Her smoke rose up forever

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.