Her Smoke Rose Up Forever

James Tiptree Jr is a pseudonym as we all know now for Alice Sheldon. The Tiptree was her favorite brand of marmalade, the "jr" was the genius addition of her husband Huntington ("Ting") Sheldon. Just linger on that for a bit, what pseudonym has "Jr" in it, the mind says "there is no one before me with that name" and it is masterful misdirection.Tiptree won so many awards at one point, she asked to be withdrawn from consideration so other authors could win awards...this is telling because her fiction IS that good.In her style, she reminds me a bit of Gene Wolf, in that the narrator may be unreliable and her stories are ambiguous or convoluted. It reminds me of painting where the negative space or what is implied OFF the canvas tells the whole story. In the case of one of her most famous stories "Houston, Houston Do You Read?" the last two sentences give you an idea what the outcome was for the protagonist Lorimer, an astronaut who finds himself and two other men in a time-snag in a completely unrecognizable Earth society. The society is all women, and how ANYONE after this story could not realize Tiptree "Jr" was a woman, is beyond me. The brilliant Robert Silverberg made a case for her being definitely a man. Maybe no writer at the time wanted to admit a woman outdid them all in a very male-oriented genre.My favorite story was actually "And I awoke and found me here..." which by the way, published in 1972 has an alien bar scene predating Star Wars. The tale is about alien-human sex and again, you figure out what is going on by what ISN'T spelled out. Love it. It's a marvelous study as well using animal behavior and addiction as a basis for the story.If you haven't read Tiptree, you really should --if you love science fiction. I grew up on the best authors, who were writing at the time so fresh novels were coming out from the greats every year. I did read some Tiptree in Gardner Dozois' wonderful anthologies, and Tiptree herself was an excellent anthologiest. But I never sat down and read her own work by itself.Right now I'm also reading her biography because she was an amazingly complex, sad, talented and unusual writer.

Some of the blurbs about Alice Sheldon, writing as James Tiptree, Jr., indicate that her real gender was a mystery and, in fact, some commented that `he had to be a man' because of the writing. I have a hard time, in retrospect, seeing that. All of these stories seem to me to have easily been seen as a woman writing, if you were so inclined to think about those things. The other thing is that Alice Sheldon is described as an `ardent' feminist. Again I don't see that, but I do see a somewhat clinical misanthrope. The men in these stories tend to be ineffectual neuters or sexual-sociopaths. The women tend to be background or professional victims (with the exception of `Slow Music,' probably the best story in the collection).Having said that I did find the stories very well written and I can well understand the awards and critical acclaim at the time. However they do tend to take on a rather common theme of hopelessness and profound melancholy at the future aspects of humans. One or two of the stories made a passing attempt at uplifting the future of humans, but mostly these are, to me, the writings of a deeply depressed person. I found it no surprise to learn that Ms Sheldon died at her own hand after killing her husband, probably as a suicide pact.I do recommend these, especially if you are a fan of the SciFi short story. All are well written but the best way to appreciate them is to read one story at a time over a long interval. These have such a common `feel' to them that if you read them one after another you start to get the feeling that you've been there, done that.

In this volume are some of the best short stories I've ever read. And it's deliberate that I don't say "some of the best _science fiction_ stories..." I'm a long-time SF fan, but I'm also a huge fan of literary fiction short stories -- Carver, Beattie, Moore, Chekhov, Hemingway, Mansfield, yadda yadda yadda. I love 'em all. I _enjoy_ SF, but when I find myself waxing ecstatic about a short story, it's most likely to be a piece of lit-fic I'm waxing about.Not with this book. These are incredible stories; passionate, beautiful, painfully moving, lyrically written, exquisitely crafted. If you should ever happen across a literary fiction snob who thinks that science fiction just can't measure up in artistic terms to the best lit-fic, this is the book to raise high in both hands and bludgeon the snob over the head with.Fair warning: On the last page of the last story in this collection, one character says to another, "You carry despair as your gift." Those words could stand as an epigraph to the whole of the book and to Tiptree/Sheldon's writing career. Despair and the dashing of hopes are a hallmark of these stories, so don't come to the book expecting sweetness and light, pretty butterflies and hopping bunnies. But in Tiptree's hands, despair is truly a gift. Take the fruits of that gift; read these stories, and be enriched.

I do remember as a kid ( 60's ) picking books from my parents library in the middle of a desert peninsula in Venezuelan Caribbean , inside a Shell Oil Refinery and reading Alexander Kazantsev: The Destruction of Faena, Jules Verne and most of his known and unknown classics , the Bible and it's amazing human tales ; then moving to the Usa and discovering Assimov's Foundation , Frank Herbert's Dune , Kurt Vonnegut Jr's The Sirens of Titan ( after watching 20 or less times Slaughterhouse 5 ) and Galapagos , Aldous Huxley's Island and Door's of Perception , Gurdjiell's All and Everything ; then coming to the Mexican Caribbean and discovering Ann Rice and the Vampires , Daniel Quinn and his adventures of mind and spirit and James Tiptree Jr ( she spent the 70's in the now Rivera Maya ) . To bad i did not get to read her as a man , it does change some prespective , but the stories in these collection are Up there with the Classics ... Highly entertaining with provoking ideas that we have not been able to surpass as the slow learners we are as humans ...

