Awards:
NEBULA (1972) for best short story with "When it Changed".
PILGRIM AWARD (1988) for sf criticism.
HUGO (1983) for best novella with "Souls"

Short Story:
"Nor Custom Stale" (1959)
"Daddy's Girl" (1975)
"The Autobiography of My Mother" (1975)

Novella:
"Souls" (1982)

Novel:
PICNIC ON PARADISE (1968)
AND CHAOS DIED (1970)
THE FEMALE MAN (1975)
WE WHO ARE ABOUT TO ... (1977)
THE TWO OF THEM (1978)

Collections:
ALYX (aka THE ADVENTURES OF ALYX) (1976)
THE HIDDEN SIDE OF THE MOON (1987)
THE ZANZIBAR CAT (1983)
EXTRA(ORDINARY) PEOPLE (1984)

Juvenile:
KITTATINNY: A TALE OF MAGIC (1978)

Edited:
WOMANSPACE: FUTURE AND FANTASY STORIES AND ART BY WOMEN (1981)

Nonfiction:
HOW TO SUPPRESS WOMEN'S WRITING (1983)

Essays:
MAGIC MOMMAS, TREMBLING SISTERS, PURITANS AND PERVERTS: FEMINIST ESSAYS (1985).

The science fiction and fantasy novels of Ursula LeGuin, b. Ursula Kroeber in Berkeley, Calif.,Oct. 21, 1929, have won a wide audience. In her science fiction she examines contemporary problems by restating them in terms of other imagined worlds--for example, the possibility for perfect anarchic society, in The Dispossessed, (1974); and life in an androgynous world, in The Left Hand of Darkness, (1969). LeGuin is also the author of a fantasy series for children, the Earthsea trilogy, and has received many awards, including
the Boston Globe-Hornbook Award for juvenile fiction (1968) and the National Book Award (1973) for the children's book The Farthest Shore. Her other works include poetry, stories (collected in The Wind's Twelve Quarters, 1975), essays on science fiction, and the novels Malafrena (1979) and The Compass Rose (1982).

Text Copyright © 1993 Grolier Incorporated

Some of her works:

[C] == Short Story Collection.
[CP] == Chapbook (a very short book, or pamphlet)..
[J] == The book is for juveniles (however you define them)
[NSF] == Not SF
[O] == Omnibus. Includes other books.
[S] == Scholarly
aka == Also known by this other title.

Born Octavia Estelle Butler on June 22, 1947, in Pasadena, California. She earned an Associates degree at Pasadena City College (A.A., 1968), and attended California State University, and the University of California at Los Angeles, the Open Door Program of the Screen Writers' Guild of America and the Clarion SF Writers' Workshop. Encouraged by master science fiction author Harlan Ellison, she began her writing career in 1970 and made her genre debut with Crossover (1971), the first of many works in which she weaves together African-American history, future soceties and a highly intellectual exploration of the alien perspective.

James Tiptree, Jr. aka Alice B. Sheldon

James Tiptree, Jr., was the pseudonym of Alice B. Sheldon, a writer who spent most of her life working for the Central Intelligence Agency and other secret agencies of the U. S. Government before becoming an experimental psychologist in the late 1960s, and bursting into the science fiction field with one of the most important and influential careers of the 1970s, her most productive decade. She was a technician who was always determined to learn more and exercise her skills as a writer. Her reputation is based upon her short fiction, collected in Ten Thousand Light Years From Home (1973), Warm Worlds and Otherwise (1975), Starsongs of an Old Primate (1978), Out of the Everywhere and Other Extraordinary Visions (1981), etc. She continued to write at a reduced pace in the 1980s, when she produced her second and best novel, Brightness Falls From the Air (1985), until her death (a widely publicized suicide) in 1987.

She was a complex and mysterious individual, who never appeared in public but was nevertheless a public figure in the sf field (in contrast to the pseudonymous Cordwainer Smith, who remains mysterious even after two decades of posthumous biographical investigation by fans and scholars).

