Award annoucements

This weekend two awards we're particularly fond of were announced.

Congratulations to Sarah Pinsker, whose Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea was awarded the Philip K. Dick Award, and to Sarah Tolmie, whose The Little Animals was awarded a special citation. Here's the official press release:

April 10, 2020
For Immediate Release

2020 Philip K. Dick Award Winner Announced

It was announced on Friday, April 10, 2020 at Norwescon 43, in (virtual) SeaTac, Washington,
that the winner for the distinguished original science fiction paperback published for the first
time during 2019 in the U.S.A. is:

SOONER OR LATER EVERYTHING FALLS INTO THE SEA: STORIES by Sarah
Pinsker (Small Beer Press)

Special citation was given to:

THE LITTLE ANIMALS by Sarah Tolmie (Aqueduct Press)

The Philip K. Dick Award is presented annually with the support of the Philip K. Dick Trust for
distinguished science fiction published in paperback original form in the United States. The
award is sponsored by the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society and the award ceremony is
sponsored by the NorthWest Science Fiction Society. The 2019 award was given to THEORY
OF BASTARDS by Audrey Schulman (Europa Editions) with a special citation to 84K by Claire
North (Orbit).

The judges for the 2020 award were Thomas A. Easton, Karen Heuler, Mur Lafferty, Patricia
MacEwen (chair), and James Sallis. This year’s judges are F. Brett Cox, Brendan DuBois, Cynthia Felice, Tim Pratt, and Jessica Reisman.

The virtual award ceremony can be found online at:
https://www.norwescon.org/con/p-k-dick-award/

For more information, contact the award administration: Gordon Van Gelder (201) 876-2551,
John Silbersack (347) 787-7445, and Pat LoBrutto (301) 460-3164

For more information about the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society, http://www.psfs.org/:

The second award announced was the Otherwise (previously known as the James Tiptree Jr.) Award. And for this award, congratulations go to to Akwaeke Emezi.
 
Here is Pat Murphy's email announcing the award:

Right now, we seem to be living in a dystopian science fiction future. Despite that, the Otherwise Award (originally the Tiptree Award) is still here —  still searching the world for speculative works that challenge us to think in new ways about gender. We are still celebrating those creators who are inventing new and better futures (which the world certainly needs right now). 

I am pleased to announce the winner of the 2019 Otherwise Award: Freshwater, by Akwaeke Emezi. 

“Akwaeke Emezi's Freshwater is beautiful, complicated, magical, challenging, and sometimes vividly cruel,” writes juror Edmond Y. Chang. “Told from multiple, overlapping, and often conflicted perspectives, the novel tells the story of Ada, who is caught between worlds, trying to navigate family, education, migration and immigration, Catholicism and Igbo spirituality, and what it means to be a self, a person.  The novel does not shy away from explorations of gender nonconformity (particularly for people of color), sexuality, toxic masculinity, race, mental illness, and trauma.  There are no easy paths or answers for Ada (or the reader), and therefore the novel imagines alternative, even radical forms of identity and most importantly survival.”

The 2019 Honor List celebrates nine exceptional and thought-provoking works:  

• Kylie Ariel Bemis, "Dreamborn" (in Maiden, Mother, Crone, edited by Gwen Benaway)
• Meg Elison, The Book of Flora (Book 3 in the Road to Nowhere trilogy) 
• Akwaeke Emezi, Pet (Make Me a World, 2019)
• Kameron Hurley, Meet Me in the Future (Tachyon Publications, 2019)
• Innocent Chizaram Ilo, "Of Warps and Wefts" (Strange Horizons, March 2018; reprinted in Transcendent 4: The Year's Best Transgender Speculative Fiction)
• Mary Robinette Kowal, The Calculating Stars (Tor Books, 2018)
• Laurie J. Marks, The Elemental Logic series (Fire Logic, Earth Logic, Water Logic, and Air Logic)
• Yukiko Motoya, The Lonesome Bodybuilder (Soft Skull Press, 2018) 

For the jury's comments on all these works, please visit the Otherwise Award website. The Award winner and Honor List often become my reading list for the next year. If you need a break from the daily news barrage, from tending to the needs of family, from worrying about the state of the world we live in, from sewing face masks (my current preoccupation), consider allowing yourself some time to read and explore other worlds. 

As always, if you spot a work of fiction that you want to call to the attention of the 2020 judges, please post it on the recommendation page of the Award website. We count on the community to let us know what's out there. On the website, you can also read more about past winners and donate to help fund the award. (We count on the community for that too.)

I'd like to commend the 2019 jury (Debbie Notkin, Mariana Calderon, Edmond Y. Chang, Trish Salah, Bogi Takács.) for completing their task during such difficult times. The Award only exists because of  the support of our community. Thank you all. 

Yours, 

Pat Murphy

For the Otherwise Award Motherboard

PS We are working on plans for a  (possibly virtual) celebration of the winner and the Honor List. The winner will receive $1000 in prize money, a specially commissioned piece of original artwork, and (of course) chocolate.

The 2017 Tiptree Award

The winner of the 2017 Tiptree Award is Virginia Bergin for her novel Who Runs the World? (Macmillan, UK, 2017). The novel is scheduled to be published in the US in September 2018 under the title The XY (Sourcebooks, 2018).

Who Runs the World? is a young adult novel that tells an intricately layered tale of intergenerational struggle and cooperation, the dehumanizing force of gender stereotypes, and the moral courage it takes to challenge cultural and political norms. The premise is familiar in feminist science fiction—a plague that kills nearly everyone with a Y chromosome. Bergin uses this premise first to develop a vividly imagined feminist society, and then to grapple with that society’s changes and flaws over time.

