Tiptree Time!
It’s that time of year again, when the Tiptree winners (and Honor List) are released. The award is designed to reward (and call attention to) works that explore or challenge the portrayal of gender, as well as being thought provoking and generally wonderful. The jury is always made up of four women and one man, and the award is administered by the Tiptree Motherboard.
Being on the 2011 Tiptree jury was a wonderful experience, and had up until that point been one of my major career goals.
But it’s a new year now, and a new jury have released their winners and honour list! The winners will be celebrated at this year’s Wiscon, and presented with $1000, chocolate, and a specially commissioned piece of artwork.
Hand-made reversible doll presented to Andrea Hairston as part of her Tiptree prize at Wiscon in 2012.
The Winners Are:
The Drowning Girl by Caitlin R. Kiernan
Ancient, Ancient by Kiini Ibura Salaam
THE HONOUR LIST:
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.
