First, the good news. The
other Campbell Award (Yes, for forty years there have been TWO major awards named after that fucker, and yes, it has always been confusing)
is also getting its name changed. When the Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction at the University of Kansas decides what name they want their award formerly known as the "John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best science-fiction novel of the year" to be known as, they will announce it. They have already renamed their yearly conference from the Campbell Conference to the Gunn Center Conference.
John Scalzi has
some interesting comments on the whole thing, and I think this is the most notable and important bit of his post:
Campbell is and will always be part of science fiction’s history. But history isn’t static, even if the facts of history stay the same. Anyone notable enough to be part of the historical record will find themselves the subject of reassessment, for however long they grace history’s record. It is, weirdly, a privilege not many people get. Campbell was never guaranteed a pedestal, or an award, or a conference in his name, even if he got them for a while. He was never guaranteed to keep them. No one is.
On to the Bad News.
The Tiptree Award is remaining the Tiptree Award, at least for now.
James Tiptree, Jr. was the pen name of Alice Sheldon, one of the greatest female SF/F writers of the early 20th Century. More than a pen name, Tiptree was a persona. Besides writing many great classics, Sheldon was an active participant in the SF/F community for decades, as James. Sheldon carried on many friendships entirely via letter, and was by the 1970s one of the Great Old Men of the genre. (Unsurprisingly, most of Tiptree's work explored gender and the social construction of identity.) It was a huge shock when, in the 1970s, it was revealed that James was Alice. Given both Tiptree's body of work and double life, it was an appropriate name for an award encouraging the exploration and expansion of gender.
The problem is that Sheldon/Tiptree killed both her disabled husband and herself in a murder-suicide in 1987. Everyone who knew them believed it was a mutual decision, and yet, it was still a pretty terrible thing to do. Especially because "well, he's disabled and old and if she can't care for him he'd be better off dead" seems to have been a large part of why they finally did it after a decade of talking and thinking about it. After some deliberation, the Tiptree Motherboard has decided to keep the name as it is, at least for now.
They lay out their reasons, many of which I agree with, here. (Warnings for talk about suicide, depression, and some ableism.) File 770 also has some interesting discussion in the comments, including by at least one person who was fairly close with Alice.
And I'm torn. Because on the one hand, Tiptree's writing explored and foregrounded themes that almost nobody else was exploring at the time (certainly nobody else with such focus and consistency). And (unlike Campbell's fascism, which had a DIRECT and OBVIOUS affect on both his work and the genre as a whole), Sheldon's last horrifying act was not directly connected with Tiptree's art, except insofar as the sense of having been trapped with no way out led both to the murder/suicide and shaped Tiptree's work. Tiptree's writings are not notably more ableist than the genre as a whole, nor do they glorify or advocate for the sort of act which was Sheldon's last. It is possible to separate out the work from the evil, because the work did not advocate for or position the evil as good; the evil was, by and large, not present in the work. This is in direct contrast to Campbell, who actively used his work and his position to advocate for all of the evil in his head. You can't separate out Campbell's evil from his work because he made them intertwine so deeply--
he did that,
he chose that. Tiptree/Sheldon made a different choice, and so it
is possible to make a separation between the work and the evil they did.
But how great a separation do we want to make? How much is good or reasonable? Do we want to name this award after a murderer? The Tiptree Motherboard make a case that it wasn't murder because Huntington Sheldon, Alice's husband, wanted to die, so that makes everything alright enough to keep the name. Here's my response, which I emailed to them:
As a person with a disability, there is one aspect of your understanding of Huntington's last days that is a gigantic, glaring problem, for two reasons, neither of which you seem to have considered. And the aspect is this: did he, or did he not, wish to die? For you, this is an important point (and you may well be correct on it). I don't believe that it matters, for two reasons.
First, a desire to die is not rational. It is a mental illness. It is part of depression. If a healthy person desires to die, we get them help. If they kill themselves, it is seen as a great tragedy. But when a disabled person is depressed, oh, of course, what could be more natural! Of course they want to kill themselves! Of course they need help ... but we are quicker to offer help to end their life than we are to offer assistance towards a better quality of life and the sort of therapy and medication that might help them be happy. Why is a disabled person's life less worthy than an abled person's? You may have considered this, but your statement certainly doesn't reflect any such consideration. He wanted to die, so his wife can be excused for making it happen. It fits so well into the common narrative of disability and death. It's even used in cases where we know for a certainty that the murder victim did not want to die ... because even in cases where the victim left a ton of evidence that they were happy and wanted to live, people will ignore it because they believe that disabled people must and should be miserable. Of course they must have wanted to die. So therefore the murderer can be excused for having killed them. Regardless of what resources were available to help the couple in 1987 (or in the decade leading up to that during which everybody seems to have known they were depressed and possibly suicidal and nobody did much), we live now in a world with much greater resources to help and yet people still kill disabled people using this as the reasoning. Regardless of whether or not you rename the award, PLEASE reframe the discussion so that you are not contributing to this perception of depression and disability.
Second, let us assume for the sake of argument that he genuinely did wish to die. How did he come to have such a wish? When someone is completely dependent on another person, as Huntington was on Alice, it is incredibly easy for the dependent person to adopt their caretaker's opinions. It is a psychological defense tactic, and it is the same mechanism that produces Stockholm Syndrome. This extends even to suicide. If the "caretaker" wishes the dependent person to be dead, the dependent person will often passively accept their "caretaker's" wishes. (I use scare quotes here because if someone wants you dead or believes you would be better off dead, the level of care is often ... minimal, if not actively neglectful or abusive.) If they can get to someplace safer, though, where they are not told through word and actions that they should be dead and would be better off dead, their opinions on the subject often change DRAMATICALLY. Even staying with the same primary caregiver but having more social contact with the wider world can be enough to work such change.
So the idea that Huntington was suicidal himself is not the mitigating factor you imagine it to be.
I really don't know what the answer is.
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