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Judging the Tiptree
Description Current Tiptree jury members discuss the process of judging and selecting the Tiptree Award winners.
Location Senate A
Schedule Sat, 2:30–3:45 pm
Panelists Christopher Barzak, Nene Ormes, Gretchen T.
Note: Christopher Barzak was not present. The moderator was someone I didn't know who had previously served on a Tiptree jury.
Gretchen: There was a spreadsheet and a Yahoo group. We would get books mailed to us from the publishers on request, usually. I did a lot of sleuthing through publisher reps and I would ask reps for copies of certain things. That's how I found Ancillary Justice and Sea Change.
Nene: The books that showed up were not always the same ones as everyone else, because I lived in Sweden. I had to buy certain books on the shortlist for myself as ebooks through Amazon because they didn't show up. I'm a manager at a branch of a chain bookstore, so I did a lot of rifling through pages.
Gretchen: Some of the things that we judged not eligible were still good books, they just didn't fit the criteria of the Tiptree mission. They might not be science fictional enough, they might not be enough about gender, they might be good but not do anything that expanded our ideas of gender. We wanted books that were accessible to read, literary but not impenetrable. We talked about readability as a criterion.
Nene: One of my early favorites didn't fit, in terms of expanding or exploring gender. Ink. It explored immigration and being an illegal immigrant, wonderful book.
Mod: You shortlisted a piece of music. How did that get on your radar?
Gretchen: I'm a fan of Janelle Monáe and have been for years. I had to make an argument for inclusion. I don't think we met with too much resistance. It sparked a discussion about whether the mission means the written world only or it can explore stories told in other media. We had a brief discussion about the context of the worldbuilding around the videos, and it's not a straightforward linear story, it's a collective emotional impression of a future. It rewards many many listenings. I appreciate that even when a few jurors didn't get it, they allowed us to shortlist it. Other forms of storytelling are doing important work that's relevant to the mission.
Mod: You had the first reading of Rupetta.
Nene: Rupetta was the first book I read for this award. I was blown away and it was unfair to the other books, that I held other books to that standard. It was an interesting experience spending a full year reading only "enlightened" literature. I was interviewed for a magazine about this and the headline was "A Year Without Male Chauvinism." So, Rupetta ended up on my must-read list immediately, and then I had a long dry spell with books not reaching across the Atlantic. I read a lot very fast in the middle of the summer. Aliette de Bodard's "Heaven on Earth" was also one of my favorites. Her other stories deal with different gender roles, but that was the one that really fit with the Tiptree mission.
Gretchen: When I got to Rupetta it was like a breath of fresh air. I had this fear -- what if everyone else likes this book and I don't get it? -- and then I read it and thought nope, that's it, that's the one. I found it so readable and so intricate and so careful in so many beautiful ways. My only hesitation was that it was published by a very small press in the UK and we weren't going to be able to sell it at Wiscon. I was glad that they were able to make a paperback edition for us. I want everyone who cares about women's histories to be able to read it. It's about a woman trying to recover the women's history in her culture, and she has trouble getting her advisors to listen to her, and that's true for so many academics. I was really happy that it won.
Mod: Can you tell us about it for those of us who haven't read it?
Nene: Rupetta is an AI made of leather and cloth and love and magic... it's the opposite of what we think of as an AI. We think of AIs as being male (android), computers, of the mind and not the body. Rupetta is very of the body. She's created in something like the Renaissance in an alternate version of our world. Her maker touches her heart and uses a key to start her up. The magic is the touch of another person on her heart. She spends some time in decline, thinking of the cycle of life. I'll keep spoilers to a minimum, but it deals with how such a being can change the world as we see it. The smallest things can be so big with the people around her, and can create such large rings in the water. It's almost mandatory to read this book.
Gretchen: It alternates viewpoints. There's a weight of history. Rupetta's created hundreds of years ago and history changes around her. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out if it's our world or an alternate world. There's a lot about how other people react to Rupetta, how they exploit her existence or create from it, and that was a really rewarding part of this book. Those differences aren't good or bad, necessarily, but they have a weight.
