(g) Short story as manifest sleight of hand:
Another spy story that becomes an alien story, except this time neither of those is actually the point, because the spy telling the story is really the alien, at least from the point of view of the people he’s telling the story about, and the aliens are the spies and are a tiny bit lame, to be honest, like out-of-their-depth Boy Scouts lost in the jungle, or in this case the mango swamps of Belize.
Alice Bradley Sheldon wrote critically and commercially successful science fiction under the pseudonym of James Tiptree Jr, and no one knew for a decade. ‘The Women Men Don’t See’ is written utterly convincingly from a standardly privileged 1970s man’s point of view: the women in the story are there, he unthinkingly assumes, for his benefit, to be interested in him, to be attracted to him, or at least seduced by him, to care for him when he’s injured, to back him up when he recounts the tale of their adventure, etc; the women are there to see the men, not the other way around.
Except the women — Ruth Parsons and her daughter Althea — are in fact the tale’s true protagonists, and ordinarily arrogant, blinkered, out-of-his-depth Don Fenton is an unwanted sidekick, barely a bit-part in their story. We just happen to be listening to his (hopelessly skewed) version of events. The best part of this is that all the macho male genre critics of the time assumed Tiptree was a man, and praised ‘his’ writing for its Hemingway-esque qualities, its eloquent capturing of the true male spirit, and so on, completely missing that they were being perfectly skewered just as much as pointless feckless Fenton. As Sheldon’s biographer Julie Phillips notes, ‘The Women Men Don’t See’ is about the psychic damage caused by having to see the world through men’s eyes, and thereby to understand how little you are, yourself, truly seen.
First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, December, 1973. Collected in Her Smoke Rose Up Forever, Gollancz, 2014
A Personal Anthology 