The closest parallel to her work in impact, in attitude, in attention to craft and art, is Theodore Sturgeon's writing of the 1950s. Like Sturgeon, when she erred, it was in the direction of too much passionate sentiment. She was associated with raising the feminist consciousness of the sf field in the 1970s, but was rarely considered as hard sf (too much sentiment, not enough science and technology). She was obsessed with the theme and the imagery of the alien biologically and emotionally. Yet at least one of her stories, "The Girl Who Was Plugged In" (1973, one of her several award-winners), is acknowledged by William Gibson as one of the sources of cyberpunk. Ironically, her affect was closest to the hard sf attitude in those of her stories that most clearly revealed her fascination, perhaps her obsession, with death. She certainly felt that the universe was a formidable antagonist.

This story is in a sense a companion piece to Wilhelm's "The Planners," about being a working scientist in a laboratory, facing moral choices, but replacing the fantasizing of Wilhelm's piece with a drunken, dreamlike supernatural phantasmagoria at the center of this story, reminiscent of a Keatsian visit to Faerie. Tiptree's story is another milestone in the characterization of the scientist, invoking the Gothic, Hawthorne strain. Here the rich subjectivity of the individual is juxtaposed to the mechanistic model of research in the physical sciences. Tiptree continually challenged idea of the coldness of the universe, portraying that coldness as a negative aspect of human character rather than an affect existing somehow in external reality -- until her last stories. Crown of Stars (1988) gathers most of her final tales, suicide-filled and full of the idea of honorable death. She was a deeply moral writer, even when embracing death.

Crown of Stars is a counterpoint to "The Cold Equations," while portraying it's affect ironically, and may be taken as representative of the movement by many of the newer writers in 1970s sf away from the hard sf affect into the fantastic.

The James Tiptree Jr. Memorial Award

Today, the James Tiptree Jr. Memorial Award is presented annually to a short story or novel that explores or expands our understanding of gender. It was created by Pat Murphy and myself in 1991 both to honor Alice Sheldon and to remind the field of its own importance in the continual struggle to re-imagine more liveable sexual roles for ourselves. Just ask yourself, if we weren't taught to be women, what would we be? (Ask yourself this question even if you're a man, and don't cheat by changing the words.)

The award honors writers who try to answer that question -- writers who try to help us unlearn what television and the movies and books and comics and advertisements for automobiles and cigarettes have taught us about our sexual identities. Writers who try, like Alice Sheldon, to helpfully confuse us. The aim is not to look for work that falls into some narrow definition of political correctness, but rather to seek out work that is thought-provoking, imaginative, perhaps infuriating.

1991 -- (co-winners) Eleanor Arnason for A Woman of the Iron People and Gwyneth Jones for White Queen.

1992 -- Maureen McHugh for China Mountain Zhang.

1993 -- Nicola Griffith for Ammonite.

1994 -- (co-winners) Ursula K. Le Guin for "The Matter of the Seggri" and Nancy Springer for Larque on the Wing.

1995 -- (co-winners) Theodore Roszak for The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein and Elizabeth Hand for Waking the Moon.

As a political statement, as a means of involving people, as an excuse to eat cookies and as an attempt to strike the proper ironic note, the Tiptree Award has been financed primarily through bake sales. Over the last five years bake sales have been held at science fiction conventions across the United States and also in England, Australia and Canada. Fund-raising efforts have also included the publication of two cookbooks, T-shirts silk-screened by San Francisco artist Freddie Baer and the Tiptree Quilt Project, a collaborative creation of a king-sized quilt by 75 people of all genders, ages and levels of sewing experience.

Before the birth of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, the eight years of Franch revolution (1789-1793) was on going. In 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft's "A Vindication of the Rights of Women" was first published. In that same year Percy Bysshe Shelley was born. A year after her book was published, William Godwin published "An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice." Mary's parents were shapers of the Romantic Era sensibility and the revolutionary ideas of the left wing. In 1794, Mary Wollstonecraft bore her first illegitimate child, Fanny Imlay. In 1797, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft get married, and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was born August 30, 1797.

Mary Wollstonecraft dies from an infection caused by improper postdelivery medical treatment soon after Mary Shelley's birth. Godwin taught Mary to read and spell her name by having her trace her mother's inscription on the stone. At the age of sixteen Mary ran away to live with the twenty-one year old Percy Shelley, who was already married to Harriet Westbrook.

She conceived of Frankenstein during one of the most famous house parties in literary history when staying at Lake Geneva in Switzerland with Byron and Shelley. She was only nineteen at the time. Her life at the time was series of calamities when she wrote this novel. The worst of these were the suicides of her half-sister, Fanny Imaly, and Shelley's wife, Harriet when she was found drowned with her unidentified lover's premature baby.

