Once again, the Tiptree Award goes to two different works this year, and they couldn't be more different. Greer Gilman's Cloud & Ashes (from Small Beer Press) is a collection of three stories drawing on folk tales from the British Isles. Two of them are previously published, and one of those won the World Fantasy Award in 2003. The other winner is Fumi Yoshinaga's Ooku: The Inner Chambers (volumes 1 & 2) which takes place in an alternate feudal Japan, where a plague has wiped out three out of every four boys. (So it's sort of the opposite of last year's winner, The Knife Of Never Letting Go.)

Says the press release:

Cloud & Ashes contains three memorable and poetic tales that draw images and elements from folk tales and ballads of the British Isles. Told in lyrical Jacobeanesque dialect, the stories are striking for their language and their originality.

Juror Paul Kincaid praised Cloud & Ashes as "A book whose hold on your mind, on your memory, is assured. It is a story about story, and stories are what we are all made of." Jury chair Karen Fowler reflected on the intriguing complexity of the interwoven themes in the work: "Patterns repeat, but also mutate in kaleidoscopic fashion and then mutate again…. Power shiftts about, much of it gender-based; time eats itself like a Moebius strip."

The first two stories in Cloud & Ashes were published previously. The first, "Jack Daw's Pack," was a Nebula finalist for 2001. The second, "A Crowd of Bone", won the 2003 World Fantasy Award. The third story, "Unleaving," is original to Cloud & Ashes.

Fumi Yoshinaga's Ooku: The Inner Chambers (volumes 1 & 2) explores an alternate version of feudal Japan, in which a plague has killed three out of every four boys. In this world, young men are protected and sheltered; women have secretly taken positions of authority and power. The Japanese ruler or shogun and the feudal lords are women and much of the story takes place among the men in the shogun's harem. The title of the work refers to the living quarters for the shogun's harem, contained within Edo Castle.

The selection of Ooku: The Inner Chambers marks the first time that manga has been chosen for the Tiptree Award. Though no one on the jury is an expert on manga or on Japanese history, the jurors fell in love with the detailed exploration of the world of these books, a world in which men are assumed to be weak and sickly, yet women still use symbolic masculinity to maintain power. Throughout the two books, Yoshinaga explores how the deep gendering of this society is both maintained and challenged by the alteration in ratios. "The result," juror Jude Feldman writes, "is a fascinating, subtle, and nuanced speculation with gender at its center."

Ooku was awarded the Sense of Gender award by the Japanese Association of Feminist Science Fiction and Fantasy (2005), the Excellence Award at Japan's Media Arts Festival (2006), and the Grand Prize in Osamu Tezuka Cultural Prize (2009).

The short list of runners up is:

* "Beautiful White Bodies", Alice Sola Kim (Strange Horizons)
* Distances, Vandana Singh (Aqueduct Press 2008)
* "Galapagos", Caitlin R. Kiernan (Eclipse 3, Night Shade Books)
* Lifelode, Jo Walton (NESFA Press 2009)
* "Useless Things", Maureen F. McHugh (Eclipse 3, Night Shade Books)
* "Wives", Paul Haines (X6, coeur de lion)

And the press release also includes a special recognition for L. Timmel Duchamp's Marq'ssan Cycle, which concluded in 2008:

In addition, the jury wishes to extend a special honor to L. Timmel Duchamp's Marq'ssan Cycle, noting the importance of this stunning series, which envisions radical social and political change. Published over a period of four years, this five-book series began with Alanya to Alanya (Aqueduct Press, 2005) and concluded with Stretto (Aqueduct Press, 2008).

Second illustration: Margaret from Cloud And Ashes, by Lieserl on DeviantArt. [via SF Awards Watch]

Futurama, "Parasites Lost"

Fry eats a dodgy egg-salad sandwich at a spaceship rest area, and the eggs hatch into tons of worms, who form a whole worm society inside Fry's bowels. So the Planet Express crew has to copy themselves into tiny little worm-sized robots, which they can control with their brains — so the robots can travel inside Fry's innards while the actual people (and robot, in Bender's case) controlling them remain safe and normal-sized.

Mobile Suit Gundam and Gundam Wing
The Wing Zero and Gundam Epyon suits included the ZERO (Zoning & Emotional Range Omitted) system, connecting to the pilot's brain via neural interface and giving the pilot real-time strategic data, and eliminating all pesky doubts. The system has one major flaw: the pilot tends to "hallucinate" the possible paths the suit can take, causing temporary insanity unless your mind is strong enough. Here's a battle between Gundam Wing Zero and Gundam Epyon.

Ghost In The Shell

Lots of people in this universe jack into android bodies and control them remotely — sending android "dolls" into danger while remaining safe. In this clip, Major Motoko Kusanagi controls two android bodies at once. Especially in "Solid State Society," she's frequently running two parallel processes, and manages to be in two places at once.

