of how it was openly spoken of, and none of them are the ones pushing this newer interpretation.
Unless someone can point to someone making the case that it was anything different, in a way that has any more substance than “could-be/possibly/maybe”, then I’m most inclined to lean to the interpretation of the people that knew them most intimately and directly.
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That’ll learn me to read the whole linked article. Sorry for jumping to conclusions.
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Agreed. I’m strongly inclined to believe the accounts of the people close to them and the biographer who interviewed them than randos speculating decades later on the internet. And while asking the questions that prompted the biographer to clarify this point is a good thing, those who now continue to suggest it was murder verge on reckless and baseless speculation while also implying that everyone who was in a position to actually be close to the couple is lying, at which point the agenda and motivations of those few who continue to make that implication deserve scrutiny.
I’m not saying they necessarily should or shouldn’t rename the award, just that they shouldn’t defame Sheldon and those close to her in order to do it.
And because the evidence points to a suicide pact, people who do push for a renaming of the award because of how they died should question whether they want to make what amounts to a statement that suicide is unacceptable. Personally, because I believe adamantly in unconditional body-sovereignty, the answer for me is a hard no. In my view, and I feel safe saying in the view of many, the condemnation of suicide is regressive, not progressive. And while one might take issue with a society that in criminalizing suicide leaves suicides no open and legal way to end their lives on their terms, that’s an issue of the society, not the people it treats as property.
Also, thanks for the link to that Twitter thread.
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Campbell’s actions also affected a far greater number of people.
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If someone was running around accusing Mary Welsh Hemingway of faking Hemingway’s suicide, I’d personally need a lot more than “I was thinking about something I read online, and we know she was alone in a room with him with a gun…?”
Many of the people the biographer interviewed (about the open secret of the suicide pact) are still alive, and I’ll be interested in what she says about it after she puts more of her research out.
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I’m not 100% certain @white_noise wasn’t being sarcastic, but if they were being serious then they’re attributing as a matter of fact a crime to Sheldon they have no way of knowing was committed and which, indeed, the evidence now seems to point to her not having committed. However, there’s a good chance it’s just more sour grapes over Campbell getting called on his racism and gatekeeping.
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To be clear, gatekeeping was actually Campbell’s job as editor. The problem with that gatekeeping is that he filtered on the wrong things rather than whether the story at hand was good. He needed to be called out for his racism, other reactionary views, pseudoscientific nonsense, and bad gatekeeping.
It’s completely understandable why an award would have been named after him. He absolutely did shape the field, and many of those who flourished in it did so because of his patronage. But I also have absolutely no problem changing the name of the award: his performance as an editor actually was compromised, and distorted the development of science fiction. There should have been a lot more room for non-Campbellian SF, earlier on, as well as authors who weren’t white men (or passed for them by pen-names such as Tiptree).
As for the Tiptree award, I admit I am a bit conflicted. How, and to what extent should we honor flawed people, for their exemplary impacts on their field? Is it just a matter of which flaws and how bad they are? Does it matter whether they’re more “personal” flaws, or whether they affected the field? In Tiptree’s case the deaths don’t seem to have any relationship to her science fiction work. Of course, neither did Roman Polanski’s rape of thirteen year old on his films, yet I’d think most would consider naming an award after him a bad idea. Does it just come down to the much less strong moral consensus that completing suicide pacts in situations such as hers is terrible?
attributing as a matter of fact a crime to Sheldon they have no way of knowing was committed and which, indeed, the evidence now seems to point to her not having committed.
I said she killed her husband and herself. I’ve seen nothing suggesting otherwise. This description is congruent with either of the interpretations people talk about: the prevailing interpretation of a suicide pact that had her pull the trigger for both of them, or the darker interpretation of an actual murder-suicide.
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The Tiptree Award has a much more specific purpose than the Campbell/Astounding Award. Its named very specifically for that person based on her struggles with industry sexism. Hard to see this as anything but reactionary backlash.
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This part I agree with completely.
Thing is, Sheldon Trojan Horsed an experiential perspective rather orthogonal to then-mainstream SF by assuming a pseudonym, subverting the near-uniformity of white male authorial perspectives. That white males - even super-talented ones whose work I personally enjoy such as Robert Silverberg - ended up rationalizing that perspective as fitting into his notion of the masculine says less about her than them. It’s even pretty understandable; it was kind of an OCP (outside context problem) for the SWM Campbellians of the period to solve.
Well, here’s the most salient division between our perspectives, which I feel I was clear about in my previous comment but I’ll state more succinctly. I don’t regard a suicide pact as a flaw in and of itself for the reasons I explicated in my previous comment. I certainly don’t regard it as morally even related to convicted child rapist Roman Polansk’s crime. Rape is evil, suicide is not. Society failing to help people consensually avoid suicide is evil, but the person committing suicide is not evil.
I have zero use for morality by consensus. Beyond that, my last paragraph above includes my answer.
Yes, you are correct. I had misread what you wrote as murder, not kill. I apologize for my error.
Except the available evidence points to a suicide pact, and only baseless speculation points to murder-suicide. Consequently, it makes more sense to provisionally accept the former unless there’s an ulterior motive for artificially inflating the weight of the latter.
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If there is somebody out there who is saying, “I’m not comfortable going to the Tiptree Award ceremony because I’m afraid it will encourage my caretaker to murder me,” then that would be a valuable perspective to know about
But so far I am not hearing anything like that
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Yes, it was a pen name, because it was incredibly hard for women to be published in sci-fi fantasy back then. It’s the same reason why many women still use initials for their work (JK Rowling, NK Jemisen), because they are regularly told that they should do that to get their work viewed in the first place.
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Yes. Reassessing history and revising award names for a deceased person is indeed a life sentence for some unknown living person.
It follows logically.
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Exactly.
It wasn’t so long ago that many thought it was a cool “outlaw” story that Burroughs killed Joan Vollmer when trying to shoot a bottle off her head.
Now we’re realizing that she was unlawfully killed and was the most important woman of the best generation before her murder. That that loss and the misogyny around both the killing and the narrative around it deserved a reassessment. And around Burroughs.
Don’t get me started on that asshole Thomas Jefferson and his purported ideals.
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Agreed. This is entirely true and necessary. If we aren’t constantly reconfiguring our understanding of the past, then we’re not growing and learning from the past, just using it as a ideological weapon to decide whose histories matter and whose do not. That’s not the kind of world we want to live in, I don’t think.
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I know WP isn’t a primary source, but the article on Sheldon includes this quote from her: “A male name seemed like good camouflage. I had the feeling that a man would slip by less observed. I’ve had too many experiences in my life of being the first woman in some damned occupation.”
It also includes this statement, although the cited source is behind a paywall: The pseudonym was successfully maintained until the late 1977, partly because, although “Tiptree” was widely known to be a pseudonym, it was generally understood that its use was intended to protect the professional reputation of an intelligence community official.
But this is the part that stood out to me in illustrating the barrier to women authors: Writing under the pseudonym Raccoona, she was not very successful getting published until her other alter ego, Tiptree, wrote to publishers to intervene.
Now I want to read that biography mentioned earlier.
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Isn’t the fact that you haven’t heard about what happened to the suppressed members of the SciFi Award Name Resistance just proof that they are being held in an underwater jail in Atlantis and that there are exactly 14 of them?
You can’t argue with science.
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Tiptree to Campbell.
Apples to Watermelons.
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