And for any who look to the Tiptree Award for a reading list each year, the jurors provide the Honor List, a group of exceptional works:

• Charlie Jane Anders, “Don't Press Charges and I Won't Sue" (Boston Review, USA, 2017)
• Indra Das, The Devourers (Del Rey, USA, 2016)
• April Daniels, Dreadnought and Sovereign (Diversion, USA, 2017)
• Maggie Shen King, An Excess Male (Harper Voyager, USA, 2017)
• Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties (Gray Wolf, USA, 2017)
• Rivers Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts (Akashic, USA, 2017) 
• JY Yang, "Black Tides of Heaven" and "Red Threads of Fortune" (Tor, USA, 2017)

You’ll find more information about each work on the Honor List — and an additional  “long list” of twenty-six other works jurors found worthy of attention — on the Tiptree website.

The Tiptree Award winner, along with authors and works on the Honor List will be celebrated on Memorial Day weekend at WisCon in Madison, Wisconsin. Thanks to the support of folks like you, the winner will receive $1000 in prize money, a specially commissioned piece of original artwork, and (as always) chocolate. I hope I’ll see you at the celebration!

Reading for 2018 has begun Visit the recommendation page of the Tiptree Award website to suggest works for 2018 jury’s consideration. On the website, you can also donate to help fund the award and read more about past winners and works it has honored.

2016 James Tiptree Jr. Award

I'm late to this party-- I've just seen the announcement for the 2016 James Tiptree Jr. Award. I've taken this from the Award's website:

Congratulations to Anna-Marie McLemore, who has won the 2016 Tiptree Award for her novel When the Moon Was Ours (Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, 2016).

About the Winner

When the Moon Was Ours by Anna-Marie McLemore is a fairytale about Samir, a transgender boy, and Miel, an orphan girl who grows roses from her wrists and is bullied as a result. In fact, there is a fairytale within the fairytale: the first chapter telling us the version of the story that mothers would tell children for years after — before also telling us what that story leaves out. Then the book takes us through all of it, step by step, exploring the heartache and frustration that being and loving differently generates. Beautifully, the novel never lets go of its unique magical realism framework. While the thoughts and emotions these characters share are incredibly familiar to anyone who is queer or trans or has loved someone who is trans, the imagery and particular scenarios the characters encounter are also completely bright and new.

In the author’s note at the end of the book, Anna-Marie McLemore tells us that when she was a teenager she fell in love with a transgender boy who would grow into the man she married. This is their story, reimagined as legend.

 In addition to selecting the winners, the jury chooses a Tiptree Award Honor List. The Honor List is a strong part of the award’s identity and is used by many readers as a recommended reading list. These notes on each work are excerpted and edited from comments by members of this year’s jury.

This year’s Honor List is:


Eleanor Arnason, Hwarhath Stories:Transgressive Tales by Aliens (Aqueduct Press, 2016) — This is a wonderful collection of stories that examine the ways that culturally, deep-rooted assumptions around gender restrict vocation and recognition of skills. Arnason tells of a culture with significantly different gender assumptions and customs that lead to a number of subtly shifted societal impacts — both positive and negative.

Mishell Baker, Borderline (Saga Press, 2016) — A fascinating whodunit with wonderful characters, Borderline spotlights diversity and intersectionality. Most of the characters in this novel are viewed as disabled by others, even by each other. But the characters’ so-called disabilities give them advantages in certain situations. Understanding this helps the characters love each other and themselves. Almost every character can be described as having attributes that are both disabilities and advantages. What builds us up can bring us down. Or put another way: our imperfections are openings to beautiful achievements.

Nino Cipri, “Opals and Clay” (Podcastle, 2016) — A beautiful love story about solidarity. With just three major characters, this story does a lot with gender, demonstrating how gendering can be something one does to control or out of love.

Andrea Hairston, Will Do Magic for Small Change (Aqueduct Press, 2016) — A beautiful story of magic and love that spans two centuries and three continents, moving between times and places through a book-within-a-book structure. Its 1980s protagonists are a family who has been torn apart by an act of homophobic violence. Through a discovery of their past, they are able to reconnect and find love again. Among other things, this novel depicts an amazing range of queer characters. Importantly, the book de-colonizes these representations, making queerness not a white or American thing, but something that emerges in different shapes and structures at different times and places, particular to individuals as well as the cultures and communities that they are a part of.

Rachael K. Jones, “The Night Bazaar for Women Becoming Reptiles” (Beneath Ceaseless Skies, 2016) — A moving story set in a world where people live separate lives by night and day, with an opposite-sex lover by day and same-sex lover by night as the standard family structure. The theme of being trapped in one’s body and circumstances and in the customs of one’s times is dealt with well. The metaphor of a city/body that traps people in prisons of identity was very powerful. A surprising (yet well set up) twist to the story broadens its scope.

Seanan McGuire, Every Heart a Doorway (Tor Books, 2916) — This is a lovely YA novel about teenagers who return to our world, against their wishes, from magical lands that they entered through secret pathways — a magic door, an impossible stairway at the bottom of a trunk, a mirror. Their parents cannot understand their pain and misinterpret the stories their children tell and send their children to Miss West’s Home for Wayward Children. Miss West, herself a returned child, helps them deal with their separation or return to what they all think of as their real homes. This novel came to the attention of the Tiptree jury because of the reasons the children are taken from or rejected by their magical worlds. The protagonist, Nancy, is asexual, and finds an ideal world through her door. A character named Kade was born Katie, and discovers he is a boy, not a girl. He is thrown out of Fairyland as punishment for his transition. Two twin girls named Jack and Jill take up identities opposite from those their parents imposed upon them. There are beautiful lessons here about the importance of finding one’s home–that place where one can be one’s self. An emotionally engaging novel.

Ada Palmer, Too Like the Lightning (Tor Books, 2016) — This book will start conversations about gender, philosophy, religion, government, even war.The judges perceived contradictions within this book that may be resolved in the sequel, but these only serve to spark interest. In the future in which it is set (the twenty-fifth century of our world), gendered language is considered taboo in most circles and gender/sex-related cues are minimized and overlooked in clothing, vocation, and all other public areas of life. However, the book slowly reveals that gender stereotypes, sexism, and sexual taboos still remain strong despite the century’s supposed enlightenment and escape from such notions.