This would make a great introduction to James Tiptree, Jr. It contains many of her best-known short stories and novellas, many of them multiple prize-winners.It also reveals how much better she was at short fiction than long. As a rule, the longer the story here the less good it is. For example, one novella - With Delicate Mad Hands - feels like a cut-and-shut of two short stories, neither of which have much in common with each other. A Momentary Taste Of Being is overlong and drags rather, and Houston, Houston Do You Read gets mired down early in generic SF get-me-out-of-here before belatedly getting to the point.But of the shorter fiction, the title story has stuck with me for 40 years and is still as devastating now as it was then, if not more so. You'll also find the eerily prophetic The Girl Who Was Plugged In (today we would call Delphi an "influencer"), the subtle anger of The Women Men Don't See, the originality of Love Is The Plan The Plan Is Death and the unsettling And I Awoke And Found Me Here On The Cold Hill's Side.Start here, then, and see where her imagination can take you.

I bought this book after listening to StarShipSofa's excellent podcast on the life and works of James Tiptree Jr. You can't help but be intrigued by Tiptree, or Alice Sheldon as her name really was, who as a child saw the world with her lawyer/naturalist father and travel-writer mother, worked as an artist, joined the US army (working in its Air Forces intelligence department), and was later asked to join the CIA -- a bisexual woman who ended her own and her husband's lives in a long-planned suicide (she at 71, he 84). But so often it's the case that authors with interesting lives are less interesting as authors, and it's the accountants and office workers who make the better writers. But Tiptree's writing, rather than being just an aspect of her colourful biography, adds another dimension to it. It is obviously the product of an intelligent, compassionate, incisive person (reading it, and not knowing, I think you'd be hard pressed to put money on whether it was written by a man or a woman), genuinely concerned with the very human issues she explores through science fiction.Most of the material in this collection comes from the 70s, so Tiptree was writing at a time when SF had been stylistically and thematically freed by the New Wave and the generally increased literariness of the 60s. Starting with her first major success as a short story writer, "The Last Flight of Doctor Ain", the book contains some fine stories, including the ones that won her two Hugos and three Nebulas ("The Girl Who Was Plugged In", "Love Is the Plan and the Plan is Death", "The Screwfly Solution" and the double-winner "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?"). "The Girl Who Was Plugged In" is the tale of an ugly young nothing picked off the streets to become a soap star -- only, not in her own body. "Love is the Plan and the Plan is Death" has assumed its place in SF history for being the first story in which no human beings appear. It is told from the perspective of a semi-primitive alien struggling to hold onto its growing self-awareness against the instinctive animal urges that force it to stick to its peculiar life cycle. For me, among many excellent stories, the standout is "A Momentary Taste of Being", a novella dealing with a desperate mission to find a new planet for humanity to inhabit, and an encounter with an alien being that puts mankind's stellar diaspora into an entirely different perspective. Whether the effect on its characters is one of ultimate transcendence, or a descent into a very less than meaningful existence is left as an open question.I could go on. There's so much to say about Tiptree's thought-provoking, and emotion-provoking, fiction and I haven't even mentioned "And I Awoke and Found Me Here On The Cold Hill's Side" or "Your Faces, O My Sisters! Your Faces Filled Of Light". (What titles!) The writing is intense, the characterisation insightful, the ideas are fresh and meaningful. But the best thing is to read the stuff yourself. And here you have, in 18 stories, a thorough and excellent introduction to the work of a very interesting writer indeed.

This is a fantastic collection of short stories, especially "Love is the plan the plan is death". The writing is spare and at times the stories seem a little dated, but the imagination behind them is incredible. I thoroughly recommend this book, even if you don't normally read short stories. They are powerful, funny, poignant and clever. She's one of my new favourite sci fi authors.

I adore this book. The stories are extremely varied and engrossing. I found myself reading this book more slowly than I usually would, to prolong it. And I read each story twice before moving to the next. This collection demonstrates how stories should be told. I already owned this book, and bought another copy to give to a friend.The themes and ideas woven into each story is refreshing. There was only one short story which I didn't absolutely love. This is a book that I'll keep on my bookshelf for a very long time, taken down to read again every year or so. Her smoke truly does rise up forever.

It has taken me all this time to finally read Tiptree and I regret it.This is the very best SF you can possibly read.I'll not go into details on the various stories, only partly because I took a few months break before reading the last three because I didn't want this to end.So, go now, buy this, read it.