Her Smoke Rose Up Forever

By: James Tiptree Jr.

Narrated by: Dina Pearlman, Adam Grupper

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.

The stories of Alice Sheldon, who wrote as James Tiptree Jr. (Up the Walls of the World) until her death in 1987, have been heretofore available mostly in out-of-print collections. Thus the 18 accomplished stories here will be welcomed by new listeners and old fans. ''The Screwfly Solution'' describes a chilling, elegant answer to the population problem. In ''Love Is the Plan the Plan Is Death,'' the title tells the tale - species survival insured by imprinted drives - but the story's force is in its exquisite, lyrical prose and its suggestion that personal uniqueness is possible even within biological imperatives. ''The Girl Who Was Plugged In'' is a future boy-meets-girl story with a twist unexpected by the players. ''The Women Men Don't See'' displays Tiptree's keen insight and ability to depict singularity within the ordinary. In Hugo and Nebula award-winning ''Houston, Houston, Do You Read?'' astronauts flying by the sun slip forward 500 years and encounter a culture that successfully questions gender roles in ours.

©2004 Jeffrey D. Smith (P)2020 Audible, Inc.

Bleak, Incandescent, Clinical, Funny, Awesome SF

Her Smoke Rose up Forever (1990) collects eight novellas and ten short stories by Alice Sheldon, AKA James Tiptree Jr., AKA Raccoona Sheldon. Ranging from 1969 to 1981, the stories are thematically arranged in categories like “The Boundaries of Humanity,” “Male and Female,” “Star Songs,” and “Life and Death.”

I liked the stories a lot. They made me shudder, chuckle, shake my head, or open my eyes. Tiptree knew SF (and its time travel, space travel, first contact, colonization, dystopia, post-apocalypse, post-human, and new Adam and Eve subgenres) well enough to appreciate its strong points, avoid its flaws, and play with its conventions. She excels at both “inner space” SF like Le Guin’s and hard science SF like “The Cold Equations” (1954). Some of the stories remind me of Childhood’s End (1953), but bleaker. Many of the stories end with death: Tiptree is not into easy reader satisfaction.

Tiptree presents life (especially love and sex) as intertwined with death and our attempts to escape mortality doomed to fail or to make us inhuman. She writes men and women as different, sometimes complementary, often inimical. She writes only slightly exaggeratedly repulsive MCPs and patriarchies, and some of her downtrodden women strike back with fell intent. (Some of her stories recall incandescent Joanna Russ.)

And she’s just an excellent, vivid writer with great descriptions, like of a bat with “a small, fiercely complicated face,” and a wry sense of humor, like “Other people's wastes smelled badly. Maybe that was what caused all the wars.”

Here is an annotated list of the stories:

In "The Last Flight of Dr. Ain" (1969), a grief-stricken virologist goes on a series of international flights, infected with his own bioweapon and spreading it to as many countries as possible before his death, talking all the while with his lover-victim-muse, the Earth.

In “The Screwfly Solution” (1977), War of the Worlds meets science, misogyny, Christianity, and angels (aliens?) on Earth.

In “And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill’s Side” (1972), the exogamous sex drive in human beings leads them to self destructively desire aliens.

In “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” (1973), nubile waldo bodies animated by the neural systems of plugged in losers are holo-cammed using products that viewers then want to buy. P. Burke is ugly, diseased, and suicidal, an ideal candidate to become a Remote Operator—a proto YouTube influencer! Or is she?

In "The Man Who Walked Home" (1972) a 1989 particle acceleration accident ended the era of hard science and sent John Delgano 50,000 years into the future. His attempts to “walk” home result in his appearing and vanishing every year on the anniversary of the accident.

In "And I Have Come Upon This Place by Lost Ways" (1972), a rookie psych scientist who came via spaceship from a hard science utopia on Earth to a planet with a “primitive” indigenous population really wants to survey a verboten mountain top.

"The Women Men Don't See" (1973) reveals what an unassuming, unsexy working mother and daughter who believe that “Women …. live by ones and twos in the chinks of your world machine” would do when offered a chance to live among alien monsters on an alien world.