Johanna Sinisalo, The Core of the Sun (Grove Press/Black Cat, 2016) — This emotional, moving and thought-provoking novel, set in an alternate present in Finland, provides a critique of heteronormativity, eugenics, and all forms of social control, done uniquely and with humor. In this alternate present, the government values public health and social stability above all else. Sex and gender have been organized as the government sees fit, much to the detriment of women, who are bred and raised to be docile. All .drugs, including alcohol and caffeine, have long been banned. Capsaicin from hot peppers is the most recent substance to be added to the list. Our protagonist, Vera/Vanna, is a capsaicin addict. Consuming peppers provides an escape from a world that has treated her horribly. Most chapters are from Vera/Vanna’s perspective, but others relate the history, laws, fairytales, and other literature of this fictional Finland.

Nisi Shawl, Everfair (Tor Books, 2016) — In this gorgeous steampunk revisionist history of anticolonial resistance, a coalition of rebels defeat King Leopold and transform the former Belgian Congo into Everfair: a new nation whose citizens comprise Africans, European settlers, and Asian laborers. Told from many different perspectives, the story switches among the viewpoints of a dozen protagonists. This novel shows how relationships can grow over time between people of different races, classes, and religions as they build community together. Characters work through their internalized racisms and demonstrate how this is necessary for those in interracial relationships.

But Wait — There’s More!

In addition to the honor list, this year’s jury also compiled a long list of twelve other works they found worthy of attention.


All the Birds in the Sky, Charlie Jane Anders (Tor, 2016)
The Waterdancer’s World, L. Timmel Duchamp (Aqueduct Press, 2016)
Lily, Michael Thomas Ford (Lethe Press, 2016)
King of the Worlds, M. Thomas Gammarino (Chin Music Press, 2016)
“Vesp: A History of Sapphic Scaphism,” Porpentine Charity Heartscape (Terraform, 2016 – an online interactive story),
Cantor for Pearls, M.C.A. Hogarth (De La Torre Books, 2016)
The Obelisk Gate, N.K. Jemisin (Orbit, 2016)
An Accident of Stars, Foz Meadows (Angry Robot, 2016)
Sleeping Under the Tree of Life, Sheree Renée Thomas (Aqueduct Press, 2016)
Suddenly Paris, Olga & Christopher Werby (CreateSpace, 2015)
The Arrival of Missives, Aliya Whiteley (Unsung Stories, 2015)
The Natural Way of Things, Charlotte Wood (Europa Editions 2016)

Now What?

Anna-Marie McLemore, along with authors and works on the Honor List, will be celebrated during Memorial Day weekend at WisCon 41 in Madison, Wisconsin, May 26-29, 2017. She will receive $1000 in prize money, a specially commissioned piece of original artwork, and (as always) chocolate.

Each year, a panel of five jurors selects the Tiptree Award winner. The 2016 judges were Jeanne Gomoll (chair), Aimee Bahng, James Fox, Roxanne Samer, and Deb Taber.


Reading for 2017 will soon begin. The panel consists of Alexis Lothian (chair), E.J. Fischer, Kazue Harada, Cheryl Morgan, and Julia Starkey.


The Tiptree Award invites everyone to recommend works for the award. Please submit recommendations via our recommendation page. Full information on all the books mentioned above will be in the Tiptree Award database before the end of March 2017.

*******************************

It's me again, just to express special pleasure that two Aqueduct Press books (and three Aqueduct Press authors) are on the Honor List, and two Aqueduct Press books are on the long list. I have to say, between the works named above and the Lambda Literary Award finalists' list, no one can say that 2016 wasn't a fruitful year for those of us hungry for sharp, challenging reading.  

Tiptree Symposium, Dec 4-5

Most of you have probably already heard that the University of Oregon Libraries will be hosting a symposium later this week to honor Alice Sheldon/James Tiptree Jr. on the centennial of her birth.
The symposium will kick off with a keynote talk by Julie Phillips, author of the biography: James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice Sheldon (St. Martins, 2006), and will also feature a panel discussion with other writers who carried on lively and engaging correspondence with Tiptree, including Ursula K. Le Guin, Suzy McKee Charnas and David Gerrold. I'll be participating myself, as a panelist on feminist sf publishing with co-panelists Jacob Weisman of Tachyon Publications and Gordon Van Gelder.

The symposium will take place in the Lillis Auditorium, Room 182. Admission is free, however please RSVP here. An exhibit based on the Tiptree Papers will be in Knight Library, first floor, and in Special Collections and University Archives.

Aqueduct Press will be there, as well as numerous Aqueduct authors. We'll be set up in the lobby alongside the University of Oregon Bookstore. We'll be bringing books we've published by attending authors as well as all our Tiptree Award-honored books. Kath made up a list of them (in reverse chronological order), to make sure we didn't miss any, and it's damned impressive, if I do say so myself:

Tiptree Award Winners:

Ancient, Ancient, Kiini Ibura Salaam, Co-Winner, 2012

Redwood and Wildfire, Andrea Hairston, Winner, 2011

Filter House, Nisi Shawl, Co-Winner, 2008

The Marq’ssan Cycle, L. Timmel Duchamp, Awarded Special Honor by 2009 Tiptree Jury

 Writing the Other: A Practical Approach, Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward, Special Mention, 2005

Honor List: 

 

Elysium, Jennifer Marie Brissett, 2014

Big Mama Stories, Eleanor Arnason, 2013

The Receptionist and Other Tales, Lesley Wheeler, 2012

"The Nones of Quintilis," in Never at Home, L. Timmel Duchamp, 2011

The Universe of Things, Gwyneth Jones, 2011

The Secret Feminist Cabal:  A Cultural History of Science Fiction Feminisms, Helen Merrick, 2010

