Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (2004) - Plot & Excerpts
"Ahead lies only the irreversible long decline. For the first time we know there is nothing beyond ourselves."when do you know that the book you've just read is one of your favorite books? that an author you've been reading is one of your favorite authors? probably a variety of factors come into play. for me, the love affair often begins when i realize that the author or book has a few specific attributes: genuine compassion and empathy for human beings combined with a dark and despairing view of the human condition itself; an imagination so fertile and original that it verges on nuts. James Tiptree Jr. and the stories contained in this collection have such traits. it's a beautiful thing when that kind of connection between reader and story happens. and when, on top of that, the author's personal story is both fascinating and moving... LOVE. if you know nothing about the author, look her up under her pen name or her real name, Alice Sheldon. a truly fascinating and complex individual.Tiptree has been pegged as a feminist author, from the good ole days of the 70s, and is sometimes described as a so-called Angry Feminist. well, the shoe sorta fits: she is definitely angry! her stories about gender imbalance are filled with brutal men, disempowered women, and a barely simmering undercurrent of rage at the injustice of it all. i have absolutely no problem with this and i don't think being considered a "feminist" is remotely insulting. however, the idea that Tiptree writes primarily about the issues of women is not just limiting (similar to likewise limiting descriptions of Angela Carter or Margaret Atwood)... it is incorrect. Tiptree writes about gender, about change, about society, about life, about death - the whole kit & kaboodle. she is not a single-issue writer and her stories are overflowing with marvelous idea after marvelous idea - of which the relationship between the genders is just one of many concerns. she writes with passion, fierce conviction, and is possessed of a remarkable generosity of spirit towards her doomed characters and despairing situations. "despair"... that should probably be addressed. the stories in this collection are bleak and deeply tragic. don't look for happy endings when reading Tiptree! one of the more positive endings has its effervescent narrator joyfully accepting his slow death and consumption by his beloved life-partner; another has a pair of characters excitedly exit the dull, restrictive confines of earth, forever.all of the stories contained within this collection are gems. some are beautifully polished and glitter with their brilliance. others are more rough-hewn, less pretty to the eye - but valuable nonetheless. each one is deeply intelligent; each one is a distillation and expansion of a particular thesis or set of ideas; each story is overflowing with wit, smarts, sadness, and life; each story stands completely on its own. here are some of my favorites:(special thanks to BunWat for helping my wee little brain fully understand the ramifications of several of these stories.)The Screwfly Solution: something insidious is turning men against women... Tiptree takes her basic idea and spins it in directions that are full of tension and slowly ratcheting unease... the mid-stream change in narrators is an ingenious decision.The Girl Who Was Plugged In: a sad pop culture addict becomes a glorious celebrity & beautiful face of sinister corporate interests... a buzzing, dizzying use of slangy language and a dense narrative full of extreme emotional highs and lows.The Women Men Don't See: are women a separate species? apparently only time and opportunity will tell... perhaps Tiptree's most famous tale, this story about the secret nature of women is warm, wise, deviously sardonic, and has one of the most nihilistically hopeful endings i've ever read.Houston, Houston, Do You Read?: three astronauts are flung far into the future, to discover that the world has changed, possibly for the better - but for them, definitely for the worse... i loved the depiction of this futuristic society, in many ways a personal dream come true (minus, ahem, a few key aspects)... i smiled and laughed so much while reading this one. oh, the tragic fate of assholes!With Delicate Mad Hands: a physically unattractive woman takes control of a ship to search for destiny and fulfill her most secret dreams... it should be mentioned that the highly sympathetic woman in question is a murderous psychopath... this novella is equal parts nuts 'n bolts thriller, xenographic study of a bizarre planet full of unusual (and unusually loveable) alien species, and psychological portrait of a disturbed and downtrodden woman... a rapturously annhilating mystery in space.A Momentary Taste of Being: a suspenseful, well-detailed and richly characterized novella about a scout ship's search for a colony site for an overpopulated earth... featuring disturbing mind control, creepy incestuous undertones, a hyper-sexualized alien 'invasion', a terrifying transcendence... my favorite story in the collection.We Who Stole the Dream: tonight the aliens revolt! against disgusting, oppressive humans, of course. HUMANS OUT OF THE GALAXY NOW!Love Is the Plan the Plan is Death: a hopeful tale of a charmingly high-spirited, forward-thinking young lad learning about life, death, and love... slowly coming to understand that the increasing length of the cold seasons equals increasing danger... fighting against tradition and culture to protect his and his loved ones' future... it should also be noted that the endearing hero in question is a gigantic, savagely violent alien-spider-monster.Slow Music: two of the final inhabitants of earth struggle to decide if they want to stay themselves and continue the human race, or transcend into the great beyond... a great twist ending... a mournful saga in miniature."A Mournful Saga in Miniature"... that phrase could also be used to describe each and every one of these glorious stories. i was enchanted by the despairing, empathetic tragedy and lightly percolating wit of the visions contained within this book. in many ways i am reminded of an equally dark and wonderful classic scifi writer - the ineffable Cordwainer Smith. two beautiful writers and two amazing human beings.i love you, Alice Sheldon! and your stories, so full of dark yet wistful tragedy."The lutroid's nictitating membranes filmed his eyes. After a moment he said formally, 'You carry despair as your gift'."