Mod: This book was published by a small british press, mostly available as an e-book. The few remaining copies immediately sold out after it was announced as the winner. The paperback comes out with big letters on the front, winner of the Tiptree Award. This is probably our biggest success from a bookselling standpoint. Can you talk about the books on the honor list?
Gretchen: I'll bring up the question of Hild. We all thought it was brilliant, we all thought it explored gender in creative ways. About St. Hilda of Whitby. Her mother teaches her how to use her prescience and abilities of observation in political ways. Using spies to make prophecies seem real. Discussion about whether this counts as speculative enough for the award. I felt that it doesn't. I was fine with it being on the honor list, but it's historical fiction, and we didn't consider other books that were historical fiction and also may have explored and expanded gender. In the end we were so taken with Rupetta that we wanted that book to stand on its own.
Nene: We had two runners-up, Ancillary Justice and Hild, which we considered equally good for very different reasons. Rupetta stood out from those very much, so they ended up on the honor list. I don't want to say they had lesser value -- they were very worthy books -- but they weren't as much a winner. I hadn't read Nicola Griffith before. She said that she used all her science fictional techniques to get into the (thinly described in the historical record) world of St. Hilda. She did as much with worldbuilding as a science fiction writer, even though it's set in our world and devoid of magic... her abilities are perceived as magic even though they're grounded in reality.
Mod: How about Eleanor Arnason's Big Mama Stories?
Nene: This was Ellen's baby all the way.
Gretchen: I didn't really read it, sorry. I flipped through it, and ... it was a time crunch issue. I apologize. We didn't really nix other people's babies in terms of the honor list. We could've had 40 things on there, if we really wanted, but that meant we didn't have to make decisions about what to cut... it allowed us to keep from being too contentious.
Mod: The jury the year before had nothing on the honor list that they hadn't considered to be a winner, so that's a difference. When we were doing this panel then... there were a lot of books that people hadn't read. I was reading things that might be the winner.
Gretchen: There was so much to go through and a lot of it was not good. We got a lot of stuff that didn't fit the award. Often it was small press or self-published and they were trying to cast a broad net, and there was a woman in the book, maybe you'll like it... a lot of big publishers don't know about the award and we weren't getting contact from them. I had to peruse the lists myself. One of the strengths of this award is it doesn't have to be something mainstream or something that has been taken through the large behemoth of the commercial publishing industry. We can consider things that are more niche that New York editors don't always consider worthy of their attention.
Mod: I don't see a lot of science fiction on your list:
Nene: There's Ancillary Justice. Electric Lady. A lot of the science fiction that we got was where there was a starship captain who was a bisexual woman, or a woman of color, and no other exploration of gender roles... I'm looking forward to more things on the level of Ancillary Justice with these kinds of questions. I think there are going to be more. If by Ann Leckie if nothing else.
Audience: How do books come under consideration?
Mod: The primary way is through our website. We take nominations for the Tiptree Award there.
Nene: Please, everyone, recommend books.
Mod: When we get the nomination, we ask the publisher for it... this jury read a lot of magazines on their own, they were out talking to publishers' reps. I read a lot of book reviews trying to see if there was anything good that might fall into our charge. The main thing is recommendations from as large a community as we can get. The Wiscon community gives us a lot of material to go through.
Nene: We give them a once-over, and then we read more deeply the ones that stand out. We send lists to each other of what are our favorites right now, what should the other people read. We didn't all get the same things, and we were weeding things out that way.
Audience: How are judges selected?
Mod: We have a long list of potential judges and anyone is welcome to get on the list. We try to pick a diverse group so they're not all like-minded. We try to have someone from overseas, because it's entertaining when they complain that they're not getting the books. We like writers, we like fans. We assemble a panel and then two of them say "not this year" so we come up with a panel that's diverse in different ways. You can come up and I'll put you on the list.
Nene: It's interesting that you keep someone on the jury who's not from the States... I've been talking about this a lot in Sweden. I get questions about how I, as a Swedish writer not published in English, ended up on the jury. It speaks to the quality of the jury that it's not just American hegemony. It was obvious for us when it came to The Golem and the Jinni. For me as a Swedish feminist there was nothing new in this. An emotional man and a strong woman? That didn't seem like it was remotely exploring and expanding gender. Other jurors were very vocal about it. We were all pushing our own things really hard so we didn't shoot each other down...