Distances, Vandana Singh, 2009

Dangerous Space, Kelley Eskridge, 2007

Mindscape, Andrea Hairston, 2006

Life, by Gwyneth Jones, 2004  (short list)

Love’s Body, Dancing in Time, L. Timmel Duchamp, 2004 (short list)

2014 James Tiptree Jr Award

WINNERS OF THE 2014 JAMES Tiptree, Jr. AWARD ANNOUNCED 

The James Tiptree, Jr. Literary Award Council (www.tiptree.org) is pleased to announce that the 2014 Tiptree Award has two winners: Monica Byrne for her novel The Girl in the Road (Crown 2014) and Jo Walton for her novel My Real Children (Tor 2014). The James Tiptree, Jr. Award is presented annually to works of science fiction or fantasy that explore and expand gender roles. The award seeks out work that is thought-provoking, imaginative, and perhaps even infuriating. It is intended to reward those writers who are bold enough to contemplate shifts and changes in gender roles, a fundamental aspect of any society.

Monica Byrne’s The Girl in the Road is a painful, challenging, glorious novel about murder, quests, self-delusion, and a stunning science-fictional big idea: What would it be like to walk the length of a few-meter-wide wave generator stretching across the open sea from India to Africa, with only what you can carry on your back? With profound compassion and insight, the novel tackles relationships between gender and culture and between gender and violence. It provides a nuanced portrait of violence against women, in a variety of forms, and violence perpetrated by women. Through the eyes of two narrators linked by a single act of violence, the reader is brought to confront shifting ideas of gender, class, and human agency and dignity.

Jo Walton’s My Real Children is a richly textured examination of two lives lived by the same woman. This moving, thought-provoking novel deals with how differing global and personal circumstances change our view of sexuality and gender. The person herself changes, along with her society. Those changes influence and are influenced by her opportunities in life and how she is treated by intimate partners, family members, and society at large. The alternate universe trope allows Walton to demonstrate that changes in perceptions regarding gender and sexuality aren’t inevitable or determined by a gradual enlightenment of the species, but must be struggled for. My Real Children is important for the way it demonstrates how things could have been otherwise — and might still be.

Honor List

In addition to selecting the winner, the jury chooses a Tiptree Award Honor List. The Honor List is a strong part of the award’s identity and is used by many readers as a recommended reading list. This year’s Honor List (listed in alphabetical order by the author’s last name) is:

Jennifer Marie Brissett. Elysium (Aqueduct Press 2014) — A masterfully layered tale of star-crossed lovers, ambiguously situated before, during, and after a devastating alien invasion. Adrian/Adrianne and Antoine/Antoinette move through a liminal, re-creative space that tells spooling variations of an original story we might never see, but can reconstruct. Variously lovers, siblings, and parent and child, these relationships change in subtle and overt ways that are tied to the gender of the characters in each looping iteration.

Seth Chambers, “In Her Eyes” (Fantasy & Science Fiction, January/February 2014) — This excellently written and evocative story is about a woman who is a polymorph, capable of drastically altering her body. It’s told from the point of view of the man who loves her. Each week she becomes a different woman for him, until she changes her gender, then her very self.

Kim Curran, “A Woman Out of Time” (Irregularity, edited by Jared Shurin, Jurassic London 2014) — A fictionalized version of Joanna Russ’s classic How to Suppress Women’s Writing, based on a true history (with very mild adjustments). Time travel paradoxes, complexity theory, and alien intervention are beautifully interwoven in this lyrical exploration of the gendering of scientific discovery. The story’s epigraph will tempt readers to explore what is known of the life and work of Emile Du Chatelet, a contemporary of Voltaire and the translator and commentator of Newton’s work, and to undo the disservice she has been done by history.

Emmi Itäranta, Memory of Water (Harper Voyager 2014) (published in Finnish as Teemestarin kirja, Teos 2012) — This beautifully crafted novel, written simultaneously in English and Finnish, uses a delicately-told coming-of-age tale to examine a future replete with water crises, a totalitarian police state, and suffocating gender roles.

Jacqueline Koyanagi, Ascension (Masque Books 2013) — A fun, fast-paced space opera with surprising heft. Its beautifully diverse cast of characters explores intersections of gender and race, class, disability, and polyamory, all while racing to save the universe from certain destruction.

Alisa Krasnostein and Julia Rios, editors, Kaleidoscope (Twelfth Planet Press 2014) — An anthology of young-adult stories about diversity, many featuring queer or trans characters or gender issues. This is a book that should be in every middle and high-school library!

Pat MacEwen, “The Lightness of the Movement” (Fantasy & Science Fiction, April/May 2014) — A solid, well-told alien-contact story about a xeno-anthropologist studying an alien species. The alien’s gender roles are well described and very alien. Though the story never enters the aliens’ minds, MacEwen does a fabulous job of making it clear how the aliens think.

Nnedi Okorafor, Lagoon (Hodder & Stoughton, 2014) — This gloriously chaotic look at the day after aliens land in the lagoon off of Lagos, Nigeria’s coast approaches gender with a diversity that intersects with many aspects of modern Nigerian life: age, religion, social class and politics, among others. The character Ayodele, an alien who takes the form of a human woman to make first contact, is particularly noteworthy in how her chosen gender exposes fault lines across the panoply of characters that drive the narrative.

Nghi Vo, “Neither Witch nor Fairy” (Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History, edited by Rose Fox and Daniel José Older, Crossed Genres, 2014) — Two orphaned brothers try to get by in 1895 Belfast. The story focuses on the younger brother, who thinks he’s a changeling. He asks the fairies to tell him what he truly is. (Saying anything more would be telling.)

Aliya Whiteley, The Beauty (Unsung Stories 2014) — A piece of disturbing, thought-provoking horror that explores what happens to a small community of men when sentient mushrooms spring from the graves of women who died years before from a deadly fungus infection. These mushrooms, called “Beauties” by the storytelling narrator, gradually and inexorably shift their roles over the course of the narrative, starting as supposedly mindless providers of comfort and ending with roles more traditionally masculine: inseminating, caring for the male mothers, and engaging in violent battles to protect their progeny. Allegorically explores a variety of aspects of the human experience, including gender and sexuality.