In 1816, after the suicides, Mary and Shelley, married at London. Fierce public hostility toward the couple drove them to Italy. They were happy in Italy, but their two young children (Clara Everina and William). Nevertheless, Shelley empowered Mary to live as the most desired: to enjoy intellectual and artistic growth, love, and freedom.

When Mary was only twenty-four Percy drowned, leaving her penniless with a two year old son.

She eventually came to more traditional views of women's dependence and differences, like her mother before her. This not a reflection of her courage and integrity but derived from socialization and the "punishments" placed on her by society.

Mary became an invalid at the age of forty-eight. She died in London from a brain tumor at age of 53. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley is buried between her mother and father in St. Peter's Churchyard, Bournemouth. She died in 1851 with poetic timing. The Great Exhibition, which was a showcase of technological progress, was opened. This was the same scientific technology that she had warned against in her most famous book, Frankenstein.

THE SUMMER OF 1816

Mary Shelley spent the greater part of the summer of 1816, when she was nineteen, at the Chapuis in Geneva, Switzerland. The weather went from being beautiful and radiant to tempestous. Rains and incredible lightning storms plagued the area, similar to the summer that Mary was born. This incredible change was due to the volcano, Tambora, in Indonesia. The weather, as well as the company, Shelley, Lord Byron, and Byron's physician) and the Genevan district, contributed to the genesis of Frankenstein.

On the night of June 16th, Mary and Percy could not return to Chapuis, due to an incredible storm, and spent the night at the Villa Diodati with Byron and the group read aloud a collection of German ghost stories, The Fantasmagoriana. In one of the stories, a group travelers relate to the another supernatural experiences that they ahd experienced. This inspired Lord Byron to challenge the group to write a ghost story.

On the June 22nd, Byron and Shelley were scheduled to take a boat trip around the lake. The night before their departure the group discussed a subject from "whether the principle of life could be discovered and whether scientists could galvanize a corpse of a "manufactured humaniod". When Mary went to bed, she had a "waking" nightmare.

The next morning Mary realized she had found her story and began writing the lines that open-"It was on a dreary night in November"- She completed the novel in May of 1817 and was published January 1, 1818.

When Judith was 13, her mother, by now a widow, moved back to New York, where Judith discovered the Trotstkyist group the Young People's Socialist League, or YPSL, pronounced ypsl. "I was born a Zionist," she said later, "in those golden days of socialist Zionism, and until I was in my early teens at least, knew that my future was in a kibbutz: I was preparing for it, and studied Hebrew until I was about fifteen, by which time I had progressed from social Zionism to socialism to the YPSLs, and no longer knew that my future was in a kibbutz.

"When I was about fifteen, it dawned on me that my mother meant for me to be a writer, and I stopped writing completely, and I didn't start again until after I had a baby and I was in San Francisco and my mother was in New York."

In 1940 she married a YPSL friend named Zissman and moved to Philly. One winter she got a toothache and the grippe at the same time. Too ill to go to a dentist, she fell back on reading to ease the pain. In desperation she opened one of her husband's sf magazines, and in it was an installment of Robert Heinlein's METHUSELAH'S CHILDREN and another of L. Sprague de Camp's THE STOLEN DORMOUSE. "I don't remember what else, but that was enough. As soon as I was well, ignoring the dentist, I went down to the magazine store and got some more."

In 1941 they moved to New York, where their daughter Merril was born the following year. Judy took her daughter's name as a pseudonym, and later adopted it legally. When her husband entered the Navy for the war, Judith moved to New York and took an apartment in the Village, and became involved through John Michel with the Futurian Society, the legendary protocommune of writers, editors and wannabes which ultimately included Isaac Asimov, James Blish, Cyril Kornbluth, Fred Pohl, Virginia Kidd, Larry Shaw, Donald Wollheim, and Damon Knight. "The Futurians were a very motley crew," she said in 1976, "Callow, or extremely unattractive, or both. I felt I belonged very much in such a group, and I think this was characteristic of everyone there, that each of us regarded ourselves as grotesque, and felt comfortable in a gathering of grotesques."

