The Tiptree award

What do people think of the Tiptree Prizewinners?

Sometimes they puzzle me exceedingly. I have no idea why Camouflage won.

I like the Tiptree list overall, but I haven't yet read the Haldeman, so I don't have an opinion on it in particular.

(On the other hand, winning Tiptree honors has helped put Camouflage on my TBR list.)

But generally, the Tiptrees are worth looking into.

Just knowing that Set This House In Order: A Romance Of Souls had won the Tiptree was a major plot spoiler:^)

I haven't read Camouflage either, Simon, so obviously I can't comment on it, but I just realized that, because of the nature of this award, your statement regarding it could address either (or both!) of two possible failures. Do you think Camouflage is a poor choice because of the book's overall quality or because it doesn't fulfill the specific gender-challenging criteria of the Tiptree prize?

On the Tiptree Award website, I see that Haldeman's book shared the 2004 award with Johanna Sinisalo's 'Not Before Sundown', the US title of which is Troll: A Love Story. That is a fabulous book; one of the best of all the Tiptree winners to my taste.

Tiptree winners past that I've enjoyed include Hiromi Goto's The Kappa Child, Elizabeth Hand's Waking the Moon, 'The Matter of Seggri' by Ursula K. Le Guin, and China Mountain Zhang by Maureen F. McHugh. I haven't read Gwyneth Jones Tiptree winner, The White Queen, but I thought her recent short-listed book 'Life' (which I can't touchstone because it's not among the 250 choices LT offers me) was excellent.

I thought Theodore Roszak's The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein was awful though. I gave up on it three-quarters of the way through. I just couldn't take any more purple prose and silly sex magick. I have a hard time understanding how even the most politically or philosophically motivated judge could have overlooked the truly dreadful prose in this one.

The prose in Camouflage is very sparse it does not convey much emotion to me, and did not draw me in but I felt like a disinterested observer throughout. The aliens seemed straight out of Van Voght. But I get the impression most people were impressed by the literary standards. Taste is always subject to dispute though, no matter what that greek guy said.So while understand that it rightly relevant to the judges opinion. I personally am more interested in things that make me reconsider gender roles. That after all is what makes the tiptree different.

Matt Ruff on his website talks about what he disliked about A Brother's Price (Shortlisted) and then adds that the sheer amount of debate it generated made it a worthy contender, feelings, I gather ran high. That is what I look for in in this award something that primarily promotes disscussion of gender roles and issues.

Last year I decided to try and work through as many of the Tiptree winners/shortlist as I could - made easier by the fact that I'd already read most of the winners anyway.
It's made me read some stuff I would never have looked at as it skews too heavily toward fantasy for my taste, but there's usually something of interest.
Camouflage to me is good, old-fashioned science-fiction, and while I'm not sure it should have won, for me the alien's slow process of trying to understand gender rolesin human relationships makes it a valid entry into the Tiptree list.

>4 marietherese: I'm another that hasn't yet read Camouflage. In a partial answer whether the book has quality, the copy on my TBR shelf is both leather-bound and gilded.

I've been changed by each of the Tiptree Award winners that I've read:
1993: Ammonite by Nicola Griffith
2002: Light by M. John Harrison and (not read) Stories for Men by John Kessel
2005: Air by Geoff Ryman
2008: Filter House by Nisi Shawl and (not read) The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness
2012: The Drowning Girl by Caitlin R. Kiernan and most definitely Ancient, Ancient by Kiini Ibura Salaam

I plan to make Camouflage my next read.

(edited to correct spelling -- my first time using the word "gilded")

White Queen is amazingly good, and I'd suggest reading it before Camouflage. I find Jones very difficult to read, someone whose books should be read several times before they're properly understood.

>9 dukedom_enough: Are they worth the trouble? I don't mind difficult reads if there's a payoff.

>10 nohrt4me2: Absolutely; every one so far.

they are calling for nominations for next years awards right now. Put in your suggestions here.
http://tiptree.org/recommend-works-for-the-2015-james-tiptree-jr-award

Agree with my husband re Gwyneth Jones being worth the read. I have not read White Queen but I did relatively recently read Spirit, or the Princess of Bois Dormant, which was mind-blowingly complex, and within the same world as White Queen. I often thought I was in over my head but there was a certain exhilaration with that.

Of the Tiptree's I've read:
China Mountain Zhang, Ammonite, Larque on the Wing, The Sparrow, Black Wine, The Conquerors Child, Wild Life and, as it happens, I'm reading The Carhullan Army currently. There are a fair amount of unread Tiptoe winners on our shelves, but I've moved away from reading the quantity of SF I used to.