Contributors

James Tiptree, Jr.
Contributor History
  • Favored by Strange Gods: A Selection of Letters to Joanna Russ, Conjunctions:67

Biography
Alice Bradley Sheldon (1915–1987), aka James Tiptree, Jr., aka Raccoona Sheldon, grew up traveling with her parents through regions such as India and central Africa. In the 1940s and 1950s, she worked as an Air Force photointelligence officer and for the CIA, before publishing her first short story in 1968. Writing under a male pseudonym for twenty years, Sheldon had a revolutionary effect on the science fiction of the 1970s and 1980s in her exploration of political—and especially fem- inist—themes. The many books she published during her lifetime include Ten Thousand Light-Years from Home (Eyre Methuen), Star Songs of an Old Primate (Del Rey), Up the Walls of the World (Berkley Books), Tales of the Quintana Roo (Arkham House), and Crown of Stars (Tor). Avowedly a lesbian (among other, more complicated orientations), she nevertheless enjoyed a close marriage of four decades with her husband, Huntington D. Sheldon. In 1987, with both spouses in ill health, Sheldon shot her husband and herself, having predicted her eventual suicide for many years. In 1991, the annual James Tiptree Jr. Award was created in her honor to recognize a work of science fiction or fantasy that expands or explores understandings of gender. Tachyon published an omnibus collection of her stories, Her Smoke Rose Up Forever, in 1994; and Open Road Media released the Kindle edition of Brightness Falls from the Air in 2014. Her honors include two Hugo Awards, three Nebula Awards, and posthumous induction into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. 

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current issue
Numina: The Enchantment Issue
Fall 2023
Bradford Morrow

Online

March 27, 2024
On my day off, I drove my aging father to his death in the quaint town he had frequented after the navy when he was bouncing between jobs. On the phone, two nights before the fated trip, was the first I had heard him speak of this place. Though I believed him, doubts soon set in, and I wondered whether his claim was a phantom of his condition.
March 20, 2024
Christmas Night lies bitter cold and silent over the capital, and all life seems frozen. Even the wind is still, and the stars flicker like minuscule fires that strive to keep life going. 
March 13, 2024
Ariadne struck the mast

Enraged. She     couldn’t sail, no

One had ever bothered to


Teach her, but the ship wouldn’t

Be still.     She had awoken

To find Thesus dead, his crew


Dead,     and at first she had felt

Relief.