At the 1947 Worldcon in Philadelphia (Philcon 47), the 5th Worldcon, and the second since the war, Judith and Fred Pohl connected. "I had met her briefly a year of two earlier." Fred wrote in his autobiography, the way the future was. "We had both been married at the time; now neither of us were. Judy had just published 'That Only A Mother,' a brilliant dismaying story about a woman who gives birth to a radiation-damaged child, the sort of story that gets right in among the glands and squeezes pretty basic parts of the psyche, so she was a writer to be respected. She was also a person to be known better, in her mid-twenties, with a small, incredibly beauitful blonde daughter. My friend Jacques LeCroix, arguably the best portrait photographer in Paris at the time, described her as having 'the capacity for great beauty.'"

Judith's recollection of their first meeting is clear: writer-editor Doc Lowndes brought Fred over to her apartment, and she found him "strange, interesting-not at that point attractive, but interesting, and I wanted the conversation to go on." Unfortunately, Bob Lowndes and Fred got into a vodka-drinking contest-which she claims Fred lost.

She remembers their Philcon 47 meeting as well: "I had meant to go just for the day, but it looked like a pretty good party, and I wanted to stay overnight...and then Fred wandered by, and although I barely knew him...he looked like somebody who had some money, so I tapped him and said, 'Have you got five dollars you can lend me for a hotel room?' And he said 'Sure I do,' and gave it to me, and I got my room. And then that evening was when I got uproariously, joyously, gloriously drunk...the next time I met Fred, at the first meeting of the Hydra Club, I gave him back the five dollars, and then a few days after that he called up and asked me to go out with him. During that evening he said he was fascinated, because when he gave me the five dollars he had expected to sleep with me, and I had gotten so rotten drunk nobody could think about it, but the last thing he had expected was that I would give him back the five dollars."

Fred & Lester del Rey formed the Hydra Club (since it began with nine members) in New York. Judith was one of the founding members of the group, which over time included Fletcher Pratt, Willy Ley, L. Jerome Stanton of Astounding, William Tenn, George O. Smith, Dave Kyle, Harry Harrison, Arthur Clarke, and just about every science fiction writer in the general area of New York.

"A sociology student named Jean Haynes came into the Hydra Club around that time," Fred writes, "and decided to do her master's thesis on kinship ties in our social microcosm. She spent three months trying to sort out who was married to whom and which had been married to what, not to mention less formal alliances, and gave up in despair. The game was Musical Beds. At its peak it was hard to get a quorum of the Hydra Club to transact business, since so many of its officers were divorcing and remarrying so many others. At the time of the New York convention, however, Judy and I were pretty solidly married. We had even decided to risk parenthood, and two or three months later, on the 25th of Sept 1950, our daughter Ann was born. (Ann, by the way, made Judith a grandmother in 1973.)"

In Spring 1951, Fred & Judith moved (from Judith's basement apartment in the East Village) into a big old house just across the river from Red Bank, New Jersey, a permanent home base, and within three months had decided to get a divorce.

In 1956, Judith and Damon Knight, with help from Jim Blish, organized the first Milford Science Fiction Writers Conference in Milford PA-which attracted some forty people, including Ted Sturgeon, Tony Boucher, Phil Klass, Bob Silverberg, Harlan Ellison, Sprague de Camp, and Forrest J. Ackerman. The Milford Conference became an annual event, prestigious and influential and creatively fruitful.

In the late fifties Judith was married again, to a merchant mariner and union organizer, Daniel Sugrue; the last time I asked, they were still married, though they have been separated for decades.

A longtime resident of Seattle, Gunn currently lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her partner John D. Berry , where she is Managing Editor of GORP, the web's major resource for outdoor recreation and adventure travel. Her personal web site, Imaginary Friends, features interviews and fiction, and the hypertext version of The Difference Dictionary, a concordance to William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's novel The Difference Engine. She is currently working on a novel and on a biography of the pre-eminent fantasist Avram Davidson.

Eileen Gunn's stories and articles have appeared in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, Science Fiction Eye, The New York Review of Science Fiction, Paradoxa, U&lc, and other magazines and anthologies. Her work has been nominated twice for the Hugo Award, included in the Norton Book of Science Fiction and other anthologies, and translated into French, Italian, German, Japanese, and other languages. Since 1988, she has served on the Board of Directors of the Clarion West Writers Workshop.