It was a particularly good year for gender-exploration in science fiction and fantasy. In addition to the honor list, this year’s jury also compiled the following long list of other works they found worthy of attention:

• Corinne Duyvis, Otherbound (Amulet 2014)
• Meg Elison, The Book of the Unnamed Midwife (Sybaritic Press 2014)
• L.S. Johnson, “Marigolds” (Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History, edited by Rose Fox and Daniel José Older, Crossed Genres 2014)
• Laura Lam, Shadowplay (Angry Robot/Strange Chemistry 2014)
• Ken Liu, “Knotting Grass, Holding Ring” (Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History, edited by Rose Fox and Daniel José Older, Crossed Genres 2014)
• Sarah Pinsker, “No Lonely Seafarer” (Lightspeed Magazine, September 2014)
• Michael J. Sullivan, Hollow World (Tachyon 2014)
• Deborah Wheeler, Collaborators (Dragon Moon Press 2013)
• Cat Winters, The Cure for Dreaming (Amulet 2014)

The Tiptree Award winners, along with authors and works on the Honor List and the long list will be celebrated during Memorial Day weekend at WisCon (www.wiscon.info) in Madison, Wisconsin. Monica Bryne will attend the ceremony at WisCon, May 23-26, 2015 (www.wiscon.info); Jo Walton is unable to attend WisCon, but will be feted at an alternate celebration in San Francisco in August. (The Tiptree Award Motherboard firmly believes that you cannot have too many celebrations.) Each winner will receive $1000 in prize money, a specially commissioned piece of original artwork, and (as always) chocolate.

Each year, a panel of five jurors selects the Tiptree Award winner. The 2014 jurors were Darrah Chavey (chair), Elizabeth Bear, Joan Haran, Alaya Dawn Johnson, and Amy Thomson.

Reading for 2015 will soon begin. The jury panel consists of Heather Whipple (chair), Jacqueline Gross, Alessa Hinlo, Keffy Kehrli, and N.A. Sulway.

The Tiptree Award invites everyone to recommend works for the award. Please submit recommendations via the Tiptree Award website at www.tiptree.org, where you can also read more about the award, about works it has honored, and about past winners.
.

2013 James Tiptree Jr. Award

Exciting news! 

WINNER OF THE 2013 JAMES TIPTREE JR. AWARD ANNOUNCED

The James Tiptree, Jr. Literary Award Council (www.tiptree.org) is pleased to announce the winner of the 2013 Tiptree Award: N.A. Sulway for her novel Rupetta (Tartarus Press 2013).



The James Tiptree Jr. Award is presented annually to a work or works of science fiction or fantasy that explores and expands gender roles. The award seeks out work that is thought-provoking, imaginative, and perhaps even infuriating. It is intended to reward those writers who are bold enough to contemplate shifts and changes in gender roles, a fundamental aspect of any society.

N.A. Sulway’s imaginative and highly original novel tells the story of Rupetta, an artificial intelligence created 400 years ago from cloth, leather, and metal, brought to life by the touch of her creator’s hand on her clockwork heart. Although Rupetta is a constructed being, she is not a robot. Her consciousness is neither digital nor mechanical. Nor is she an android, a creature that is, etymologically, male. (The word is not gyndroid). Rupetta’s power does not come from her brain, but from her heart. Sulway has placed her construct not in the future, but the past, and made her female, created with traditionally feminine technology: sewing and weaving. Rupetta is a woman, made by a woman in the image of a woman, and the world changes to accommodate her existence.

A deft blend of fantasy, science fiction, romance, and even gothic horror, this beautifully written story challenges the reader’s expectations about gender and of a gendering society. It examines power and what makes an object of power, relationships and love, sexuality and identity, and how culture is shaped and history is made.

Rupetta was published by British independent publisher Tartarus Press in a limited hardback edition and a more widely available e-book version. Both are available for purchase from Tartarus’s website (http://freepages.pavilion.net/tartarus/rupetta.htm).

Nike Sulway lives and writes in Queensland, Australia. Her novel The Bone Flute won the Queensland Premier's Literary Award for Best Emerging Author in 2000. Since 2007, she has been the co-director of Olvar Wood Writers Retreat, and one of the editors of Perilous Adventures, a literary magazine.

Honor List


* Eleanor Arnason, Big Mama Stories (Aqueduct Press 2013) — Big Mamas are galaxy-sized women, powerful beings who can stroll around space and travel through time by sheer force of character. They are feminist, sensible, and adventurous. They come in all kinds of colors, and they survive by their wits, sometimes aided and abetted by Big Poppas. In these five stories, Arnason offers a new mythos, laced with both humor and wisdom.




* Aliette de Bodard, "Heaven Under Earth" (Electric Velocipede #24, Summer 2012,http://www.electricvelocipede.com/2012/08/heaven-under-earth-by-aliette-de-bodard) In a world with few biological women, some men have been medically altered to carry children and live as wives. When a new wife who was born a woman in a household, her presence causes Liang Pao, an altered man, to scrutinize his reasons for wanting to keep the status quo and to re-examine his own sexuality and feelings towards family, culture, status, and gender.

 
    * Nicola Griffith, Hild (Farrar Straus & Giroux 2013) — This stunningly beautiful historical novel describes what life might have been like for a woman whose mother has arranged for her to be "the light of the world": the real-life St. Hilda of Whitby. In a rollicking good read, the reader is drawn into action and adventure as Hild becomes a king's seer, a warrior, and a vessel through which the dynamics of power and gender in war-ravaged 7th-century Britain can be explored.

