Alice Bradley Sheldon was a sci-fi writer with a life that was stranger than fiction. As a child, she went on several trips with her parents to Africa and illustrated children’s books that her mother, Mary Bradley, wrote about Alice and her adventures there.

After a brief young marriage, an attempt at college, and stints as a painter and an art critic, she joined the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps in 1942, and in 1943 she was hired by the Pentagon. And that’s just the beginning.

After World War II ended, in 1945, Alice was transferred to a new unit and soon married her commanding officer, Col. Huntington Sheldon. In 1952 they both joined the CIA. Alice left the CIA in 1955…and used her intelligence training to disappear from her marriage, which she had become unsure about, for about a year. After earning a college degree in 1959 she pursued graduate studies in experimental psychology. While writing her dissertation, she also began writing science fiction stories under the pseudonym James Tiptree, Jr. Tiptree’s stories received several awards and were praised by critics for their treatment of themes such as death and gender and later for their feminist leanings. Tiptree corresponded extensively but always closely guarded “his” personal life and identity. Sheldon felt that Tiptree was not just a pseudonym but also part of her personality, a character she played. The only detail Tiptree gave about his life was that his mother was an explorer from Chicago. When Mary Bradley’s obituary was published in 1976, the sci-fi community put the pieces together and figured out Alice Sheldon was Tiptree. This revelation helped contradict assumptions within the sci-fi genre about perceived differences between men’s and women’s writing. Sheldon, however, was deeply affected by the loss of her alter ego. She continued to publish as Tiptree, but her work was never the same. Having dealt with depression for much of her life, Sheldon shot her ailing husband and then herself in 1987. In 1991 an award was established in her honor: the James Tiptree Jr. Literary Award for work that “expands or explores our understanding of gender”.