In "Your Faces, O My Sisters! Your Faces Filled of Light!" (1976), a joyful female courier is walking down empty streets at night, through a wonderful post-apocalypse world of sisters (men the city builders are gone), when the story shifts to men and women from our “real” world who report encountering the “crazy” woman. A Marge Piercy Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) vibe.

In "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?" (1976), Wells’ “The Country of the Blind” (1904) meets Russ’ “When It Changed” (1972) by way of Tiptree’s detailed imagination and bleak humor when a solar flare flings three astronauts (manly Christian Dave, manly Texan Bud, and unmanly physicist Lorrimer) three-hundred years into the female future.

In "With Delicate Mad Hands" (1981), Carol Page (AKA Cold Pig) has compensated for her abnormally long nose by earning top grades, till finally she’s chosen to be nurse/mother/sexual gratifier under the command of a misogynistic starship captain, when she is, perhaps, called to the stars.

In "A Momentary Taste of Being" (1975), Dr. Aaron Kaye is on a starship sent from a desperate, over-populated Earth to seek worlds for colonization to save humanity. Aaron’s younger sister Lori returns from a scouting mission that seems to have discovered a paradisical planet, but Aaron thinks she’s hiding something, and the alien plant-like life form she brought back with her seems to be affecting the crew strangely.

In "We Who Stole the Dream" (1978), exploited “aliens” attempt to escape from their hulking Terran overlords on a distant planet and return to their original star system where, they imagine, they’ll be greeted by their own people sympatico in pacifism and religion. Would you drink Stars’ Tears, distilled from tortured loving couples of sentient winged creatures?

In "Her Smoke Rose Up Forever" (1974), Peter relives every moment in his life when he was about to experience joy only to be devastatingly “betrayed,” perhaps because alien sightseers to the barren future earth may be providing the energy to evoke Peter’s persisting pain to savor it.

In "Love Is the Plan the Plan Is Death" (1973), a giant plate armored creature with hunting claws, weaving hands, many legs, fur, and great jaws is pursuing his new love, an alluring, tiny, red young of his species (“My shining joy berry!”). What is the plan? Love is the plan! But if the plan is wrong, can we make our own plan?

"On the Last Afternoon" (1972) presents Misha, a dying leader who has been trying desperately to get his reluctant people to prepare for the “attack” of gargantuan lobster-like “monsters” who’ll be coming ashore to violently reproduce, the coastal human colony being ground zero.

"She Waits for All Men Born" (1976) depicts a dinosaur-era mother, the last Kiowa, the Enola Gay, a surgeon saving an unviable baby’s life as missiles head for the hospital, and finally a post-apocalypse tribe into which a blind, albino, mutant girl is born with formidable powers of self-preservation.

"Slow Music" (1980), recalling Clarke’s The City and the Stars (1956) and Simak’s City (1952), explores whether or not a new Eve and Adam can restart the human species after everyone else has gone to the “river,” a disembodied immortality traveling round the universe. Will young Jacko decide to stay to make babies with a resourceful young woman?

"And So On, and So On" (1971) presents post-human humanity attenuated and softened into senescent decadence. Should we explore inner space via religion or art or follow science?

The audiobook is superbly read by Dina Pearlman and Adam Grupper, who understand and enhance what they’re reading without drawing attention to themselves, but it lacks the printed book’s Introduction by John Clute.

The Best of Her Fiction

Alice B. Sheldon, a.k.a. James Tiptree Jr., had a fascinating life story and a unique imagination. Each of these deeply moving, speculative stories is infused with the sadness all female creatives feel when excluded from the "boys' club." The fact that she wasn't a publishing sensation until mid-life, writing as a man, is just another cultural fault that can never be repaired. And despite #metoo and some small headway toward equality, so many female sf authors still publish under pseudonyms or their first initials to disguise gender. Listen to this collection for a mind-bending, unforgettable experience!

Extraordinary Science Fiction

intelligent stories, often with surprising turn of events. Depressive undertones, not exactly cheering up the reader..Sometimes longing for happier ends .

A wonderful reminder

I remember reading this book quite a while back when I was younger. It was a very pleasant surprise to find this audiobook then. The performances were very well done and actually brought to life the stories I had enjoyed a long time ago.

Visionary tales

I loved them even as I found parts of some stories difficult to listen to, even chilling.