     * Alaya Dawn Johnson, The Summer Prince (Arthur A. Levine 2013) — Set in a somewhat dystopic matriarchal future Brazil, this lavish, provocative YA novel centers on June Costa, a rebellious teenage artist. She and her best friend Gil become entwined with Enki, the Summer King, who is elected to a position of celebrity and social eminence for one year before he becomes a ritual sacrifice. This book grapples with the nature of love, social and political conscience, creative rebellion and personal awakening, and an exploration of sexuality remarkable for its treatment of bisexuality and multiple relationships.

     * Ann Leckie, Ancillary Justice (Orbit 2013) — This political revenge story draws the reader into a fraught and ruthlessly colonizing military galactic empire. The protagonist is a human being whose consciousness began as a spaceship inhabiting dozens of bodies and vessels. Now stranded in one body, she bides her time and plots against the leader of the culture she once unquestioningly served. The story examines the brutality of occupation as well as exploring questions of gender and embodiment within a cultural framework that does not recognize gender, only class. 

     * Bennett Madison, September Girls (HarperTeen 2013) — In this young adult fantasy, a young man named Sam spends a summer in a beach town where he encounters numerous Girls with mysterious pasts that even they have a hard time recalling. Exploring the myth of mermaids and gods of the deep through an examination of gendered power dynamics, Sam learns how to become a man in ways that differ from the models he's been supplied with by his somewhat clueless father, abrasive older brother, and American culture in general.
  

  * Sarah McCarry, All Our Pretty Songs (St. Martin’s 2013) — A modern-day retelling of the myth of Orpheus, this is the story of two teenagers who grew up closer than sisters despite their parents' drug-fueled rock-star baggage. The girls' relationship is tested when the mysterious Jack moves to town, along with strange and disturbing otherworldly interest in his musical talent. The lyrical beauty of the writing and the way the story's concerns support the value of all of the girls' relationships (not just the romantic ones) make this contemporary myth surprising and affecting. 

     * Janelle Monae, Electric Lady (Bad Boy Records 2013) — Janelle Monae’s latest album is a musical work of science fiction, the latest installment in the conceptually rich world of Cindi Mayweather, a prototype android. A cross-medium Afrofuturist fable, loosely inspired by Fritz Lang’s 1927 film Metropolis, Electric Lady has dramatic scope, powered by magnetic waves of sound and rhythm.

    * Helene Wecker, The Golem and the Jinni (Harper 2013) — This debut novel combines elements of Jewish and Arab folk mythology in an immigrant tale, the story of two supernatural creatures in 1899 New York. Ahmad is a jinni, a “man” made of fire. Chava is a golem, a “woman” fashioned of clay. A golem is traditionally male. By making Chava a female figure, Wecker expands this well-trod fantasy element. Although she is a powerful and supernatural being, Chava discovers that in 19th-century New York, her choices and freedoms are limited by the gender of the body she inhabits.
   

 * S. M. Wheeler, Sea Change (Tor 2013) — This debut novel tells a dark, fairytale-like story of a young girl and her best friend, Octavius, who is an eloquent, intelligent kraken. When Octavius is captured, Lilly sets out to rescue him, bargaining with a greedy circus master, a witch, and a pair of gay bandits. She is transformed by her quest, giving up everything she has known, including her gender, to save her friend.

The Tiptree Award winner and authors on the Honor List will be celebrated during Memorial Day weekend at WisCon (www.wiscon.info) in Madison, Wisconsin. N.A. Sulway will receive $1000 in prize money, a specially commissioned piece of original artwork, and (as always) chocolate.

Each year, a panel of five jurors selects the Tiptree Award winner. The 2013 jurors were Ellen Klages (chair), Christopher Barzak, Jayna Brown, Nene Ormes, and Gretchen Treu.

Reading for 2014 will soon begin. The jury panel consists of Darrah Chavey (chair), Elizabeth Bear, Amy Thomson, Joan Haran, and Alaya Dawn Johnson.

As always, the Tiptree Award invites everyone to recommend works for the award. Please submit recommendations via the Tiptree Award website at www.tiptree.org, where you can also read more about the award, about works it has honored, and about past winners.

2012 Tiptree Awards

The James Tiptree Awards have just been announced, and Wow! Aqueduct has another winner! Joyous congratulations to Aqueductistas Kiini Ibura Salaam (co-winner) and Lesley Wheeler (Honor List)! But I'm getting ahead of myself. Here's the complete skinny:

The Tiptree Award for 2012 goes to two books. The Drowning Girl by Caitlin R. Kiernan and Ancient, Ancient by Kiini Ibura Salaam.


Caitlin R. Kiernan’s The Drowning Girl probably couldn’t have been written without its multifaceted consideration of gender roles and its extraordinary management of an unreliable narrator who doesn’t even trust herself. For India Morgan Phelps (aka Imp), the act of telling the story parallels the act of choosing a path or an identity as she makes her way through a maze of false memories and blurred realities. Using myth, art, and mental illness, this beautifully written novel explores the boundaries between reality and fantasy, sanity and insanity, and art and dream.  It’s complex in its plot, metaphor, and style as well as in its thinking about one’s role as a woman and a daughter. In its characters, lesbian, straight, and transgender, old and young, this novel also recognizes the complexity of human beings.

 In Ancient, Ancient, Kiini Ibura Salaam’s startling stories combine science fiction, fantasy, and mythology in a sensuous exploration of what it means to live while struggling to define self and other. Salaam’s language is poetic and sensuous — a unique and original voice. The stories are ambitious and challenging, demonstrating excellent range in both storytelling style and imagery, from the mundane to the fully fantastical. Salaam is particularly interested in agency in oppressive social realities and explores how oppression works on our gendered bodies.

In addition to selecting the winner, the jury chooses a Tiptree Award Honor List. The Honor List is a strong part of the award’s identity and is used by many readers as a recommended reading list for the rest of the year. This year’s Honor List is:

 §     Elizabeth Bear, Range of Ghosts (Tor 2012) — A rip-roaring tale with imaginative worldbuilding, convincing exploration of gender, power, and possibility, and an intriguing juxtaposition of procreative energy, wizardly magic, and necromancy. The first book in the Eternal Sky trilogy.