Audience: It seemed to me that you made these decisions easily and consensually...
Gretchen: It didn't seem that way at the time.
Nene: She wanted Electric Lady, I wanted Hild.
Gretchen: Every jury gets to decide how they make their decisions. But I appreciated that we had a discussion about what consensus means to us. We don't all have to agree, but we have to agree to trust each other as a group of people that we respect. Even one of us doesn't really get something we need to respect and honor each other's opinions about it.
Nene: Apart from the Swedish in me who strives for consensus in all things, it felt like a statement about diversity that we didn't have to agree with each other completely. Our respect for each person's tastes and loves showed through. At the end we had three choices each that we brought forward -- they overlapped to a certain extent.
Gretchen: I felt like there was a lot of respect there and we were all invested in making this important decision together. We weren't in competition with each other's tastes. An award has to go to one or two works, and there was some competition there, but... I'm proud of the honor list as a whole even though not everything was something that I cared about. That may be why we didn't have as much science fiction -- there weren't too many science fiction people on the jury.
Audience: Were there any books brought up that you felt very strongly against, and how did you deal with that?
Nene: Golem and the Jinni was a great book, but I didn't feel like it fit the Tiptree... but because other people felt so strongly, I didn't speak against it.
Gretchen: The way we did the honor list, each of us could represent our own tastes, and even if some of us didn't get it, it went on there.
Audience: I'm fascinated by the floating nature of the award. If you read the winning book from the past 20 years... would that be a journey through something?
Audience: There were books that made the shortlist 20 years ago that wouldn't show up today. But I think, for the winners, they're all just good books. Except for certain exceptions. In other words... the Tiptree has succeeded in that something that was once seen as new and innovative no longer is. It's happened that there was something on the list that people disliked... a few years ago at the panel there was a person who just hated something that was on the honor list, and so we required more consensus to put something on the honor list.
Can you talk a bit more about some of the shortlisted books?
Gretchen: I understand why the past winners won now that I've been through the experience. I found this to be a very personal and emotive experience. There's not objectivity in terms of what is perfect and true and good. There was some consensus to bring something to the top... there were past Tiptree-winning books that I didn't think were gendery enough or science-fictiony enough, and other jurors can help each other to understand what's good about a book... if you're not part of that process you don't necessarily understand.
Nene: I didn't find many stories that expanded and explored our view of gender. We've reached a point where it's not strange to have a female airship pilot or any of those things that would have once been considered out there. If I could wish for anything from the Tiptree, it's that people would help out with short stories, because there's so much to go through and we can't manage to read or even skim everything.
Gretchen: There were a lot of stories that were doing interesting things wrt gender, and there's one that stood out that had been published too long ago to be considered, by Alex Dally MacFarlane... it was a year of a lot of representation, which is strong and important for the field, but not enough challenge. A story that depicts something as unremarkable may be helping the field but not expanding gender.
Audience: If you're not finding it, that may have more to do with the magazines you're looking at and the editors. There's 3 magazines and all they do is publish gender-specific stuff.
Gretchen: We may not necessarily know about that stuff.
Audience: Use the recommendation form on the website.
Gretchen: Both of mine are... the editors come to WisCon. That doesn't mean they're not doing gatekeeping, but personal knowledge of them as people, I think they would consider it.
Mod: Part of the gatekeeping is about quality. It's great that people can get their stories out there, but sometimes they're not going to be strong enough as stories if they're not going through the editorial process, regardless of what they're about.
Nene: I read a lot of... the word I'm coming up with is substandard, but I don't mean that. Short stories need to step up their quality very very much to come up to the standards of the Tiptree. It gets wearying looking for the glimmers in there, but we try to read all the standard publications because sometimes they do publish something we need to look at.
