Her Smoke Rose Up Forever by James Tiptree
"Her Smoke Rose Up Forever" is a collection of eighteen short stories by Alice Sheldon, who wrote under the pen name James Tiptree, Jr. Released posthumously in 1987, this anthology showcases some of Tiptree's most celebrated works published between 1969 and 1981. Each story in the collection explores themes of death, the human experience, and relationships, often depicting the darker aspects of existence and the human condition. The collection includes notable tales such as "Her Smoke Rose Up Forever," which examines love and loss through the lens of alien visitation, and "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?" which portrays a dystopian future where male survivors confront a world dominated by female clones. Tiptree's narratives frequently address the complexities of gender dynamics, including themes of sexual aggression and alienation. This thought-provoking anthology reflects Tiptree’s unique voice and insight into the intertwining of desire, identity, and mortality, making it a significant work in science fiction literature. Readers interested in intricate storytelling and profound thematic exploration may find this collection particularly engaging.
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Her Smoke Rose Up Forever
First published: 1990
Type of work: Stories
Type of plot: Science fiction—alien civilization
Time of work: Various times in the future
Locale: Various locations on Earth and planets throughout the galaxy
The Plot
This collection of eighteen stories, published three years after her death, represents the best of James Tiptree, Jr.’s short fiction. The collection, subtitled The Great Years of James Tiptree, Jr., was edited by James Turner and contains stories originally published between 1969 and 1981. Under the pen name of James Tiptree, Jr.—taken from the label of a marmalade jar—Alice Sheldon began publishing science fiction in 1968. She earned critical acclaim, and interest rose in the mystery of her identity, which was not revealed until 1977.
All the stories in this collection are about death as an inextricable part of the striving and dreams of living beings. In the title story, “Her Smoke Rose Up Forever” (1974), enigmatic alien visitors somehow cause moments of love, violence, and loss in the life of one man to be relived on the cinders of a dead Earth. In “Slow Music” (1980), two of the last people on Earth are betrayed by their love to follow the rest of humanity into a mysterious “River” of alien, bodiless sentience. In “The Man Who Walked Home” (1972), an experimental subject thrown into the far future “walks” back to the moment of the experiment by sheer willpower, appearing and reappearing on the post-apocalyptic Earth at the point of the civilization-destroying explosion caused by his return. In “The Last Flight of Dr. Ain” (1969), a biologist, in despair at the destruction of a “beautiful woman”—Earth—creates a humanity-destroying plague.
In many of the stories, the sex drive itself is a form of death. In “The Last Afternoon” (1972), a human colony is unable to stop waves of giant sea creatures who thrash ashore to mate in an orgy of sexual destruction. In “Love Is the Plan,” the Plan Is Death (1973), an alien being struggling toward sentience is trapped in a biological life cycle in which the females eat the males. The author also represents the human fascination with alien beings as itself a form of self-destruction. In “A Momentary Taste of Being” (1975), the first interstellar expedition, desperate to find new planets to relieve pressures on an overcrowded Earth, finds that humans are merely sperm for fertilizing the ovum of an unknown life-form.
Tiptrees most famous stories deal with relations between the sexes in which the sexual aggression of men makes them deadly and alien to women. In “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” (1976), a ship of NASA astronauts is thrown forward in time to an Earth sparsely populated by female survivors, all clones, of a plague that has destroyed humanitys ability to reproduce. The author represents the men as painfully driven by “alpha male” aggression and misogyny. In “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” (1973), a young man falls in love with a literally brainless, beautiful body that is animated by remote control by a woman whose own ugly body makes her a social outcast. In “The Women Men Dont See” (1973), a mother and a daughter leave Earth willingly on a thoroughly alien ship. The mother says to the shocked male narrator, “We survive by ones and twos in the chinks of your world-machine. . . . I’m used to aliens.”