 §       Roz Kaveney, Rituals (Plus One Press 2012) — Tremendous fun while dealing with serious issues around power, gender, class, economics.  Genre-savvy while subverting conventions and tropes. This is the first book in Rhapsody of Blood, a four-part series.

 §       M.J. Locke, Up Against It (Tor 2011) — On an asteroid world, characters struggle with the social implications of altered biology. The control and betrayal of innocent AI’s are particularly fascinating.

 §       Kim Stanley Robinson, 2312 (Orbit 2012) — A rare and honest effort to examine gender multiplicity in pure hard-SF terms. This vision of freedom from gender assignment could help revise the standard hard-SF future in much the same way that Robinson’s Mars trilogy revised the portrayal of Mars in science fiction.

§         Karin Tidbeck, Jagannath (Cheeky Frawg Books, 2012) — A beautifully written collection of short stories using Norse myth; the ones that involve gender identities present figures not easily forgotten, from the Aunts to the Great Mother to the characters mooning over an airship and a steam engine.

 §       Ankaret Wells, Firebrand (Epicon Press 2012) — Set in the steampunk era, this fun read shows women dealing with the restrictions of society on their way to gaining political and economic power and considers how definitions of “proper” behavior worked across cultural, class, and species’ boundaries.

 §        Lesley Wheeler, “The Receptionist” (in The Receptionist and Other Tales, Aqueduct Press 2012) — An overt exploration of gender and power in narrative poetry with splendidly drawn characters and pitch-perfect language.

The Tiptree Award winners will be honored during Memorial Day weekend at WisCon in Madison, Wisconsin. Each winner will receive $1000 in prize money, a specially commissioned piece of original artwork, and (as always) chocolate.  

Each year, a panel of five jurors selects the Tiptree Award winner. The 2012 jurors were Joan Gordon (chair), Andrea Hairston, Lesley Hall, Karen Lord, and Gary K. Wolfe.

I lifted the above whole from the Tiptree website. Congratulations, of course, to both winners and everyone on the Honor List (and also, of course, to the jury). And happy reading to all of us!

2011 Tipree Award is announced

Thrilling news! Andrea Hairston's Redwood and Wildfire has won the James Tiptree Jr. Award! Here's the low-down from the James Tiptree Jr. Award website:

Redwood and Wildfire by Andrea Hairston (Aqueduct Press, 2011) is the winner of the 2011 James Tiptree Jr. Award.

Redwood and Wildfire was a favorite of the jurors from the moment they read it. They reported: “This vivid and emotionally satisfying novel encompasses the life of Redwood, a hoodoo woman, as she migrates from rural Georgia to Chicago at the turn of the 20th century. While Redwood’s romance with Aidan Wildfire is central to the novel, female friendship is also a major theme, without deferring to the romance. Hairston incorporates romantic love into a constellation, rather than portraying it as a solo shining star. Her characters invoke a sky where it can shine; they live and love without losing themselves in cultural expectations, prejudices and stereotypes, all within a lovingly sketched historical frame.

“Intersections of race, class, and gender encompass these characters’ entire lives. They struggle with external and internal forces around questions of gender roles, love, identity, and sexuality. This challenge drives how they move through the world and how it sees them. The characters in Redwood and Wildfire deftly negotiate freedom and integrity in a society where it’s difficult to hold true to these things.”

Honor List:

In addition to selecting the winner, the jury chose a Tiptree Award Honor List. The Honor List is a strong part of the award’s identity and is used by many readers as a recommended reading list for the rest of the year. This year’s Honor List is:

Libba Bray, Beauty Queens (Scholastic Press 2011) — In this atypically comedic Tiptree candidate, a cast of iconic characters trapped on a hostile island (populated by the capitalist analog of Doctor No) illuminates the limited palette of roles for women and offers the hope of more rewarding and rounded lives.

L. Timmel Duchamp, “The Nones of Quintilus” (in her collection Never at Home, Aqueduct Press 2011) — This standout story addresses the relationships between mothers and daughters and how the world looks different when you become (or intend to become) pregnant.

Kameron Hurley, God’s War (Night Shade Books 2011) — Set on a marginally habitable world divided by a common religion with diverse interpretations, this engaging work explores a militaristic matriarchal society.

Gwyneth Jones, The Universe of Things (Aqueduct Press 2011) — Running through these gorgeous stories is a fierce awareness of how gender roles and other social power imbalances are always factors in how we think, how we approach one another, how we see the world. The author questions the status quo, and then questions the questioning, so what emerges is a mature, honest, thoughtful complexity.

Alice Sola Kim, “The Other Graces” (Asimov’s Science Fiction, July 2010) — This elegantly written short story revisits the role of mirroring in self-actualization and casts that path in a new and skiffy light as its heroine, Grace, is mentored by her older alternate selves. It also depicts racial/cultural intersections with gender roles.

Sandra McDonald, “Seven Sexy Cowboy Robots” (Strange Horizons, 2010.10.04) — A surreal and subversive take on human-AI relations. An older female character exploring her sexuality is a rare thing in science fiction, and it is refreshing to see it handled here with such a deft hand.

Maureen F. McHugh, “After the Apocalypse” (in her collection After the Apocalypse, Small Beer Press 2011) — This title story of an impressive collection brings to the foreground gender expectations concerning the practice of motherhood in extreme situations and then completely and matter-of-factly upends them.

Delia Sherman, The Freedom Maze (Big Mouth House 2011) — A clear-hearted, magically immersive time travel story that explores powerful ideas. Thrown back through time to an antebellum plantation, a thirteen-year-old comes to understand how women’s experience is shaped by cultural expectations as they interweave with social, economic, and racial truths.

Kim Westwood, The Courier’s New Bicycle (Harper Voyager Australia 2011) — This compelling novel depicts a variety of sexually transgressive characters and looks at themes of fertility and alternate family structures through a dystopic lens.

