Her smoke rose up forever
Ratings16
Average rating4.3
For a decade Alice Sheldon produced an extraordinary body of work under the pseudonym James Tiptree Jr, until her identity was exposed in 1977. Her Smoke Rose Up Forever presents the finest of these stories and contains the Nebula Award-winning ' Love Is the Plan, the Plan Is Death', Hugo Award-winning novella 'The Girl Who Was Plugged In', 'Houston, Houston, Do You Read?' - winner of both the Hugo and Nebula - and of course the story for which she is best known: 'The Women Men Don't See'.
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An exquisite collection of science fiction short stories and novellas, written in the 70ies by Alice Sheldon under her male pen name. Her voice and her stories feel so unique, they are blends of melancholy, rage and existentialism. Each ones engages you intellectually and emotionally. Her characters all long for something, for a human connection, for survival, for love, for equality, for enlightenment. Yet they are confronted with violence, the violence of men, the violence of evolution. Sheldon gives them hope only to have darkness waiting around the last corner.
An agonizing lament for human life welled up in him, a last pang that he would carry with him through eternity. But its urgency fell away. Life incorporeal, immortal, was on him now; it had him as it had her. His flesh, his body, was beginning to attenuate, to dematerialize out into the great current of sentience that flowed on its mysterious purposes among the stars.
This book is front-loaded with mostly 4-star stories and then there's a string of 2-star stories and then it ends with a couple of 3-stars. Throughout, the prose style and tone were a bit difficult for me. It took me a while to get into the rhythm of each story, but that probably comes with the genre and the form. Frequently my patience paid off. Some great themes and fascinating worlds and cultures, but Tiptree, Jr. did not breed further interest in stories like these.
