Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (S.F. MASTERWORKS)

by James Tiptree Jr.

  ‘Tiptree is one of the best story writers in or out of the field’

  Locus

  ‘Exquisite, lyrical prose . . . keen insight and ability to depict singularity within the ordinary’

  Publishers Weekly

  ‘There is just one great collection of Tiptree’s fiction still in print . . . Her Smoke Rose Up Forever’

  New York Times Book Review

  Her Smoke Rose Up Forever

  JAMES TIPTREE, JR.

  Enter the SF Gateway . . .

  In the last years of the twentieth century (as Wells might have put it), Gollancz, Britain’s oldest and most distinguished science fiction imprint, created the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series. Dedicated to re-publishing the English language’s finest works of SF and Fantasy, most of which were languishing out of print at the time, they were – and remain – landmark lists, consummately fulfilling the original mission statement:

  ‘SF MASTERWORKS is a library of the greatest SF ever written, chosen with the help of today’s leading SF writers and editors. These books show that genuinely innovative SF is as exciting today as when it was first written.’

  Now, as we move inexorably into the twenty-first century, we are delighted to be widening our remit even more. The realities of commercial publishing are such that vast troves of classic SF & Fantasy are almost certainly destined never again to see print. Until very recently, this meant that anyone interested in reading any of these books would have been confined to scouring second-hand bookshops. The advent of digital publishing has changed that paradigm for ever.

  The technology now exists to enable us to make available, for the first time, the entire backlists of an incredibly wide range of classic and modern SF and fantasy authors. Our plan is, at its simplest, to use this technology to build on the success of the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series and to go even further.

  Welcome to the new home of Science Fiction & Fantasy. Welcome to the most comprehensive electronic library of classic SFF titles ever assembled.

  Welcome to the SF Gateway.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  COVER

  PRAISE

  TITLE PAGE

  GATEWAY INTRODUCTION

  EPIGRAPH

  INTRODUCTION BY GRAHAM SLEIGHT

  INTRODUCTION II BY JOHN CLUTE

  THE LAST FLIGHT OF DOCTOR AIN

  THE SCREWFLY SOLUTION

  AND I AWOKE AND FOUND ME HERE ON THE COLD HILL’S SIDE

  THE GIRL WHO WAS PLUGGED IN

  THE MAN WHO WALKED HOME

  AND I HAVE COME UPON THIS PLACE BY LOST WAYS

  THE WOMEN MEN DON’T SEE

  YOUR FACES, O MY SISTERS! YOUR FACES FILLED OF LIGHT!

  HOUSTON, HOUSTON, DO YOU READ?

  WITH DELICATE MAD HANDS

  A MOMENTARY TASTE OF BEING

  WE WHO STOLE THE DREAM

  HER SMOKE ROSE UP FOREVER

  LOVE IS THE PLAN THE PLAN IS DEATH

  ON THE LAST AFTERNOON

  SHE WAITS FOR ALL MEN BORN

  SLOW MUSIC

  AND SO ON, AND SO ON

  GATEWAY WEBSITE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO BY JAMES TIPTREE, JR.

  COPYRIGHT

  If I could describe a “human being” I would be more than I am—and probably living in the future, because I think of human beings as something to be realized ahead.. . . But clearly “human beings” have something to do with the luminous image you see in a bright child’s eyes—the exploring, wondering, eagerly grasping, undestructive quest for life. I see that undescribed spirit as central to us all.

  —TIPTREE/SHELDON

  INTRODUCTION

  I know of no more powerful a collection of short science fiction than this. Even more than usual, readers may feel that the author’s personal story has a bearing on their work, so it may be worth telling that story first.

  In 1968, a writer called James Tiptree Jr began publishing with a story called “Birth of a Salesman”. Within a couple of years, Tiptree became one of the most prominent authors in the field, solely on the basis of short fiction. Very little biographical information was known about the author, though. For instance, introducing the Tiptree story in his anthology Again, Dangerous Visions (1972), Harlan Ellison wrote, “That he lives in the state of Virginia and does a good deal of traveling (for a purpose I don’t know) is all I have on him. His reasons for remaining private seem to me deeply and sincerely motivated, so I won’t defy them.” But he was clear about the author’s stature: “Tiptree is the man to beat this year. [Kate] Wilhelm is the woman, but Tiptree is the man.”

  By that stage, Tiptree had begun corresponding with a few figures in the sf field. One of these was Jeff Smith, a fan who subsequently became Tiptree’s literary executor. Tiptree published occasional non-fiction pieces in Smith’s fanzines Kyben and Phantasmicom describing, for instance, trips to Mexico, occasional health problems (including a heart attack), and the demands of caring for “an aged and ornery mother”. Tiptree stories also began appearing in some venues alongside tales by one “Raccoona Sheldon” who, many felt, had a similar style to Tiptree.

