Death
Sheldon continued writing under the Tiptree pen name for another decade. On May 19, 1987, at age 71, Sheldon took the life of her 84-year-old, nearly-blind husband and then took her own. They were found dead, hand-in-hand in bed, in their Virginia home. According to biographer Julie Phillips, the suicide note Sheldon left was written years earlier, and saved until needed. In an interview with Charles Platt in the early 1980s Sheldon spoke of her emotional problems and previous suicide attempts. Much of her work contains dark and pessimistic elements, which in retrospect can be seen as reflective of her troubled emotions.
Award winning science fiction authors Karen Joy Fowler and Pat Murphy created the James Tiptree, Jr. award in honor of Alice B. Sheldon on February 1991. Sheldon influenced this award through her use of a masculine pseudonym, James Tiptree, Jr., demonstrating that there is no distinction in works of science fiction when written by either gender. This award also coincides with her main theme, feminism. The criteria for winning this award would be for authors who focus their stories on the exploration of science fiction and gender. Novels such as "Half Life" by Shelley Jackson and "Light" by M. John Harrison have received the James Tiptree, Jr. award for incorporating themes of fantasy and sexuality. The James Tiptree, Jr. Award is given in her honor each year for a work of science fiction or fantasy that expands or explores our understanding of gender; funds for the award are raised in part by bake sales
Read more about this topic: James Tiptree, Jr.
Famous quotes containing the word death:
“You know, if this is Venus, or some other strange planet, we’re liable to run into some high-domed characters with green blood in their veins who’ll blast at us with their atomic death rayguns, and there we’ll be with these—these poor old-fashioned shootin’ irons.”
—Edward L. Bernds (b. 1911)
“If thou art rich, thou’rt poor,
For like an ass, whose back with ingots bows,
Thou bear’st thy heavy riches but a journey,
And death unloads thee.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“In the twentieth century, death terrifies men less than the absence of real life. All these dead, mechanized, specialized actions, stealing a little bit of life a thousand times a day until the mind and body are exhausted, until that death which is not the end of life but the final saturation with absence.”
—Raoul Vaneigem (b. 1934)