Her Smoke Rose Up Forever by James Tiptree Jr.

Her Smoke Rose Up Forever by James Tiptree Jr.

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


John Clute said, “I felt that simply to read a Tiptree story was to yank it, bleeding, from its dark home.”



Tiptree herself said one of her pieces was “screaming from the heart.”



I had these two sentences up on the screen all day, and I finally realized I wasn’t reviewing because I was hoping they would give me perspective, a master key to this book so I could talk about it as a whole. Respond to the chorus these stories are. But I can’t yet. So the disconnected things I do have:



Thematically, you could pick a Tiptree story out of a lineup in about three sentences. It’ll be the one about biological drives winning out over fragile psychology. It’ll be the one delivered in a calm, reporting style while something screams underneath until its voice breaks. It’ll be the one about how sex and death are two sides of the same coin. It’ll probably be the one where most of the human race bites it.



It’ll be about men and women. It’s bizarre to say of a science fiction collection, but my immediate association is Virginia Woolf. Tiptree and Woolf had the same preoccupation with thinking about the sexes as . . . distorting gravitational pulls on each other (mostly men on women, obviously). The sort of gender essentialist thinking that is obsessed with counterfactuals – what if all men died out this way? Or that? And all the time they’re talking about “women,” you’re just like, “oh, sweetie. It’s okay. We know you’re talking about how you hurt.”



Anyway. This book blew my mind. Not every story – not even most of them. But the ones that did . . . I came to myself last Saturday, standing out at our elevator bank with an armful of recycling and my pulse going at 150, with no memory of how I’d gotten there. All I remembered was the last ten minutes of “The Screwfly Solution” playing in my ear, and I couldn’t breathe.



Right. Some actual stories.



“The Screwfly Solution” – The one that really socked me. This is classic Tiptree with all the letters and reports layered between the reader and the screaming, bloody thing that’s happening. It is I think the story that gets most keenly, most viscerally at those things I was talking about up there – sex and death, biological imperatives, dying and dying and dying. And a way of talking about gendered violence that Tiptree picked up, looking around her 1970’s world and reading her 1970’s newspapers, and mimicked down the years to me, where it sounds . . . well. It’s dead accurate, okay? Read it here.



“A Momentary Taste of being” – A long space opera colony ship thing. I spent the first 80% thinking it was nice, but wondering what the hell all these cogs and gears were doing, because I couldn’t see the structure. And the structure put itself together as fast as a Marine assembling his rifle, and then it did other things. And I said “oh,” very meekly, and went away. Nihilist was invented for this story.



“The Girl Who Was Plugged In” – a story that would have been a sentimental offensive mess from someone else. But Tiptree hit the style, the telling so right. This is about a depressed (and possibly disabled) girl in an underground bunker, living the dream life through a corporate designed body. Of course she falls in love. Of course. As the narrator says, “you really can skip this part.” But the narrator lies.



“And I have Come Upon This Place by Lost Ways” – Ick. A total didactic flop, all frustrated academic rage and bureaucratic restraints on research.



“Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” – I have very mixed feelings about this one. Utterly absorbing to read, but one central premise – that a women’s only society would be different in those particular ways – struck me as nonsense. But there is something here that is psychologically true and screwed up, and the execution is, of course, flawless.



I’ll stop now.



Except no, wait, have one more. The Women Men Don’t See.





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