Cities In Flight by James Blish

Before humans can actually visit Jupiter in person, we send tele-operated robots with cool tentacles. Here's a relevant passage (thanks to Technovelgy):

For a wild instant he had thought there was a man on Jupiter already; but as he pulled up just above the platform's roof, he realized that the moving thing inside was - of course - a robot; a misshapen, many-tentacled thing about twice the size of a man. It was working busily with bottles and flasks, of which it seemed to have thousands on benches and shelves all around it The whole enclosure was a litter of what Helmuth took to be chemical apparatus, and off to one side was an object which might have been a microscope...

The robot looked up at him and gesticulated with two or three tentacles...

"This is Doc Barth. How do you like my laboratory?"

Bug Park by James P. Hogan

In this awesome novel, inventors Eric and Vanessa Heber develop a new kind of telepresence — direct neural coupling — which shuts down your usual senses and connects them to neural feedback from robots, known as Mecs. The novel explains:

Ohira, who had been watching phlegmatically, nodded his head at the figures in the chairs. "You see, it's the way I told you. No ordinary VR helmets here. This connects straight into your head."

"DNC: Direct Neural Coupling," Heber said to Michelle. "That's what makes Neurodyne different."

She nodded. "I have read a little about it."

"Would you like to try it?" Heber invited.

Michelle moved her gaze to the empty chairs but looked apprehensive. "I'm not sure. I wouldn't want to get one of your little guys shredded or caught up in a wringer."

So of course the Hebers, and their precocious teen son, come up with the ultimate business model — tiny little bug robots controlled by tourists' minds, which can explore an insect theme park or even take part in insect gladitorial contests. But of course, bad guys want to use the DNC technology to power miniature assassins instead.

Robot in Invincible

The leader of the Teen Team superhero group, Robot gets promoted to join the Guardians Of The Globe, who are like the Justice League in the Invincible universe. Everybody thinks he's just a regular robot, but eventually they discover he's actually remote controlled by Rudy Conners, a disfigured man living in a tank of fluid.

Battle Angel Alita

Soon to be a movie from James "Avatar" Cameron, this series follows a cyborg assassin who's controlled several different bodies, including a Berzerker body, a "motorball body" and a TUNED body. (Thanks to Cash907Censored!)

The Girl Who Was Plugged In by James Tiptree, Jr.

In a corporate-controlled future, advertising is illegal, so instead celebrities go around promoting products. This story's protgagonist has her personality put into a perfect robot body, while her real body is put "in the sauna room" and she becomes an advertising celebrity. Her new body is a "placental decanter," specially grown to be perfect, with control implants. "Little Delphi is going to live a wonderful, exciting life. She's going to be a girl people watch. And she's going to be using fine products people will be glad to know about and helping the people who make them."

Forever Peace by Joe Haldeman

The soldiers in this book are jacked into Soldierboys, Flyboys and other constructs, which they control with their brains. These machines allow the U.S. to run a remote-controlled war against various third-world countries. Protgaonist Julian Class controls his robot Soldierboy via a jack connected to his skull. Too bad that long-term connection to the Soldierboys and Flyboys has weird long-term effects, including "humanizing" you and making you averse to killing.

Sleep Dealer

Two different characters jack their nervous systems into robots, far away, in this incredible movie directed by Alex Rivera. Memo goes to work in the city in Mexico, where he's connected remotely to robots doing construction work in the United States — so the U.S. can import people's labor, without bringing in the people themselves. And Rudy controls a military drone with his mind — using it, among other things, to blow up Memo's family's house when Memo accidentally gets suspected of being a hacker.

Runners up: Suspended (InfoCom game), Debatable Space by Philip Palmer, City by Clifford Simak, Starstruck (comics), Neon Genesis Evangelion, Metal Gear Solid 4 and Call Me Joe by Poul Anderson

Thanks to Arthur Conan Smith, Kiala Kazebee, S.J. Edeards, Katrina James, Andrew Liptak, Greta Christina, Kate Dominic, Jessy Randall Carlos P. Diaz, FLIMGeeks, Espana Sheriff, Tom Marcinko, Barry Lukens, Lun Esex, Ashley Edward Miller, Allan Bostick, Jackie M, Star Killer, Jason Schachat, Bonnie Burton, Morgan Johnson, Paul McEnery, Izzy Oneiric, Jason Shankel and Kate Cowan.

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.

Many, many thanks to Liz Henry with the Feminist SF blog for helping me put together this exhaustive list of lesbian-dominated cultures in science fiction. Smug Sappho! There are way more than I'd expected.

Ammonite by Nicola Griffith. A weird virus on the planet Jeep kills all the men, and most of the women, and the women who survive are changed, gaining access to a sort of Jungian collective unconscious. Deprived of access to men's precious bodily fluids, the women start mating using a weird ritual called "deep trance." One reviewer was annoyed that all these women, who presumably aren't naturally lesbians, seem way too comfortable turning to lesbianism and don't seem to miss the men at all. Ammonite won the Tiptree Award for science fiction that considers gender themes, prompting also-ran David Brin to complain that he'd been robbed.

