Flying Cups & Saucers: Gender Explorations in Science Fiction & Fantasy

Ever wonder what happened to the rest of the tea party when the saucers went off into space? Here’s your chance to find out! What would it be like to go to a club where you could buy an injection of sexiness? To grow up in a world where you didn’t know what gender you would be until puberty — and the discovery could be painful? To find yourself and your secret pitted against the entire United States government? The James Tiptree, Jr. Award has been recognizing science fiction and fantasy novels and stories that explore and expand gender since 1992. Although the award itself is given to one or two works of fiction a year, each jury also produces an “honor list“ of notable works that were considered for the award. This anthology contains almost all of the short fiction that either won or was honored in the first five years of the award.

Flying Cups & Saucers collects 13 winners and finalists for the James Tiptree Jr. Award, named for science fiction's ultimate gender pioneer, the woman writer everyone thought was a man. Accordingly, the Tiptree Award (est. 1991) honors the best science fiction and fantasy to explore and expand gender roles. As you might expect, these stories are feminist; non-heterosexist; focused on sex and desire; and sometimes androgynous (a few stories feature three sexes, and one even stars Freud's nightmare, the woman with a penis). But this list hardly begins to describe the contents.

Kelley Eskridge's terrific and gender-bending And Salome Danced is the perfect opening story: it not only examines oft-ignored aspects of desire, it operates on several levels to explore how what we expect to see defines and limits our perceptions. Science fiction's founding mother Ursula K. Le Guin contributes two brilliant stories: Forgiveness Day explores the intricacy of gender roles in a society where they are further complicated by slavery and war, while The Matter of Seggri is set on a world with near-absolute segregation of the sexes. L. Timmel Duchamp incisively delineates how men react to a woman who doesn't fit the feminine role. James Patrick Kelly's seemingly traditional idea-SF story Chemistry just might be the most radical in the book, for it explores the purely chemical nature of love. The other contributors--Eleanor Arnason, Ian McDonald, Carol Emshwiller, Graham Joyce, Peter F. Hamilton, R. Garcia y Robertson, Lisa Tuttle, Delia Sherman, and Ian R. MacLeod--also contribute strong, insightful, well written, challenging, and often threatening fiction. --Cynthia Ward