Her personal web site, Imaginary Friends, was chosen a Project Cool Site of the Day in 1997. It features snippets of fiction, interviews on the future of computer interface design (done originally for Omni Online) and the hypertext version of The Difference Dictionary, a concordance to William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's novel The Difference Engine. She contributes a column on web issues, Web Radar, for the on-line edition of the design magazine U&lc.

Bruce Sterling calls his friend Eileen Gunn a "bio-punk," referring to her off-beat treatments of other Science Fiction notaries. Aficionados await her all-too-infrequent - but always celebrated - appearances in such venues as Asimov's SF Magazine. Her current project is a CD ROM biography of the late Avram Davidson, the brilliantly eccentric fantasy writer. Gunn has written several short stories, including "Stable Strategies for Middle Management," "Fellow Americans," and "Lichen and Rock."

Born in Philadelphia in 1952, she abandoned her studies of Graphic Design and instead attended New York University’s Graduate School of Film and TV. In 1980 she made her first feature film SMITHEREENS, which was presented in Competition at the Cannes Film Festival. Other films: DESPERATELY SEEKING SUSAN (1984), MAKING MR.RIGHT (1987), COOKIE (1988), SHE DEVIL (1989), CONFESSIONS OF A SUBURBAN GIRL (1992).

CREDITS:

STORY:

A few weeks before her wedding, Teresa starts acting strange...She and her friends always eat lunch on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum. But, one day, Teresa decides to go inside. Teresa listens to a guide describing "The Drunker" a Dutch painting by Peter De Hooch. She becomes fascinated by the young wine-pourer in the picture, his long heavy dark hair and good looks. She takes her friends to see the painting-but, they soon leave, bored to tears. When Teresa gets up to leave the room, she hears a crash and turns around. THE PAINTING HAS COME TO LIFE!...

Filmography as: Director, Producer, Actress, Writer, Editor

"Now and Again" (1999) TV Series
Cooler Climate, A (1999)
"Sex and the City" (1998) TV Series
"Early Edition" (1996) TV Series
Tales of Erotica (1996) (segment "Dutch Master, The (1995)")
... aka Erotic Tales (1996)
Dutch Master, The (1995)
... aka Flämische Meister, Der (1995) (Germany)
Confessions of a Suburban Girl (1992)

Filmography as: Director, Producer, Actress, Writer, Editor

Filmography as: Director, Producer, Actress, Writer, Editor

Lee attended a number of primary schools. Following the completion of her secondary education, she was employed in a variety of jobs, including file clerk, assistant librarian, shop assistant and waitress. She also attended art college for one year, but quickly came to the conclusion that she would rather express herself through words than pictures.

An aspiring writer from the age of nine, her first professional sale was “Eustace,” a 90 word vignette which appeared in The Ninth Pan Book Of Horror Stories (1968), edited by Herbert van Thal.

In the fall of 1968, a friend took one of her early short stories and set it in type to experiment with his printing press. According to the author, “there were about six copies” of the resulting book, titled The Betrothed. One copy was sent to the British Museum, where it was received on 25 November 1968 and subsequently listed in the British Museum General Catalogue Of Printed Books, much to the consternation of future fans and collectors (and bibliographers!)

While working as an assistant librarian, Lee wrote a children’s story which was accepted for publication. A number of additional stories were also purchased, but none of them were ever published, due to a slump in the publishing firm’s sales. Finally, in 1971, Macmillan published The Dragon Hoard, a children’s novel, followed by Animal Castle, a children’s picture book, and Princess Hynchatti & Some Other Surprises, a short story collection (both 1972).

After receiving numerous rejections from British publishers for her adult fantasy novel The Birthgrave, she wrote a letter of inquiry to DAW Books, the American publishing firm founded by well-known science fiction fan and editor Donald A. Wolheim. DAW published The Birthgrave in 1975, beginning a relationship that lasted until 1989 and saw the publication of 28 books altogether. Following the publication of her second and third books from DAW, Don’t Bite The Sun and The Storm Lord (both 1976), Lee quit her day job to become a full-time freelance writer.

Tanith Lee has won or been nominated for a variety of awards, including the World Fantasy Award, the August Derleth Award and the Nebula. She has appeared as Guest of Honour at a number of science fiction conventions, including Boskone XVIII in Boston in 1981, and the 1984 World Fantasy Convention in Ottawa.

In 1987, she met John Kaiine, a British writer and artist. The couple married in 1992 and currently live in the south of England.