The young adult novel in question is Flora Segunda by Ysabeau Wilce and the graphic novel series is Y: The Last Man by Brian K. Vaughn, Pia Guerra and others. Also on the "Honor List" is Charles Stross' Glasshouse, which I liked a lot. Here's what I said about Glasshouse in recommending it for inclusion:

It's set in a John Varley-esque world where you can have any body you want and you can back up your brain. But the main character agrees to take part in an experiment where he'll live in a reconstruction of America in the 1990s. Because so much data from that era of history was encoded on magnetic tape and digital media, it's been lost and historians know little about the period from 1950-2040. So the 1990s reconstruction is fatally flawed, especially as it relates to gender roles. It's sort of a pastiche of the 1950s, where women are expected to be subservient and sexually available. The main character gets stuck in a female body and quickly discovers how non-consensual gender roles can be. On top of that, participants receive points (towards a promised bonus) for gender conformity, including sexual behavior.

JAMES TIPTREE JR. AWARD WINNER ANNOUNCED

A gender-exploring science fiction award is presented to Sarah Hall for The Carhullan Army (Daughters of the North)

The James Tiptree, Jr. Literary Award Council is pleased to announce that the winner of the 2007 Tiptree Award is The Carhullan Army by Sarah Hall (published in the United States as Daughters of the North). The British edition was published in 2007 by Faber & Faber; the American edition in 2008 by HarperCollins.

The Tiptree Award will be celebrated on May 25, 2008 at WisCon (www.wiscon.info) in Madison, Wisconsin. The winner of the Tiptree Award receives $1000 in prize money, an original artwork created specifically for the winning novel or story, and (as always) chocolate.

Each year, a panel of five jurors selects the Tiptree Award winners and compiles an Honor List of other works that they find interesting, relevant to the award, and worthy of note. The 2007 jurors were Charlie Anders, Gwenda Bond (chair), Meghan McCarron, Geoff Ryman, and Sheree Renee Thomas.

The Carhullan Army elicited strong praise from the jurors. Gwenda Bond said, "Hall does so many things well in this book - writing female aggression in a believable way, dealing with real bodies in a way that makes sense, and getting right to the heart of the contradictions that violence brings out in people, but particularly in women in ways we still don't see explored that often. I found the writing entrancing and exactly what it needed to be for the story; lean, but well-turned." Geoff Ryman said, "It faces up to our current grim future (something too few SF novels have done) and seems to go harder and darker into war, violence, and revolution." Meghan McCarron said, "I found the book to be subtle and ambiguous in terms of its portrayal of the Army, and its utopia....The book became, ultimately, an examination of what it means to attain physical, violent power as defined by a male-dominated world. And it asserted that it could be claimed by anyone, regardless of physical sex, provided they were willing to pay the price."

The book, which is Hall's third novel, also won the 2007 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for the best work of literature (fiction, non-fiction, poetry, drama) from Britain or the Commonwealth written by an author of 35 or under.

The Tiptree Award Honor List is a strong part of the award's identity and is used by many readers as a recommended reading list for the rest of the year. The 2007 Honor List is:

* "Dangerous Space" by Kelley Eskridge, in the author's collection Dangerous Space (Aqueduct Press, 2007)
* Water Logic by Laurie Marks (Small Beer Press, 2007)
* Empress of Mijak and The Riven Kingdom by Karen Miller (HarperCollins, Australia, 2007)
* The Shadow Speaker by Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu (Hyperion, 2007)
* Interfictions, edited by Delia Sherman and Theodora Goss (Interstitial Arts Foundation/Small Beer Press, 2007)
* Glasshouse by Charles Stross (Ace, 2006)
* The Margarets by Sheri S. Tepper (Harper Collins 2007)
* Y: The Last Man, written by Brian K. Vaughan, art by Pia Guerra (available in 60 issues or 10 volumes from DC/Vertigo Comics, 2002-2008)
* Flora Segunda by Ysabeau Wilce (Harcourt, 2007)

The James Tiptree Jr. Award is presented annually to a work or works that explore and expand gender roles in science fiction and fantasy. The award seeks out work that is thought-provoking, imaginative, and perhaps even infuriating. The Tiptree Award is intended to reward those women and men who are bold enough to contemplate shifts and changes in gender roles, a fundamental aspect of any society.

The James Tiptree Jr. Award was created in 1991 to honor Alice Sheldon, who wrote under the pseudonym James Tiptree, Jr. By her 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.

Since its inception, the Tiptree Award has been an award with an attitude. As a political statement, as a means of involving people at the grassroots level, as an excuse to eat cookies, and as an attempt to strike the proper ironic note, the award has been financed through bake sales held at science fiction conventions across the United States, as well as in England and Australia. Fundraising efforts have included auctions conducted by stand-up comic and award-winning writer Ellen Klages, the sale of t-shirts and aprons created by collage artist and silk screener Freddie Baer, and the publication of four anthologies of award winners and honor-listed stories. Three of the anthologies are in print and available from Tachyon Publications (www.tachyonpublications.com). The award has also published two cookbooks featuring recipes and anecdotes by science fiction writers and fans, available through www.tiptree.org.

In addition to presenting the Tiptree Award annually, the James Tiptree, Jr. Literary Award Council occasionally presents the Fairy Godmother Award, a special award in honor of Angela Carter. Described as a "mini, mini, mini, mini MacArthur award," the Fairy Godmother Award strikes without warning, providing a financial boost to a deserving writer in need of assistance to continue creating material that matches the goals of the Tiptree Award.

