James Tiptree. Jr.

I was thinking about some of the science fiction I used to read, and I started going down the whatever-happened-to path. Needless to say, most of the SCI-FI authors I read are dead, but I am struck by how much their lives and works resembled Kilgore Trout's. James Tiptree had an even stranger life: see her Wikipedia entry . What I didn't know at the time was that Tiptree was the pen name of Alice Sheldon (photo right), a bisexual behaviorist and former CIA analyst, who committed suicide after first killing her elderly husband. Her stories and novels were considered New Wave sci-fi at the time and had a literary style that seemed drug induced (see this example). Every base library had a collection of her works, and I admit they used to puzzle and disturb me, but now no more so than the author herself. There's a biography available by Julie Phillps, "The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon" (reviewed by the NY Times). I wonder what ever became of New Wave science fiction?

(Photo: Mary Hastings Bradley Papers, University of Illinois, Chicago)

More Adelanto News

Adelanto's problems in the last two decades. Victorville Daily Press : Arrest evokes memories of rocky past News reports hints, but doesn't come out and say that before being replaced, the Adelanto police department acted as the hired enforcers for the previous ruling group of developers and politicians. These Adelanto elites were also single handedly responsible for tying up the conversion of the former George Air Force Base in fruitless litigation that spanned many years at a cost of millions of dollars. Ultimately a whole generation of Adelanto land owners, developers, and politicians had to die out before the town could be considered safe by supermarket, banks, and fast food franchises. Until then, Adelanto residents had to purchase their groceries and cash their checks in Victorville. Such a lack of stores and services was a remarkable achievement for a town that adjoined a military base and counted among its local industries a state of the art prison. (Coincidentally a former Adelanto mayor had been in prison even before being elected, see LA Times 4/11/2007).

Adelanto News

Adelanto is a small high desert town in California that could well serve as a text book example of small town dysfunction. While not a communty of end-of-the-roaders, Adelanto would be the next neighborhood over. For years groups of local developers and politicians made alliances and carried out complicated feuds in a backdrop of cheerful nickel and dime corruption. A long tradition continues: Mayor of Adelanto arrested in theft of Little League funds: "'He's very principled and very ethical,'"

The Adventures of Lieutenant Rose

Long before James Bond (Lt. Cmdr, Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve), there was the dashing Lieutenant Rose, hero of many British one-reelers (one reelers were the forerunners to Youtube). The British Film Institute has a collection, but only viewable through British schools: screenonline: Lieutenant Rose and the Stolen Code (1911)

God Bless You, Mr. Vonnegut

Hello, goodbye! His obituary attempts to describe his place in time, and why he was important. Vonnegut had an easy writing style with a simple message: we had to be kind. He was the first to explain that a good index was the next best thing to reading an author's mind.Vonnegut was most fond of his earlier work, which were published as science fiction, and felt his later more literary novels were below average. Vonnegut also understood and detested science fiction and created the archetype of the science fiction author, Kilgore Trout, who worked a series of low paying jobs and wrote scores of bad science fiction novels, read mainly by deranged fans. Trout eventually committed suicide. So it goes. (Photo from NY Times)