The James Tiptree, Jr. Literary Award Council has announced the winners of the 2008 Tiptree Award, which is is presented annually to a work or works that explore and expand gender roles in science fiction and fantasy. This year’s winners are The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness (a young adult novel published by Walker) and Filter House by Nisi Shawl (a short story collection published by Aqueduct Press).
The Tiptree is a juried award, and the jurors who selected this year’s winners were Gavin J. Grant (chair), K. Tempest Bradford, Leslie Howle, Roz Kaveney, and Catherynne M. Valente.
The Knife of Never Letting Go begins with a boy growing up in a village way off the grid. Grant explains, “All the villagers can hear one another’s thoughts (their ‘noise’) and all the villagers are men. The boy has never seen a woman or girl so when he meets one his world is infinitely expanded as he discovers the complications of gender relations. As he travels in this newly bi-gendered world, he also has to work out the definition of becoming and being a man.”
Howle praises Ness’s skills as a writer: “Ness is a craftsman—the language, pacing, complications, plot—this story has all of the elements of great story-telling. It’s a page-turner, and I continued to think about the story long after reading it. Todd’s understanding of gender is constructed as the story progresses, making his perceptions feel fresh and new. It reminds me of the kind of SF I loved when I was growing up.”
The Knife of Never Letting Go also won the 2008 Booktrust Teenage Prize in the UK (which “celebrates contemporary fiction for teenagers”) and the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize.
Publishers Weekly, which selected Filter House as one of the best books of 2008, described it as an “exquisitely rendered debut collection” that “ranges into the past and future to explore identity and belief in a dazzling variety of settings.” Tiptree jurors spotlight Shawl’s willingness to challenge the reader with her exploration of gender roles. Bradford writes, “The stories in Filter House refuse to allow the reader the comfort of assuming that the men and women will act according to the assumptions mainstream readers/society/culture puts on them.”
Valente notes that most of Shawl’s protagonists in this collection are “young women coming to terms with womanhood and what that means in terms of their culture, magic (almost always tribal, nuts and bolts, African-based magical systems, which is fascinating in itself), [and] technology.” In her comments, Valente points out some elements of stories that made this collection particularly appropriate for the Tiptree Award: “‘At the Huts of Ajala’ struck me deeply as a critique of beauty and coming of age rituals. The final story, ‘The Beads of Ku’, deals with marriage and motherhood and death. ‘Shiomah’s Land’ deals with the sexuality of a godlike race, and a young woman’s liberation from it. ‘Wallamellon’ is a heartbreaking story about the Blue Lady, the folkloric figure invented by Florida orphans, and a young girl pursuing the Blue Lady straight into a kind of urban priestess-hood.”
The awards will be presented at WisCon 33, which will be held 22-25 May in Madison, Wisconsin. Each award includes $1000 in prize money, “an original artwork created specifically for the award, and the signature chocolate that always accompanies the Tiptree Award.”
The honor list, which the jurors compile to call attention to “works that the jurors found interesting, relevant to the award, and worthy of note,” is as follows:
* The Love We Share Without Knowing by Christopher Barzak (Bantam)
* The Explosionist by Jenny Davidson (HarperTeen)
* Shadowbridge and Lord Tophet: A Shadowbridge Novel both by Gregory Frost (both published by Del Rey)
* Two Pearls of Wisdom by Alison Goodman (HarperCollins Australia); published in the US as Eon: Dragoneye Reborn (Viking); published in the UK as Eon: Rise of the Dragoneye
* “Pride or Prometheus” by John Kessel (published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, January 2008)
* Tender Morsels by Margo Lanagan (Knopf)
* Lavinia by Ursula K. Le Guin (Harcourt)
* Let the Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvist (Quercus UK); originally published in Swedish as Låt den rätte komma; first published in English as Let Me In (St. Martin’s Press), translated by Ebba Segerberg
* the series of A Princess of Roumania, The Tourmaline, The White Tyger, and The Hidden World all by Paul Park (Tor)
* The Alchemy of Stone by Ekaterina Sedia (Prime Books)
* Girl Meets Boy by Ali Smith (Canongate US)
* Flora’s Dare: How a Girl of Spirit Gambles All to Expand Her Vocabulary, Confront a Bouncing Boy Terror, and Try to Save Califa from a Shaky Doom (Despite Being Confined to Her Room) by Ysabeau S. Wilce (Harcourt)
“The James Tiptree, Jr. Award was created in 1991 to honor Alice Sheldon, who wrote under the pseudonym James Tiptree, Jr. By her chance choice of a masculine pen name, Sheldon helped break down the imaginary barrier between “women’s writing” and “men’s writing.” Her insightful short stories were notable for their thoughtful examination of the roles of men and women in our society.”