Gretchen: I do take issue with the idea that the quality wasn't high enough, but sometimes there wasn't enough there there for me to feel like they delved deeply enough into their concepts and had the follow-through. A lot of representation but not necessarily exploration and expansion.
Nene: I read The Other Half Of The Sky, an anthology concerned with representation, and it was a marvelously good book. But it didn't do what the Tiptree should do.
Aud: How much discussion did you do about what is gender?
Gretchen: We didn't do a lot of discussing the concept of gender...
Nene: We came to the table with short introductions of ourselves and our views. Obviously there were a lot of places where certain works didn't fit my view of gender stretching.
Gretchen: I sort of wanted to have serious meaty definition discussions but I think it's a strength that we didn't do that. We each brought very different things to the table because we brought our own definitions. If we'd thought only about exploring genderqueerness, for example, that would've been limiting... we tried to consider books/stories on their own terms and our terms and there was discussion after between the jurists that it didn't necessarily make sense for one thing to be on there and one thing not to be...
Nene: We brought our own opinions in about why something was worthy of consideration, and in that process our own ideas about gender showed up.
Audience: My ideas about what gender was changed as I was reading. For each jury, there might be an evolution in the way the literature changes the jurists. Did you find that? Did your ideas expand?
Gretchen: It broadened my idea of what I thought of as Tiptree worthy. Before I would've thought, "This is just representation, it doesn't expand," but reading without that narrow focus, I thought it was doing a lot of exploration of what femininity means, for example. Not having that singular focus meant I saw value in different kinds of explorations.
Nene: I agree. Wonderful experience, would do again.
Audience: Shortlist?
Gretchen: I really love All Our Pretty Songs... it's about the friendship between two teenage girls. They end up in this orphean dark fantasy situation with a young man who blows into town with magical musical abilities. It's an exploration of female friendship that you see so rarely. It's a different kind of hero's journey.
Nene: Two other books that could be considered YA... Sea Change, about a girl who has a birthmark that marks her as evil. She's shunned. She makes friends with a kraken, and goes looking for him when he disappears. It's a story-like adventure without a story-like ending. She has to take the consequences for all the decisions she makes, and keep the consequences. I found it very moving. It didn't shy away from fairy-tale darkness. September Girls, Christopher Barzak's big push... A teenage boy who travels to the ocean with his family, which is falling apart. His mother has left, his father is trying to handle things... we get to see that family falling apart. The boy is a real ass in the building. It's his transformation from a very unlikeable teenage boy to a real person, through the lens of his encounter with these sea girls, like a variation of the Little Mermaid story. I found it fascinating to read a story that made that kind of transformation in a person, and it felt very real.
Gretchen: The Summer Prince. Beautifully written, YA science fiction set in dystopian matriarchal Brazil. The MC is a privileged girl. She and her best friend become involved with Enki, the Summer Prince. He's from a low-caste area and he will be killed at the end of the year as a ritual sacrifice. It's a lot to do with art, revolution, identity. Unconventional sexual relationships. MC's decisions really spoke to me. The worldbuilding was interesting and beautiful. Explored what it meant to be a girl, what it meant to be in doomed relationships. It did everything so well.
Nene: Ancillary Justice... I hand-sell it very hard. Space opera adventure with a mindship that has lost the ship, and all the bodies except one. The language the ship thinks in is without gendered pronouns... The writer signals this by using "she" for everybody. Very profound reading experience, but it took me a long time to understand why. A bit confusing at first and then relaxing. Even when I understood that a person identified as male, the character remained female in my head. It was marvelous. And the critique I've heard is, that's not enough to make it such a beautiful book... that's come from men, all the time, and they can't see how bit a deal it is to be the norm. This is the opposite of what you usually find.
Gretchen: There are many cultures in the book, some use gendered pronouns and gendered social systems... the ship's culture is very class-based. There's a lot of reflection on why ppl have to have gendered pronouns. Protag reflects on their own culture. There's still power imbalances, there's not a weird utopia. There's colonization and oppression. It's an excellent book.
Nene: This has been a wonderful experience. I'm deeply grateful, and it's changed my view of books and what I demand of books.
Gretchen: It was an honor to be asked, and an honor to serve, and I got to read free books all year. I look forward to what future juries bring us.
