I can say that, can’t I? “Ladies”, I mean. If that verboten? I mean Mike Resnick and Barry Malzberg got in all kinds of trouble for referring to a “lady editor”, but Mary Robinette Kowal, who (I think) was leading the charge against those two has a series about a lady astronaut with the word “lady” in the title. I’m so confused.

I guess the lesson is you ain’t gonna please everybody, so you might as well please yourself.  I’m gonna please myself be recognizing two ladies who have left their mark on the field were born on this day, August 24. The first was Alice B. Sheldon (1915 -1987), who wrote under the pen name of James Tiptree, Jr., and Bea Mahaffey (1926-1987), who was the lady Resnick was referring to when he got in trouble.

Bea Mahaffey

We’ll start with Ms. Mahaffey.  She edited or coedited several sf magazines in the early to mid 1950s. All were titles published by Ray Palmer. She was quite popular with fans and pros in the Cincinnati area. The only publications of her own writing that I know of are a handful of editorials and columns in the magazines she published. So there’s really not anything to review. I suspect that the non-Shaver fiction she published were her own selections rather than Palmer’s. That’s speculation on my part.

Oh, and according to Mike, she looked darned good in a swimsuit.

Sheldon was no stranger to controversy in her lifetime and has remained a controversial figure more than thirty years after her death. Robert Silverberg famously put his foot in his mouth when he wrote that Tiptree had to be a man, couldn’t be a woman, no siree. This was before Tiptree’s true identity was known.

Alice Sheldon, AKA James Tiptree, Jr.

For a number of years, The Tiptree Award was given in her honor to works that challenged gender boundaries. The name was changed in 2019 to the Otherwise Award because some folks were uncomfortable honoring her due to the circumstances of her death. She is believed to have shot her husband and herself due to failing health. Whether it was a murder-suicide or a suicide pact isn’t entirely clear.

I’ve never really gotten into Tiptree, although I read a couple of her collections about 20 years ago. I enjoyed them for the most part.  I read one or two of her stories when I was in junior high, and her work was a little grown-up for me at the time, which is probably why I haven’t read more of fiction. I’ve not yet read any of her novels, although I expect I will at some point. As my impending geezerdom draws nearer, I’m finding many of the writers that didn’t do anything for me as a kid are a lot more to my liking.

The story I read for this post was “The Man Who Walked Home”. It was originally published in the May  1972 issue of Amazing Stories. I had read it years ago. At least I think I did. For some reason it didn’t stick.

There’s an explosion at a research facility followed shortly by a nuclear war. Though I don’t recall Tiptree explicitly saying so, the implication is that the explosion is what causes all the nuclear powers to launch their missiles.

Eventually, grass grows over the crater, except for on bare spot in the middle. Various groups and tribes begin to settle the area, displacing the people already there. Over the years, on a certain day a monster appears.

It’s shaped like a man. What it is is an astronaut moving backwards through time on a trajectory that takes him to this point once a year.

I really liked how Tiptree didn’t give you all the information. If you read carefully, there are clues as to what caused the explosion.

I quite enjoyed “The Man Who Walked Home”. It is currently available in Ten Thousand Light Years From Home.