Celebrating the 20th Anniversary of the James Tiptree Jr Award

I hear that there are lots of people who, beginning their journeys home from WisCon, now find themselves in stranded travel situations, meaning they're spending hour upon hour in airports, waiting. My sympathies to you all. (This seems to happen more frequently every year, doesn't it?)

At this year's WisCon, the Tiptree Award celebrated its 20th birthday. In addition to holding the wildly popular annual auction conducted by the inimitable Ellen Klages (and this year assisted manfully by Geoff Ryman)and announcing this year's winners and Honor List as is usually done after the Guest of Honor speech(es), the Tiptree Award Motherboard threw a party. (Was it Friday night? I think so, but the days, the nights, at WisCon have rather blurred together in my memory.) The party featured not only the usual alluring refreshments to be found at WisCon parties, but also a splendid cake by Georgie Schnobrich. Matt Austern photographed the cake and graciously sent it to me:

As Pat Murphy noted before introducing Penny Hill, who chaired last year's jury, from the Tiptree Award's inception, WisCon has been key. Pat also announced that the Tiptree Motherboard had been awarded SFRA's 2011 Thomas D. Clareson Award for Distinguished Service. She said that when she and Karen Joy Fowler were making their travel arrangements, Karen had some hesitation about spending the money necessary for them to travel to Poland (where the SFRA held their annual conference this year), only to be reminded that the Tiptree Award is about "World Domination." (Originally through bake sales, granted...)

2011 Tiptree Jury

This just in:

Nisi Shawl says: "I am a 2011 Tiptree Award juror.  Lynne Thomas is the jury panel chair.  Karen Meisner, James Nicoll, and Tansy Rayner Roberts are my other co-jurors.  Nominate winners at http://tiptree.org/?page_id=41."

2010 James Tiptree Jr. Award

he 2010 James Tiptree Jr. Award has been announced:

The James Tiptree, Jr. Literary Award Council is pleased to announce that the 2010 Tiptree Award is being given to Baba Yaga Laid an Egg, by Dubravka Ugresic (Canongate, 2010).


Baba Yaga Laid an Egg impressed with its power and its grace. Tiptree juror Jessa Crispin explains that the beginning of the book “does not scream science fiction or fantasy. It starts quietly, with a meditation on the author’s aging mother, and the invisibility of the older woman…. But things shift wholly in the second act, with a surreal little tale of three old ladies, newly moneyed, who check into an Eastern European health spa. There’s another revolution in the third act, where what looks like a scholarly examination of the Russian fairy tale hag erupts into a rallying cry for mistreated and invisible women everywhere.”

Crispin notes that the fairy tale figure Baba Yaga is the witch, the hag, the inappropriate wild woman, the marginalized and the despised. She represents inappropriateness, wilderness, and confusion. “She’s appropriate material for Ugresic, who was forced into exile from Croatia for her political beliefs. The jurors feel Baba Yaga Laid an Egg is a splendid representation of this type of woman, so cut out of today’s culture.”

HONOR LIST

The Honor List is a strong part of the award’s identity and is used by many readers as a recommended reading list for the rest of the year. This year’s Honor List is:

The Bone Palace by Amanda Downum (Orbit 2010) — noted for a deliciously complicated plot that challenges 21st century Earth attitudes toward transfolk. One juror noted that this book came closest among the honor list to meeting her Tiptree ideal by including a character that not only embodies a challenge to prescribed roles, but also creates a crack in or addition to the structure that carries forward to future generations.

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin (Orbit 2010) — set in a matriarchal society where the privilege and expectations between the sexes are reversed, while the gender roles are different but recognizable (and believable).

“Diana Comet and the Disappearing Lover” by Sandra McDonald (published as “Diana Comet,” Strange Horizons, March 2 & March 9, 2009) — a (true) love story, in which the author does something simple but radical with the identity issues at play.
“Drag Queen Astronaut” by Sandra McDonald (Crossed Genres issue 24, November 2010) — a wonderful exploration (and ultimately an affirmation) of a gender presentation that tends to be ignored or ridiculed.

The Secret Feminist Cabal by Helen Merrick (Aqueduct Press 2009) — an academic look at the history of early feminism in science fiction, science fiction criticism, and fandom that provides a valuable documentation of our beginnings

Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor (DAW 2010) —A strong female lead character breaks out of restrictive gender roles to change her life, perhaps changing history as a result. A well-written perspective on prejudice and discrimination and the lessons needed to overcome their bonds on our identities and imaginations.

Living with Ghosts by Kari Sperring (DAW 2009) — an unusual perspective in a main character —a feminized man who makes much of his living as an escort/high-class sex worker who sees ghosts when he is not expecting — or expected — to be able to do so. An excellent read.

The Colony by Jillian Weise (Soft Skull Press 2010) — Takes on the idea that pervades our culture that women have to be perfect in order to have sex with men. One juror notes: “I’ve never read a book that made a woman with one leg so sexually normal.” Smart and well written with subtle gender politics.

In addition to the honor list, this year’s jury also compiled the following long list of other works they found worthy of attention:

* Beth Bernobich, Passion Play (Tor 2010)
* Stevie Carroll, “The Monitors” (Echoes of Possibilities, edited by Aleksandr Volnov, Noble Romance Publishing 2010)
* Roxane Gay, “Things I Know About Fairy Tales” (Necessary Fiction, May 13, 2009)
* Frances Hardinge, Gullstruck Island (MacMillan 2009)
* Julia Holmes, Meeks (Small Beer Press 2010)
* Malinda Lo, Ash (Little, Brown 2009)
* Alissa Nutting, Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls (Starcherone Books 2010)
* Helen Oyeyemi, White Is for Witching (Doubleday 2009)
* Rachel Swirsky, “Eros, Philia, Agape” (Tor.com, March 3, 2009)

This year’s jurors were Penny Hill (chair), Euan Bear, Jessa Crispin, Alice Sola Kim, and Lawrence Schimel.