Her Smoke Rose Up Forever

A haunting collection. Source: Here

"Man is an animal whose dreams come true and kill him."

I enjoy short story anthologies for the reason that they provide a wide corpus of an author's work, usually across their career and hosting such a wide variety of stories that you get to see how they write for different characters, contexts and narratives. Sometimes the results are good, sometimes not so good - and sometimes you get a book like this. I put off writing this review just because of the sheer impact these stories had on me as a whole, and I wanted to collect my thoughts before writing about such a haunting piece of literature.

Her Smoke Rose Up Forever is a collection of 18 science fiction and fantasy short stories written by James Tiptree Jr. across the length of her writing career and covering human nature, biological essentialism, gender and sexuality, metaphysics and our own perception of the world we live in. Needless to say it isn't your usual sci-fi - and it makes for such a vivid set of tales that still ring with me now even months after reading it.

Just reading up on Tiptree herself makes for an informative read. Tiptree itself is a pseudonym, her real name being Alice Bradley Sheldon. Her mother worked as a writer and her father was a lawyer, Bradley enjoyed travels with them from an early age. Initially working as a graphic artist, a painter and then an art critic, she joined the United States Army Air Forces in 1942, later promoted to major. She would later study for a Bachelor of Arts degree at American University (1957-59) and gain a doctorate at George Washington University in 1967 in Experimental Psychology, also submitting science fiction stories under the name James Tipree Jr., not just to protect her academic reputation but due to the sadly accurate perception that stories written under male names weren't unfairly disregarded. She's quoted as saying:

"A male name seemed like good camouflage. I had the feeling that a man would slip by less observed. I've had too many experiences in my life of being the first woman in some damned occupation."

Certainly, the common thread through these stories are women and their treatment by the society they live in; and oftentimes their attempts at escape. Consider "The Screwfly Solution", which posits misogyny as an infectious disease with lethal consequences. Or perhaps "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?" where a group of male astronauts displaced in time arrive to a future Earth solely populated by women. In "The Women Men Don't See" both women choose to leave with aliens rather than stay on Earth, following the monsters they don't know over they monsters they do. There's such variety, such a fertile imagination at display - and the questions she grapples with elevate her work beyond just pulpy sci-fi.

They are dark stories though. Women are often beaten, powerless, at the mercy of men. But is that so different from our world? Yes, the stories border on downright depressing but that's their whole point; highlighting just how messy and tragic our own one is. You'll notice I'm waxing poetic but that's just because of the ride this book took me on. I'd definitely recommend not whizzing through it, this is a story collection to absorb and think on instead of consuming it all at once.

I came out of that book changed, and those stories still stick with me today. Alice Sheldon had a voice and a talent in their own league, and there haven't been many like her since. Certainly not for the faint of heart but I'd heartily recommend it to any S.F. fan willing to try something different.