Location Senate A
Schedule Sat, 2:30–3:45 pm
Panelists Christopher Barzak, Nene Ormes, Gretchen T.
Note: Christopher Barzak was not present. The moderator was someone I didn't know who had previously served on a Tiptree jury.
Gretchen: There was a spreadsheet and a Yahoo group. We would get books mailed to us from the publishers on request, usually. I did a lot of sleuthing through publisher reps and I would ask reps for copies of certain things. That's how I found Ancillary Justice and Sea Change.
Nene: The books that showed up were not always the same ones as everyone else, because I lived in Sweden. I had to buy certain books on the shortlist for myself as ebooks through Amazon because they didn't show up. I'm a manager at a branch of a chain bookstore, so I did a lot of rifling through pages.
Gretchen: Some of the things that we judged not eligible were still good books, they just didn't fit the criteria of the Tiptree mission. They might not be science fictional enough, they might not be enough about gender, they might be good but not do anything that expanded our ideas of gender. We wanted books that were accessible to read, literary but not impenetrable. We talked about readability as a criterion.
Nene: One of my early favorites didn't fit, in terms of expanding or exploring gender. Ink. It explored immigration and being an illegal immigrant, wonderful book.
Mod: You shortlisted a piece of music. How did that get on your radar?
Gretchen: I'm a fan of Janelle Monáe and have been for years. I had to make an argument for inclusion. I don't think we met with too much resistance. It sparked a discussion about whether the mission means the written world only or it can explore stories told in other media. We had a brief discussion about the context of the worldbuilding around the videos, and it's not a straightforward linear story, it's a collective emotional impression of a future. It rewards many many listenings. I appreciate that even when a few jurors didn't get it, they allowed us to shortlist it. Other forms of storytelling are doing important work that's relevant to the mission.
Mod: You had the first reading of Rupetta.
Nene: Rupetta was the first book I read for this award. I was blown away and it was unfair to the other books, that I held other books to that standard. It was an interesting experience spending a full year reading only "enlightened" literature. I was interviewed for a magazine about this and the headline was "A Year Without Male Chauvinism." So, Rupetta ended up on my must-read list immediately, and then I had a long dry spell with books not reaching across the Atlantic. I read a lot very fast in the middle of the summer. Aliette de Bodard's "Heaven on Earth" was also one of my favorites. Her other stories deal with different gender roles, but that was the one that really fit with the Tiptree mission.
Gretchen: When I got to Rupetta it was like a breath of fresh air. I had this fear -- what if everyone else likes this book and I don't get it? -- and then I read it and thought nope, that's it, that's the one. I found it so readable and so intricate and so careful in so many beautiful ways. My only hesitation was that it was published by a very small press in the UK and we weren't going to be able to sell it at Wiscon. I was glad that they were able to make a paperback edition for us. I want everyone who cares about women's histories to be able to read it. It's about a woman trying to recover the women's history in her culture, and she has trouble getting her advisors to listen to her, and that's true for so many academics. I was really happy that it won.
Mod: Can you tell us about it for those of us who haven't read it?
Nene: Rupetta is an AI made of leather and cloth and love and magic... it's the opposite of what we think of as an AI. We think of AIs as being male (android), computers, of the mind and not the body. Rupetta is very of the body. She's created in something like the Renaissance in an alternate version of our world. Her maker touches her heart and uses a key to start her up. The magic is the touch of another person on her heart. She spends some time in decline, thinking of the cycle of life. I'll keep spoilers to a minimum, but it deals with how such a being can change the world as we see it. The smallest things can be so big with the people around her, and can create such large rings in the water. It's almost mandatory to read this book.
Gretchen: It alternates viewpoints. There's a weight of history. Rupetta's created hundreds of years ago and history changes around her. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out if it's our world or an alternate world. There's a lot about how other people react to Rupetta, how they exploit her existence or create from it, and that was a really rewarding part of this book. Those differences aren't good or bad, necessarily, but they have a weight.