  In late 1976, an American explorer named Mary Hastings Bradley died and her obituary appeared in some newspapers. These revealed that she had had a daughter, Alice – now Alice Sheldon. Some of the biographical details described in Tiptree’s writings tallied with those of Alice Sheldon, and speculation began about whether they were one and the same. And so, shortly afterwards, Alice Sheldon wrote to Jeff Smith confirming that she was Tiptree: “Five feet eight, sixty-one years, remains of a good-looking girl vaguely visible, grins a lot in a depressed way, very active in spurts. Also, Raccoona.”

  Alice Sheldon is the subject of the finest biography yet written about any sf writer, Julie Phillips’s James Tiptree Jr: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon (2006). I would strongly recommend it to anyone interested in an extraordinary life; Charles Platt’s fine profile in Dream Makers (1980) also gives a strong flavour of her personality. In 1983, Sheldon described her childhood in an autobiographical profile for Contemporary Authors:

  From age 4 to 15, Alice Sheldon’s childhood was dominated by the experience of accompanying her parents on their (widely reported) explorations and trips. . . . She found herself interacting with adults of every size, color, shape, and condition – lepers, black royalty in lionskins, white royalty in tweeds, Arab slavers, functional saints and madmen in power . . . and above all, women: chattel-women deliberately starved, deformed, blinded and enslaved; women in nuns’ habits saving the world; women in high heels saving the world, and women in low heels shooting little birds; an Englishwoman in bloomers riding out from her castle at the head of her personal Moslem army; women, from the routinely tortured, obscenely mutilated slave-wives of the ‘advanced’ Kibuyu, to the free, propertied, Sumarran matriarchs who ran the economy and brought six hundred years of peaceful prosperity to the Menang-Kabau; all these were known before she had a friend or playmate of her own age.

  She worked as an artist and illustrator before World War II, and then joined the US Army from 1942. She became the first female US photo-intelligence officer. While working in occupied France, she met and subsequently married Colonel Huntingdon D Sheldon. Huntingdon Sheldon subsequently became one of the founding officers of the nascent CIA, and Alice Sheldon continued to do work for it, particularly around photo-intelligence. Judging by her own testimony, she became sceptical of the value and efficacy of intelligence work as practised by the CIA, especially around the Bay of Pigs fiasco. But she was also fond of emphasising her connection with this world. One of her editors, David Hartwell, once told me t
hat she was fond of dropping into conversation tantalising snippets like, “You have no idea how tough it was in the 1960s when we were trying to get hold of a sample of Fidel Castro’s urine.” In the late 1950s she had a hiatus for taking stock, which led to another change of career. She took degrees in psychology, concentrating on the workings of visual perception. This culminated in a PhD in 1967.

  It was around this time that her sf career began. She had, by her own account, discovered Weird Tales magazine at the age of nine, and had subsequently read avidly in sf. When asked by Smith to cite some influences, she said:

  Christ, all of them, in different ways. Harrison’s Bill the Galactic Hero, for the ultimate in grim clowning; Sturgeon’s “Man Who Lost the Sea,” for total wow (sometimes when my stuff bores me worse than usual I go through the opening paragraphs of a flock of Sturgeons and contemplate suicide); Damon Knight’s “The Handler,” for classic social comment, Le Guin, Ellison, Delany, Zelazny, Lafferty (for total raconteur ease), Niven, Ballard (for brilliance). Oh man, all of them. Hundreds. And a special place for Philip K Dick. All genuflect.

  After the revelation of her identity, Alice Sheldon continued publishing fiction under the Tiptree name – though some felt there was a falling-off in quality compared to the work published between around 1970 and 1977. It’s tempting to overinterpret this, but Phillips argues convincingly that the loss of the Tiptree identity was a blow that Alice Sheldon never quite recovered from. That said, some of her later stories like “Yanqui Doodle” (1987) and “The Color of Neanderthal Eyes” (1988) are very fine indeed.

  In addition to the short fiction, there are two Tiptree novels, Up the Walls of the World (1978) and Brightness Falls from the Air (1985). But they both suffer, in a way, from the ferocity with which she bears down on her material: it must have been difficult to sustain a novel-length narrative against that background. In the best of her short fiction, Tiptree’s intensity burns the story to the ground at the exact moment it ends.

  Phillips chronicles a decline both in Alice Sheldon’s health and that of Huntingdon Sheldon throughout the 1980s. One of Tiptree’s late stories, “The Only Neat Thing to Do” envisages a good death as being preferable to an unhappy life. The two had no children, and Huntingdon’s sight was failing. In May 1987, Alice Sheldon shot dead her husband, and then herself.

