Name: Her Smoke Rose Up Forever
Rating: 4.4 (5 reviews)
ISBN: 9780870541605

James Tiptree, Jr.

The Great Years of James Tiptree, Jr

Her Smoke Rose Up Forever

James Tiptree

These 18 darkly complex short stories and novellas touch upon human nature and perception, metaphysics and epistemology, and gender and sexuality, foreshadowing a world in which biological tendencies bring about the downfall of humankind. Revisions from the author's notes are included, allowing a deeper view into her world and a better understanding of her work. The Nebula Award?winning short story Love Is the Plan, the Plan Is Death, the Hugo Award?winning novella The Girl Who Was Plugged In, and the Hugo and Nebula Award?winning novella Houston, Houston, Do You Read? are included.

Lindy

In this collection's title story, the protagonist attempts to "conjure love out of extinction to shield him[self] against hell" (p. 400). I think this sums up the anthology. 

At the time of Tiptree's writing, the idea of biology being destiny was rapidly gaining traction with little substantial critique. The previously pervasive imperial patriarchal epistemology of religion succumbed to an imperial patriarchal epistemology of science as undeniable truth. Add a general social preoccupation with Freud, and when Tiptree asks herself if there's any hope for women, the answer is a resounding no. In these stories, Tiptree chronicles the resulting betrayal, rage, anguish, and alienation. It's devastatingly depressing and devastatingly beautiful. 

Volume highlights: "The Screwfly Solution," "The Girl Who Was Plugged In," Houston, Houston, Do You Read?," "Love Is The Plan The Plan Is Death," "Slow Music"

Eleanor Martin

Don't get me wrong, these are fascinating stories, tightly written. I just had to force my way through the book on account of the unrelenting misery. That I finished it is testament to the standard of writing - if races destroying themselves is your bag, carry on.

Bryan Alexander

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."

Her Smoke Rose Up Forever The Great Years of James Tiptree, Jr

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