Mod: This book was published by a small british press, mostly available as an e-book. The few remaining copies immediately sold out after it was announced as the winner. The paperback comes out with big letters on the front, winner of the Tiptree Award. This is probably our biggest success from a bookselling standpoint. Can you talk about the books on the honor list?
Gretchen: I'll bring up the question of Hild. We all thought it was brilliant, we all thought it explored gender in creative ways. About St. Hilda of Whitby. Her mother teaches her how to use her prescience and abilities of observation in political ways. Using spies to make prophecies seem real. Discussion about whether this counts as speculative enough for the award. I felt that it doesn't. I was fine with it being on the honor list, but it's historical fiction, and we didn't consider other books that were historical fiction and also may have explored and expanded gender. In the end we were so taken with Rupetta that we wanted that book to stand on its own.
Nene: We had two runners-up, Ancillary Justice and Hild, which we considered equally good for very different reasons. Rupetta stood out from those very much, so they ended up on the honor list. I don't want to say they had lesser value -- they were very worthy books -- but they weren't as much a winner. I hadn't read Nicola Griffith before. She said that she used all her science fictional techniques to get into the (thinly described in the historical record) world of St. Hilda. She did as much with worldbuilding as a science fiction writer, even though it's set in our world and devoid of magic... her abilities are perceived as magic even though they're grounded in reality.
Mod: How about Eleanor Arnason's Big Mama Stories?
Nene: This was Ellen's baby all the way.
Gretchen: I didn't really read it, sorry. I flipped through it, and ... it was a time crunch issue. I apologize. We didn't really nix other people's babies in terms of the honor list. We could've had 40 things on there, if we really wanted, but that meant we didn't have to make decisions about what to cut... it allowed us to keep from being too contentious.
Mod: The jury the year before had nothing on the honor list that they hadn't considered to be a winner, so that's a difference. When we were doing this panel then... there were a lot of books that people hadn't read. I was reading things that might be the winner.
Gretchen: There was so much to go through and a lot of it was not good. We got a lot of stuff that didn't fit the award. Often it was small press or self-published and they were trying to cast a broad net, and there was a woman in the book, maybe you'll like it... a lot of big publishers don't know about the award and we weren't getting contact from them. I had to peruse the lists myself. One of the strengths of this award is it doesn't have to be something mainstream or something that has been taken through the large behemoth of the commercial publishing industry. We can consider things that are more niche that New York editors don't always consider worthy of their attention.
Mod: I don't see a lot of science fiction on your list:
Nene: There's Ancillary Justice. Electric Lady. A lot of the science fiction that we got was where there was a starship captain who was a bisexual woman, or a woman of color, and no other exploration of gender roles... I'm looking forward to more things on the level of Ancillary Justice with these kinds of questions. I think there are going to be more. If by Ann Leckie if nothing else.
Audience: How do books come under consideration?
Mod: The primary way is through our website. We take nominations for the Tiptree Award there.
Nene: Please, everyone, recommend books.
Mod: When we get the nomination, we ask the publisher for it... this jury read a lot of magazines on their own, they were out talking to publishers' reps. I read a lot of book reviews trying to see if there was anything good that might fall into our charge. The main thing is recommendations from as large a community as we can get. The Wiscon community gives us a lot of material to go through.
Nene: We give them a once-over, and then we read more deeply the ones that stand out. We send lists to each other of what are our favorites right now, what should the other people read. We didn't all get the same things, and we were weeding things out that way.
Audience: How are judges selected?
Mod: We have a long list of potential judges and anyone is welcome to get on the list. We try to pick a diverse group so they're not all like-minded. We try to have someone from overseas, because it's entertaining when they complain that they're not getting the books. We like writers, we like fans. We assemble a panel and then two of them say "not this year" so we come up with a panel that's diverse in different ways. You can come up and I'll put you on the list.
Nene: It's interesting that you keep someone on the jury who's not from the States... I've been talking about this a lot in Sweden. I get questions about how I, as a Swedish writer not published in English, ended up on the jury. It speaks to the quality of the jury that it's not just American hegemony. It was obvious for us when it came to The Golem and the Jinni. For me as a Swedish feminist there was nothing new in this. An emotional man and a strong woman? That didn't seem like it was remotely exploring and expanding gender. Other jurors were very vocal about it. We were all pushing our own things really hard so we didn't shoot each other down...
