Her Smoke Rose Up Forever

Author: James Tiptree Jr.

In the late 1960s stories suddenly started to appear from a writer no-one had heard of before, and no-one had met. But the stories were just too good, too quirky, too powerful to come from a complete novice. So all sorts of rumours began to spread. Because the stories came from Langley, Virginia, Harry Harrison decided that the author must work for the CIA. Robert Silverberg, meanwhile, declared that there was something ineluctably male about them, a view that, to be fair, most other people agreed with, even those who were in communication with the mysterious James Tiptree. Then, inevitably, the truth came out: Tiptree was really Alice Bradley Sheldon, daughter of a writer, who had worked analysing reconnaissance photographs during the war, had briefly been an unsuccessful chicken farmer, and was currently studying to become a psychologist. She was also the most original, most surprising and most powerful short story writer in the genre.Her Smoke Rose Up Forever is as close as we have to a definitive collection of her short stories. It includes all her award-winning fiction, including "The Screwfly Solution" which won the Nebula Award for Best Novelette and which suggests that male violence against women is actually the result of a virus; "The Girl Who Was Plugged In" which won the Hugo Award for Best Novella is a precursor of cyberpunk, it tells of a cruelly deformed girl who becomes a global media celebrity thanks to an avatar that she controls remotely; "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?" won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards for Best Novella, it tells of the three male astronauts whose ship is somehow displaced in time, who return to Earth to find that all men have been wiped out and they have to come to terms with a peaceful all-female society; and "Love is the Plan, the Plan is Death" which won the Nebula Award for Best Short Story, which tells of an alien creature that tries to resist its violent primal urges.The collection also includes other classics such as "The Women Men Don't See", in which, following a plane crash in the Amazon, two women choose to go off with aliens rather than stay with their male companions; and "And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill's Side", which explores sexual obsession with the alien. Tiptree won a fistful of Hugo and Nebula Awards and was, for a while, the most celebrated writer in science fiction. Her work is individual, explores gender issues in a way that no earlier writer had ever done, and is consistently challenging and absorbing. You don't forget a Tiptree story.

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Her Smoke Rose Up Forever is a wonderful collection, but it doesn't come anywhere near to giving you all of Tiptree's inimitable stories, so you'd be very well advised to seek out all her original collections, especially Ten Thousand Light Years from Home, Warm Worlds and Otherwise, Star Songs of an Old Primate and Out of the Everywhere.

Tiptree was primarily a short story writer, but she did produce two novels. The better of them is probably Up the Walls of the World which describes a psychic invasion of Earth by aliens, while an entity larger than the solar system becomes tangentially involved. But to be honest, the novels really don't match the stories.