2006 Tiptree Award announced

Here's the list, which also functions as a preview of what will appear in The James Tiptree Award Anthology 4. We're really looking forward to working with the editors on what will be another strong entry in the series.

Winners of the 2006 Tiptree Award:

Shelley Jackson, Half Life (HarperCollins)
Catherynne M. Valente, The Orphan's Tales: In the Night Garden (Bantam Spectra)

Special Recognition:

Julie Phillips, James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon (St. Martin's)

Honor List:

Andrea Hairston, Mindscape (Aqueduct Press)
Betsy James, Listening at the Gate (Atheneum)
Ellen Kushner, The Privilege of the Sword (Spectra)
James Morrow, The Last Witchfinder (William Morrow 2006)
Michaela Roessner, "Horse-Year Women" (Fantasy & Science Fiction, January 2006)
Karen Russell, "Ava Wrestles the Alligator" (Granta 93, April 2006; St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves (Knopf 2006))
Karen Russell, "St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves" (Zoetrope: All-Story, Summer 2006; St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves (Knopf 2006)
Karen Traviss, Matriarch (Eos 2006)
Mark von Schlegell, Venusia (Semiotext(e)2005)

Each year, a panel of five jurors selects the Tiptree Award winners. The 2006 jurors were Midori Snyder, Joan Gordon, Laurel Winter, Diane Silver, and Takayuki Tatsumi. In addition to selecting the winners, the jurors compile an honor list (formerly known as the short list), which calls attention to works that the jurors found interesting, relevant to the award, and worthy of note.

The 2006 jurors praised both winners for their exploration of gender and sexuality. Of The Orphan’s Tales, juror Joan Gordon wrote: "The structure...is brilliant, stories within stories, looping around and following through one another. On the surface it's a girl telling fairy tales a la 1001 nights, but the tales are influenced by worldwide story-telling traditions, and the roles of men, women, heroes, villains, animals, mythic beings, gods, etc., are constantly being subverted, upended, tweaked, so that gender and sexuality are more liquid than solid." Juror Takayuki Tatsumi called this novel "a literary masterpiece renovating postmodern fabulation in the twenty-first century.”"

In writing about Half Life, Gordon comments on the strong lively writing, vivid story telling, inventive language, and narrative tricks. "Half-Life is a spectacular book. Jackson uses the science fictional conceit—conjoined twins born in large numbers after the A-Bomb testing in the 1950s—to explore both sympathetically and satirically all the negotiations in the women's movement, in gay-lesbian-bisexual-transgender movements, in other rights movements—separatist, solidarity, identity, integration, etc." Tatsumi notes that "Jackson’s speculation on Hiroshima and Nagasaki makes the novel more philosophical, inviting us to meditate on what will happen to sexuality and ethnicity in the post-nuclear future."

The jury’s special recognition of Julie Phillips' work of nonfiction, James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon (St. Martin's 2006), is unusual for the Tiptree Award, which focuses on fiction. But the jury could not ignore Phillips' fine work and excellent scholarship, detailing the remarkable life of the remarkable woman for whom the award is named.