Audience: It seemed to me that you made these decisions easily and consensually...
Gretchen: It didn't seem that way at the time.
Nene: She wanted Electric Lady, I wanted Hild.
Gretchen: Every jury gets to decide how they make their decisions. But I appreciated that we had a discussion about what consensus means to us. We don't all have to agree, but we have to agree to trust each other as a group of people that we respect. Even one of us doesn't really get something we need to respect and honor each other's opinions about it.
Nene: Apart from the Swedish in me who strives for consensus in all things, it felt like a statement about diversity that we didn't have to agree with each other completely. Our respect for each person's tastes and loves showed through. At the end we had three choices each that we brought forward -- they overlapped to a certain extent.
Gretchen: I felt like there was a lot of respect there and we were all invested in making this important decision together. We weren't in competition with each other's tastes. An award has to go to one or two works, and there was some competition there, but... I'm proud of the honor list as a whole even though not everything was something that I cared about. That may be why we didn't have as much science fiction -- there weren't too many science fiction people on the jury.
Audience: Were there any books brought up that you felt very strongly against, and how did you deal with that?
Nene: Golem and the Jinni was a great book, but I didn't feel like it fit the Tiptree... but because other people felt so strongly, I didn't speak against it.
Gretchen: The way we did the honor list, each of us could represent our own tastes, and even if some of us didn't get it, it went on there.
Audience: I'm fascinated by the floating nature of the award. If you read the winning book from the past 20 years... would that be a journey through something?
Audience: There were books that made the shortlist 20 years ago that wouldn't show up today. But I think, for the winners, they're all just good books. Except for certain exceptions. In other words... the Tiptree has succeeded in that something that was once seen as new and innovative no longer is. It's happened that there was something on the list that people disliked... a few years ago at the panel there was a person who just hated something that was on the honor list, and so we required more consensus to put something on the honor list.
Can you talk a bit more about some of the shortlisted books?
Gretchen: I understand why the past winners won now that I've been through the experience. I found this to be a very personal and emotive experience. There's not objectivity in terms of what is perfect and true and good. There was some consensus to bring something to the top... there were past Tiptree-winning books that I didn't think were gendery enough or science-fictiony enough, and other jurors can help each other to understand what's good about a book... if you're not part of that process you don't necessarily understand.
Nene: I didn't find many stories that expanded and explored our view of gender. We've reached a point where it's not strange to have a female airship pilot or any of those things that would have once been considered out there. If I could wish for anything from the Tiptree, it's that people would help out with short stories, because there's so much to go through and we can't manage to read or even skim everything.
Gretchen: There were a lot of stories that were doing interesting things wrt gender, and there's one that stood out that had been published too long ago to be considered, by Alex Dally MacFarlane... it was a year of a lot of representation, which is strong and important for the field, but not enough challenge. A story that depicts something as unremarkable may be helping the field but not expanding gender.
Audience: If you're not finding it, that may have more to do with the magazines you're looking at and the editors. There's 3 magazines and all they do is publish gender-specific stuff.
Gretchen: We may not necessarily know about that stuff.
Audience: Use the recommendation form on the website.
Gretchen: Both of mine are... the editors come to WisCon. That doesn't mean they're not doing gatekeeping, but personal knowledge of them as people, I think they would consider it.
Mod: Part of the gatekeeping is about quality. It's great that people can get their stories out there, but sometimes they're not going to be strong enough as stories if they're not going through the editorial process, regardless of what they're about.
Nene: I read a lot of... the word I'm coming up with is substandard, but I don't mean that. Short stories need to step up their quality very very much to come up to the standards of the Tiptree. It gets wearying looking for the glimmers in there, but we try to read all the standard publications because sometimes they do publish something we need to look at.
Gretchen: I do take issue with the idea that the quality wasn't high enough, but sometimes there wasn't enough there there for me to feel like they delved deeply enough into their concepts and had the follow-through. A lot of representation but not necessarily exploration and expansion.