This is a reread for me. I read the book when it came out circa 1990, and read some of the stories in collections before that. "The Girl Who Was Plugged In" I taught in an ambitious literature class at the University of Michigan, around 1997.Why reread now? My dear friend, podcast maven, and Goodreads user Jenny Colvin has been describing her reading of these stories in several places. Her reflections (and an odd discussion with another podcaster/reviewer) made me want to revisit these stories. And another friend gifted me a copy of the Tiptree*/Sheldon biography, so I added that to my reading.(In these notes I won't revisit that biography, nor offer a story-by-story review. I might do the latter, given time.)So what was it like returning to these stories?It's exactly like revisiting works of art you admired, and now find them even more powerful, impressive, and disturbing.I found myself slowing down to reread paragraphs and whole stories, savoring Tiptree's astonishing ability to cram details and information into compressed sentences, admiring the way she built hints and clues throughout a tale to set up its conclusion. Even the longer stories ("Momentary Taste of Being") are as rich as novels.The bleakness and melancholy struck me harder this time. “Man is an animal whose dreams come true and kill him.” (431) I'd forgotten how often the end of the human race appeared in Tiptree's fiction, especially by nuclear war or aliens. Her Smoke Rose Up Forever is filled with humans wiped out, ruined landscapes, and people degraded as a species. These are tragedies and post apocalypses. John Clute's introduction arranges the stories in an arc towards death, which makes some sense at the risk of too much biographical criticism, but decay and doom are throughout the tales. "You carry despair as your gift." (Well quoted, Jenny) Part of that degradation stems from hard science, a kind of biological determinism. The superbly realized aliens in "Love is the Plan, the Plan is Death" (and have I mentioned the awesomeness of Tiptree's titles?) are largely driven by biological imperatives, and doom themselves when crossing them. Humans reveal hideous depths when probed or tweaked biologically in "Houston" and "Screwfly". Our noble desire to explore the universe, an sf staple, becomes entropic ("And So On, And So On"), a pathetic cover for sex fetish ("And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill's Side"), or just a species-level cover for another species' sexuality ("Momentary"). The sheer power of anti-patriarchal outrage came across more clearly than before, too, possibly because of today's political climate. This is obviously the point of some of the famous stories, like "The Women Men Don't See", the truly terrifying "Screwfly Solution", and "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?" But we also see the ferocity and subtlety of men's oppression of women in other stories, like the nightmarish first 1/3rd of "With Delicate Mad Hands" or the gender imbalance between the two main characters of "Slow Music." Readers interested in gender and science fiction today *must* read these stories largely from the 1970s. These stories are such powerful howls of outrage, such deep critiques of patriarchal masculinity - "Houston" is a clear anatomy. At times Tiptree's women must defy the entire world, trying to overwrite it entirely ("Your Faces, O My Sisters! Your Faces Filled of Light!") or flee in desperation ("Women Men Don't See"):"Please take us. We don't mind what your planet is like; we'll learn - we'll do anything!... Please. Oh, please." (146)Her Smoke has other intersections with sf history. I see "Girl Who Was Plugged In" as a critical cyberpunk antecedent. "Her Smoke Rose Up" echoes powerfully John Crowley's criminally under appreciated Engine Summer. "The Man Who Walked Home" and "She Waits for All Men Born" are fine examples of science fiction engaging with the construction of myth, on two very different levels. Tiptree's use of hard science places this collection powerfully in hard sf's tradition, and also offers a fascinating path for feminist sf (a fine antecedent for Joan Sloncewski).These stories verge on the horror genre, but are more horrific than generic. "The Last Flight of Dr. Ayn," one of my favorite short stories of all time (and a nice contemporary to J. G. Ballard's compressed stories") so elegantly summons up cataclysmic fear with quiet lines like "Birds are, you know, warm-blooded" (10). "We Who Stole the Dream" is based on moral horror, itself predicated on lethal torture. The final cruelty of "Her Smoke" is like Greg Egan's worst torments, and features desolation akin to that depicted by Lovecraft in "Mountains of Madness" or Hodgson's Night Land, but so much more economically expressed. Read this book. Reread it. It's one of the great science fiction collections, and should be a fixture in 20th-century American literature. *I'll refer to the author by her pseudonym here, partly for convenience, and also to reflect her choice of publication. Much like I say "Twain" instead of "Clemens."
