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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Submissions

In Print

Vol. 82
Conjunctions:82
Works & Days
Spring 2024
Bradford Morrow

Online

Rendered
by Julia Juster
July 24, 2024
On Valentine’s Day, Milo strings a horse-shaped piñata from the ceiling light in our living room, and I walk by twice before noticing it swaying there. The light is off and the horse is dark, but I am not unobservant. Part of me accepts a horse swinging in my periphery. Milo makes up a real reason for me to go back down the hall and, when I look for the space heater, I find the horse hanging. He dangles from a yellow jump rope, and I am so happy to see him in my house. Milo hands me the stick. “You need,” he says, “to kill a horse.”
 
Into the Arms of the Man on the Moon
by Yannick Murphy
July 17, 2024
There is the man on the moon. Go to him. Get bread from him, drink his water. Take your dog, Blue to him. Take your mother. She is skiing outside around the house. Stop her, tell her that Blue is going also. Take the gander, Henry. He is short in the legs. Leave me Iris. I have seen her eat feed in a pattern.
 
Permanent Collection
by Joe Sacksteder
July 10, 2024
Marcie decided on Vertigo because she’d recently encountered several texts in quick succession that made extensive reference to it: Chris Marker’s time travel film told in still images, La Jetée, Terry Gilliam’s unlikely Hollywood adaptation, 12 Monkeys, and a story by Bennett Sims called “White Dialogues” about an embittered academic seething in an auditorium during a lecture being given by the hot new thing in Hitchcock studies. The coincidence made her feel involved with the film, and vice versa, in a way that evades more specific description.