Houston, Houston, Do You Read? by James Tiptree Jr. A trio of astronauts blast off into a mission around the sun, but a solar flare knocks them forward in time a few hundred years, to an era when a plague (again!) has wiped out all the men and most of the women. The surviving women reproduce via cloning, and a few of their girl-babies are dosed with androgens early on to make them grow up bigger and stronger. The three male astronauts are thrilled at the chance to be the only men on Earth — either to become patriarchs, or just to have lots of sex — but then it turns out the women rulers have no intention of letting the men live. They're happy without men around, and don't want to upset their groovy, stable society with annoying menfolk.

Walk To The End of the World and Motherlines, by Suzy McKee Charnas. A horrendous gay male-dominated society that locks up women in breeding farms. But then a free lesbian society, the Motherlines, springs up and shelters the refugees from the ebil male society. And the nomadic, horse-riding lesbian culture has an... interesting way of reproducing. In a nutshell, they, ummm... collect semen from their male horses and then use it as a catalyst to reproduce themselves. Or as Liz puts it, "horsefucking lesbians."

The Marq'ssan Cycle by L. Timmel Duchamp. In the dystopian future of 2076, everything's run by lesbians, and somehow the world is still totally fucked. The novel pits the lesbian Anarchist Collectives in the Women's Free Zone against the evil Executive Class, which runs the rest of the world and is equally lesbiotic. Ideomancer explains:

Executive men are 'fixed', which means they are capable of reproduction but entirely uninterested in the act except as a mean to an end. They derive no physical pleasure from the act, which frees them to pursue their vocations and hobbies without internal conflict. Executive women are almost entirely homosexual, except when it is necessary to bear their executive men children-and it is a distasteful act: in Renegade, one executive woman speaks of the obvious perversion of heterosexuality-but there is a very strong prohibition against executive-with-executive sex: executive women are only to have sex with service-tech women, who are sometimes available during parties much as champagne and caviar are provided. Executive women are also taught self-defense against un-fixed men.

The Door into Ocean by Joan Slonczewski. The planet Valedon is materialistic and has a rigid class system, but its moon, Shora, is covered by a shallow ocean full of water-breathing lesbians who live in harmony (but don't have any goats.) The Sharers of Shora are pacifists and super-advanced biologists, who communicate across long distances by talking to the insects, and reproduce by parthenogenesis. They live in peace... until an army from Valedon comes to "develop" Shora. Here's sample dialogue after the army has taken a few Sharers prisoner:

"We seek our sister Sharers," Merwen said.
"Who might they be?"
"Lerion Nonthinker, Ronesha the Coldhearted, and Oo the Jealous, who were last seen with Valans on Nri-el raft."

The Wanderground by Sally Gearhart. A linked collection of stories about a future lesbian utopia, where women can communicate telepathically, not just with each other but also with plants and animals. They can talk to the flowers! And everyone lives in harmony with nature. The women raise children collectively and die when they decide to. Gearhart coined some fancy terms for the lesbians' non-verbal communication, including "learntogether" and "listenspread." In the book's final story, an old woman and her goat prepare to pass on together.

Virgin Planet by Poul Anderson. This is more like the traditional "spaceman visits a planet of all women" story, except that for once the women-only planet is explicitly lesbified. As Liz puts it, "The lesbian society is like OMG SPACEMENZ please fuck us." Similarly, World Without Men by Charles Maine from 1958 features a lesbian-dominated dystopia, which is saved by a man. Here's how the Feminist SF web page describes it:

In World Without Men, all the men are dead and the women perverted lesbians. The story explains that this was caused by feminism and sexual liberation. One man is created from frozen sperm and saves the society.

Solution Three by Naomi Mitchison. Everyone in the ruling class is gay, except for a few "deviant" professional class hets. Cloning has replaced sexual reproduction as a means of carrying on the species, but a few women rebel and bear their own children. Heterosexuality is seen as "rather an unpleasant word," because heterosexuality leads to violence and aggression. And sports. By the end of the book, however, there's the suggestion that eventually society may stop conditioning everyone into mandatory homosexuality.

Shore Of Women by Pamela Sargent. In a post-nuclear dystopia, the sexes have been segregated: Lesbians live in the cities, while savage men lurk out in the wastelands. Every now and then, men come to "shrines" in the wilderness and "consort with the lady," meaning they have virtual-reality sex with a fake goddess. During these cyber hook-ups, the savage men are milked of semen, which is used for artificial insemination by the city women. A woman who murders another woman is exiled from the city, to a horrible fate in the wilderness of men. But there's a shocking twist: the men are so conditioned to worship women that when they meet one in person, they're enraptured instead of violent. So you see, cybersex can change the world after all.

Want more worlds ruled by lesbians? (And who doesn't?) Here's an exhaustive list of gay female worlds in lesbian science fiction.