Found Screwfly online and read it.
Yeah, that's good.
I'll have to find some of her stuff that she did under the Tiptree name, because the main voice in Screwfly is so very much a woman (woman character) that I don't think anyone could imagine that being written by a man.
My Google-fu had failed me, as I'd missed that it was online!
It's here, if anyone wants to read it.
The Screwfly Solution. (I sized my browser window down to get the text all on the white side--what a shitty background set-up.)
I'll admit I was thrown within the first two paragraphs, as I couldn't figure out how we jumped from sweaty guy to housewife. I reread a few times before giving up and moving on in the hopes it would become clear. I still think it was an odd and confusing way to start.
After reading the story and comparing it to the film treatment of it, there are some marked differences. I think the director did an admirable job of updating it and actually making us care more about the characters. I have to admit, the story wins with me on concept, but I engaged far less with the characters as individuals than I did in the film version. I expected the story to be longer and much more in depth. I still think it's great, and the general idea is amazing, but I felt less for the people than I did in the filmed version, which isn't done through letters and lets you see the people all together before everything comes crashing down. I think the director took her idea and actually made some improvements, which is usually the opposite of how I feel.
I think in this case, since she did publish it under the pseudonym Raccoona Sheldon, the gender of the author was less in dispute. I do know that Harlan Ellison and a couple other people who wrote forwards to anthologies that Tiptree published in had, at one time, stressed Tiptree's maleness. One went so far, when rumors were swirling that Tiptree might have been a woman, to pick apart some writing and use pieces as examples of why the author absolutely had to be male. Whoops.
I think by the time Screwfly came out, her gender had been revealed or was about to be revealed. There were rumors, at the very least. Maybe that's why the funny pseudonym and why you felt like you were reading a woman writer. Maybe by this point, she wrote it differently than her other stuff. I haven't read anything else yet, but it'll be an interesting comparison.
I want to read more about her, too. She seems like a fascinating person. I hadn't ever heard of her until her death many years ago (she killed her husband and then herself, both in their late 80s, and they were found on the bed together holding hands), and I find myself fascinated by her in much the same way I was when I first discovered Dorothy Parker.
Shelley