Reading for the 2008 Tiptree Award will soon begin, with jurors K. Tempest Bradford, Gavin Grant (chair), Leslie Howle, Roz Kaveney, and Catherynne M. Valente. As always, the Tiptree Award invites all to recommend works for the award. Please submit recommendations via the Tiptree Award website at www.tiptree.org.

When is science fiction a form of political intervention?

That's a tough one!

Looking at fiction in the broader sense, it's fairly clear that it can have political repercussions; Orwell's work (from "Animal Farm" and "1984" to the less-well-remembered journalistic indictment, "The Road to
Wigan Pier") was unequivocally political, and in "1984" he certainly worked with tools from the box labeled "science fiction". But it's relatively rare for politics to be the main purpose of a work of fiction, and even rarer for a work of avowedly political fiction to be any good.

Fiction, confabulation, story-telling — is, when you get down to it, usually used as an entertainment medium, and also as a mechanism for showing us about other ways of thinking, and if you try to preach a
political message you usually end up with something that's not very entertaining (if not outright annoying to a lot of your readers).

I suspect political fiction is at its best precisely when it doesn't preach, but restricts itself to showing the reader a different way of life or thought, and merely makes it clear that this is an end-point or outcome for some kind of political creed. Leave the readers to either enjoy it as a work of fiction, or to join up the dots and apprehend the shape of the monster lurking in the background: but don't beat them over the head with it.

In Glasshouse, you could have gone the obvious route in exploring the horror of twentieth-century gender roles by saying merely "Yuck women's roles really sucked." But instead it seemed to me that for your characters the most horrifying gender experiences were those of men (particularly Sam) dealing with masculinity. What made you go this direction? Was your point that all gender roles are crappy unless they can be chosen?

That's a part of it, but only a part ...

... Because the set-up in the Glasshouse isn't simply about gender; it's about how social systems of oppression emerge and become self-sustaining and self-reinforcing once you create a privileged group who benefit from enforcement the roles. It could equally well have been about skin color, or religion, or left- versus right- handedness, but physical sex is a convenient hook to hang it on because it's intimately familiar, and we've got a roughly 50/50 randomized allocation to begin with. And then you get the social construction of gender roles layered on top of the actual physical bits'n'pieces, which adds a layer of indirection to it all.

I was in part writing a tribute novel to John Varley, and in part tipping my hat at Paul Linebarger, who wrote wonderful science fiction as Cordwainer Smith but who in real life was also known as the father of psychological warfare: and I'd been reading up on Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo's work on obedience to authority and emergent behaviour in unpleasant artificial societies — Zimbardo was the brain behind the Stanford Prison Study — so there you have the bundle of influences that shaped Glasshouse.

The key conceit in the novel was the application of the Stanford Prison Study protocol to gender roles, in a posthuman society where actual physical morphology — and therefore sexual identity — is normally under voluntary control. That's where the gender dysphoria and alarm and unhappiness comes from: it's an explicit metaphor for imprisonment. (As for what the Glasshouse is for — within the text — that's something else: Robin/Reeve is a notoriously unreliable narrator, and while he/she thinks his side won the war, and the Glasshouse is a prison environment for reprocessing war criminals from the other side, how do we really know that he/she is right? After all, he/she has lost most of his/her memories, and he/she is in there ...!)

But to get back to your question: many men do have trouble with their assigned gender and its associated behaviour. And yes, any gender role has the potential to be a stifling caul unless it's voluntarily adopted. Many of us, I think, are a little bit dysfunctional, and kick against the traces of what's expected of us from time to time — but what must it be like to live in a culture where that is discouraged to the point where you can be killed for it? And what, in contrast, might it be like to live in a culture where the thing is entirely voluntary? I thought that was worth asking.

Putting your futurist goggles on for a second, how do you imagine that humans will eventually escape from gender roles? Will we need nanotech to make sex changes a breeze? Will we need fortieth wave feminism?

(I wish.)

Wearing my futurist hat, I'd have to say that sex changes are likely to stay difficult, and controversial, for quite a while to come. There's a lot of physiological differences, going all the way down to the cellular level.

On the other hand, there's a lot of scope for improvements in how we relate to one another. Looking back just 100 years, we've made some remarkable progress in terms of equality and freedom of expression for people who don't fit the stereotypical gender roles of their contemporary society. Go back to, say, 1858, and the legal rights and social role of women in British society wasn't that different from Iran today. (In fact, contemporary Iran is probably doing better in some areas.) Segregating people from birth and channeling their life opportunities on the basis of their physical sex seems to me to be every bit as unjustifiable as doing so on the basis of their skin colour. And I'd like to live to see the day when it's as unacceptable to engage in gender stereotyping as it is to engage in racial stereotyping.

(But I'm afraid I'm not holding my breath.)

Kathleen Ann Goonan says she tries to write her SF as if gender doesn't matter. Do you think that's possible?

I'm not sure. The business of fiction is the study of the human condition, and gender is something that many humans are obsessed with, thus making it rather difficult to ignore when studying the human condition! On the other hand, you don't need to take received notions of gender as solid proven facts, especially in science fiction, where it's always fun to turn constants into variables and start twiddling the knobs to see where things go. Good luck to her for trying, anyway!

Image by Mark Fredrickson from the cover of Stross' novel The Atrocity Archives.