What do You think about Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (2004)?
I've been working on this on and off for probably close to a year. I've wanted to read Tiptree for a long time; she was a ground-breaking sci-fi writer and one of the few women who gained recognition in this field in the 1970s. The stories in this collection were all really... haunting. Almost every story followed me around for a few days after I finished it, which is partly why reading this took so long.In many ways, her stories present a really hopeless future, but Tiptree's characters also keep going and striving (which is part of why they were so haunting to me; Ursula Le Guin, a favorite of mine who was much younger than Tiptree but writing at the same time, has a lot more hope in her stories - or maybe she just uses fiction to explore hopeful concepts? I could spend a long time thinking about this). In particular, Tiptree's vision of gender in the future was fascinating to me. In several of the stories presenting a future with a gender binary, the women end up as sex slaves on spaceships, but are no less interesting or competent for that; it's the men who are caricatures of macho maleness while the women are working five times as hard to succeed and servicing the men as an understood price of admission. Her stories really focus on the female characters when you look at them collected like this; it's really interesting to me that no one caught on that she was a woman for such a long time. Overall, I'm glad I read this, since Tiptree's work is so hugely influential (so clear now looking back on other SF that I've read). I won't likely seek her out again in the near future, however, which has more to do with how sad her stories make me and nothing to do with their artistry or literary merit, of which I don't think enough can be said.(Marking this with my "hugo" tag because this collection includes the following Hugo Award winners: 1974 novella, "The Girl Who Was Plugged In"; 1977 novella, "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?")
—Roxanne
I'll probably come back and review this collection more thoroughly later, if (when) I read the whole thing again.For now, I'll just say that there's a part of me that needed this book so badly. It's the part that makes my heartrate speed up when I read the text of Andrea Dworkin's speech I Want a Twenty-Four-Hour Truce During Which There Is No Rape; the part of me that considers all of the patriarchal condescension, the misogynist hostility, the sexual assaults that I have experienced or witnessed or heard about in my life, and despairs. I don't, rationally, think for a second that exclusion of cismen would create a feminist utopia; but oh my god, it feels good to read about it. I think that's why "With Delicate Mad Hands" and "Your Faces, O My Sisters! Your Faces Filled of Light!" are my favorite stories in this collection -- they're both about escaping from a patriarchal hell.When I read science fiction from the fifties or sixties or seventies, it so often appalls me with its assumptions that hundreds of years in the future, technology and government will be radically different, but women's subservience to men will be exactly the same. I imagine that the conditions that produced these stories produced Tiptree's: that she had in her a massive crater filled with rage and despair, and she allowed it to pour out of her in the form of beautiful and controlled sentences.On a sillier note, I hate the cover illustration of this edition so much that I made a brown-paper wrap for it. Never again will I have to look up that guy's nostril while reading these stories.
—Dorothea
James Tiptree Jr. (pen name for Alice Sheldon) was a truly amazing writer. Her life - both public and internal - is fascinating in itself, but her collected fiction is a rare and precious legacy.This particular collection of many of her short works is an impressive, daunting hunk of wordage. There are so many stories here and so many ideas within that one could spend a lifetime mulling them over. Unfortunately, my copy must be returned to the library for the enjoyment of a waiting patron, so I was unable to get to all of the stories available here. But I read most of the inclusions I wanted to read right now, so I'll go ahead and offer my thoughts. I really need to buy a copy for my home shelves! Many of the stories here upset me in some way, be it anger, or sadness, or frustration or feelings harder to pin down and describe. They were wonderfully-written, yet difficult to read. I don't regret the effort, though, as I greatly respect an author who can so move my emotions. Each story here was well worth my time, but this quality in the writing did necessitate my taking things in slow, more digestible bites. Tiptree was masterful at exposing imbalance, unfairness, iniquity, and hypocrisy. There are several 5-star stories here as well as a number to which I would give 3 stars. As with most collections, especially one so lengthy and covering such a wide period in an author's career, there was considerable variance in subjective quality and impact from story to story. However, as with a few other short story authors I can think of, (Ted Chiang comes to mind.) a mediocre Tiptree story stands tall above the ouvres of many of her peers.One note on format: I liked the organizational layout of this collection. Tiptree's included stories were categorized into themed sections, such as "The Boundaries of Humanity" or "Male and Female," and I felt the system worked well, providing a method of comparison that I found useful. It was good to read several thematically-related stories together. I would definitely recommend this particular collection as a prime place to introduce yourself to this phenomenal and often misunderstood writer.
—Candiss