Nene: I read The Other Half Of The Sky, an anthology concerned with representation, and it was a marvelously good book. But it didn't do what the Tiptree should do.
Aud: How much discussion did you do about what is gender?
Gretchen: We didn't do a lot of discussing the concept of gender...
Nene: We came to the table with short introductions of ourselves and our views. Obviously there were a lot of places where certain works didn't fit my view of gender stretching.
Gretchen: I sort of wanted to have serious meaty definition discussions but I think it's a strength that we didn't do that. We each brought very different things to the table because we brought our own definitions. If we'd thought only about exploring genderqueerness, for example, that would've been limiting... we tried to consider books/stories on their own terms and our terms and there was discussion after between the jurists that it didn't necessarily make sense for one thing to be on there and one thing not to be...
Nene: We brought our own opinions in about why something was worthy of consideration, and in that process our own ideas about gender showed up.
Audience: My ideas about what gender was changed as I was reading. For each jury, there might be an evolution in the way the literature changes the jurists. Did you find that? Did your ideas expand?
Gretchen: It broadened my idea of what I thought of as Tiptree worthy. Before I would've thought, "This is just representation, it doesn't expand," but reading without that narrow focus, I thought it was doing a lot of exploration of what femininity means, for example. Not having that singular focus meant I saw value in different kinds of explorations.
Nene: I agree. Wonderful experience, would do again.
Audience: Shortlist?
Gretchen: I really love All Our Pretty Songs... it's about the friendship between two teenage girls. They end up in this orphean dark fantasy situation with a young man who blows into town with magical musical abilities. It's an exploration of female friendship that you see so rarely. It's a different kind of hero's journey.
Nene: Two other books that could be considered YA... Sea Change, about a girl who has a birthmark that marks her as evil. She's shunned. She makes friends with a kraken, and goes looking for him when he disappears. It's a story-like adventure without a story-like ending. She has to take the consequences for all the decisions she makes, and keep the consequences. I found it very moving. It didn't shy away from fairy-tale darkness. September Girls, Christopher Barzak's big push... A teenage boy who travels to the ocean with his family, which is falling apart. His mother has left, his father is trying to handle things... we get to see that family falling apart. The boy is a real ass in the building. It's his transformation from a very unlikeable teenage boy to a real person, through the lens of his encounter with these sea girls, like a variation of the Little Mermaid story. I found it fascinating to read a story that made that kind of transformation in a person, and it felt very real.
Gretchen: The Summer Prince. Beautifully written, YA science fiction set in dystopian matriarchal Brazil. The MC is a privileged girl. She and her best friend become involved with Enki, the Summer Prince. He's from a low-caste area and he will be killed at the end of the year as a ritual sacrifice. It's a lot to do with art, revolution, identity. Unconventional sexual relationships. MC's decisions really spoke to me. The worldbuilding was interesting and beautiful. Explored what it meant to be a girl, what it meant to be in doomed relationships. It did everything so well.
Nene: Ancillary Justice... I hand-sell it very hard. Space opera adventure with a mindship that has lost the ship, and all the bodies except one. The language the ship thinks in is without gendered pronouns... The writer signals this by using "she" for everybody. Very profound reading experience, but it took me a long time to understand why. A bit confusing at first and then relaxing. Even when I understood that a person identified as male, the character remained female in my head. It was marvelous. And the critique I've heard is, that's not enough to make it such a beautiful book... that's come from men, all the time, and they can't see how bit a deal it is to be the norm. This is the opposite of what you usually find.
Gretchen: There are many cultures in the book, some use gendered pronouns and gendered social systems... the ship's culture is very class-based. There's a lot of reflection on why ppl have to have gendered pronouns. Protag reflects on their own culture. There's still power imbalances, there's not a weird utopia. There's colonization and oppression. It's an excellent book.
Nene: This has been a wonderful experience. I'm deeply grateful, and it's changed my view of books and what I demand of books.
Gretchen: It was an honor to be asked, and an honor to serve, and I got to read free books all year. I look forward to what future juries bring us.
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