The James Tiptree Jr. Award Cake

This is one of the few photographs extant of an edible award, or at least the edible component of an award. From its inception, the idea of the Tiptree has always been to include both a practical dimension — usually a check for $1000 — and a more fanciful one, comprising a beautiful art object and some magnificent form of that ambrosial substance which I believe is only fully appreciated by women — chocolate. While my art object is beautiful (it’s a silver medallion designed by Laurie Toby Edison and graced with images symbolizing elements of the Holdfast Chronicles — an archer’s bow, a broken manacle, and a horse’s foreleg), I have not been able to photograph it well enough for it to show up clearly on a computer screen.

However, behold this wonderful piece of celebratory ephemera: a chocolate cake decorated with a fine rendition of the cover art for The Conqueror’s Child (original artist, Dominic D’Andrea, cake artist Georgie Schnobrich, and photographer Diane Martin). I cut the cake shortly after the award ceremony and the bright, clear image reproduced here rapidly disappeared among the crowd. If I could extend to you a slice of that cake right now via computer, I would, for it is the nature of the Tiptree that it include this element that is best enjoyed when shared — that is, chocolate.

The idea is also to convey both true affection to the winner or winners, and to keep us all from taking ourselves too seriously. The chocolate component is related, after all, to one of the mainstays of ongoing Tiptree fund-raising: the bake-sales held at SF conventions with proceeds going to Tiptree — something that is only a joke because "women’s work" is considered a joke in this society. So the Tiptree chocolate component is also a statement, as I see it, about the tangible and essential value of that work.

That said and on the other hand, avoiding pomposity is a serious concern. While the intent is to publicly honor feminist work that has been over-looked and dismissed by the powers that bestow the rest of the awards in SF and fantasy, no one wants the Tiptree to become mired in the kind of rivalry, electioneering, and endless preoccupation with rules that regularly engulfs, say, the Nebula Awards given by SFWA. This sort of thing happens when ghettoized folk come up with their own internal systems of reward and recognition because they can’t get the Big Boys to consider them for the Big Stuff; what there is becomes that much more important and a focus of energy-bleeding infighting for the only recognition available. In a doubly ghettoized sector of the authorial field — fantasy/SF and feminist — it behooves the Tiptree Motherboard to be extra vigilant about this. Chocolate helps.

Well, there’s very little that chocolate doesn’t help. There used to be a keyboard cast in chocolate as the edible part of the Tiptree, a dark or milk chocolate frame with white chocolate keys; but the company that made those has apparently gone under. Consider it a call to imagination to come up with something else when the Tiptree is given again at Wiscon in Madison in 2001.

— Suzy

Copyright © 2002 by Suzy McKee Charnas