  This collection, first published in 1990, contains much of Tiptree’s finest short work, largely from before 1977. Alice Sheldon clearly thought deeply about what made good fiction. Her writings to Jeff Smith contain frequent references to her terror of boring the reader, and to the resulting ruthlessness with which she cut her stories. For instance, she described “The Last Flight of Doctor Ain” as “a perfect example of Tiptree’s basic narrative instinct. Start from the end and preferably five thousand feet underground on a dark day and then don’t tell them.” On a technical level, it’s striking how each of these stories creates its own structure and style around the material it’s depicting. Tiptree assumes that the reader will pay attention, will not need to have things explained twice. Some of the stories may strike the reader as dense or perhaps even confusing the first time round – but as a consequence, they greatly repay re-reading. It seems a shame to spoil the working-out of these stories; but there are some ideas that run through a number of them.

  The first is the tug of home. “The Man Who Walked Home” is the clearest example of this, its astronaut protagonist arcing back to the start of the story with the most intense effort, in the most extreme circumstances. But look also at the tiny human colony in “On the Last Afternoon” and how precious it seems, even in the face of a vast and implacable threat. Related to this is Tiptree’s concern about what humans are doing to the Earth, and how irreparable that damage might be. This is most overt in “The Last Flight of Doctor Ain”, where the protagonist sees all too clearly what crimes are being committed.

  By the same token, straying away from home can be dangerous in a Tiptree story. This is clearest in “A Momentary Taste of Being”, where an encounter with the alien Other is utterly devastating to humans, arguing not just that they are empty vessels, but why they are. “And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill’s Side” – its title taken from Keats’s “La Belle dame Sans Merci” – makes a similar argument around human sexuality.

  There’s an undeniable streak of dislocation and trauma in Tiptree, the sense of something that happened long ago in a way that can’t be recovered from. This is most overt in “The Girl Who was plugged in”, a story whose influence William Gibson has acknowledged – one thinks particularly of “The Winter Market”. The cheery, brittle narration of this story is at odds (surely deliberately) with what underlies it. Similarly, the opening paragraphs of “With Delicate Mad Hands” set out the childhood traumas that shape the protagonist, Carol Page, and from which the rest of the story grows. In “My Faces, O my Sisters! Your Faces Filled Of Light!”, the dislocation comes from the difference between the all-female world that the protagonist perceives, and how the reader comes to understand where she really is.

  One consistent thread in a number of these stories is the threat of men’s sexual violence. In “Houston, Houston, Do You Read”, it is one of the aspects of our world that the male astronauts find most under question. In “The Screwfly Solution”, Tiptree extrapolates it one step further, with terrifying consequences. Even the apparently amiable narrator of “The Women Men Don’t See” allows thoughts of rape to flit across his mind as he tries to save the women with whom he’s been cast into the wilderness. “The Women Men Don’t See” may be Tiptree’s most well-known story; it is particularly central to her reputation as one of the most important writers of feminist science fiction. It’s a story that’s open to many interpretations: just who are the aliens here? The strangely reticent and seemingly otherworldly women? Or the male narrator whose values are, in the end, so distant from those of the women?

  Many Tiptree stories are tragedies. I use the word in the classical sense that they are set off by some tiny, almost incidental flaw whose consequences lay waste to everything. In “Love is the Plan the Plan is Death”, the evolutionary structure of the creatures depicted is tragic, a dead-end from which they can’t escape. In “On the Last Afternoon”, the protagonist has a choice to make about whether to save himself or his community; his choice has devastating results. And in “Slow Music” the whole of human history is seen, in retrospect, as a dying fall. So the presence of death runs throughout Tiptree’s work. It’s overwhelmingly a secular conception of death. There’s no concept of an afterlife, or of or a deity that might skyhook us away from the mortal world. “She Waits For All Men Born” may mythologise death, but doesn’t offer any escape.

  Finally, these threads come together in the title story of this collection. I find it a summation of what is extraordinary about Tiptree’s work: the intensity with which it views life (even an “ordinary” life”), the immediacy of a sense of suffering, and yet the vividness with which it imagines joy. In an afterword for the story’s original publication, Tiptree referred to the work of the scientist Carrington, described in the story, about how consciousness might persist through time:

  . . . Carrington’s work is real, and his speculation on the real nature of time holds out a faint hope of a curious sort of immortality. His idea is that perhaps, just perhaps, very intense psychic structures might have existence in timelessness or “static” time. But Carrington, good man that he was, unhesitatingly assumed that the intense psychic structure was good, was in fact a sort of Spinozan intellectual love of some aspect of life. A beautiful picture – all the fragments of loving farmers merging around the ideas of earth and seed, bits of philatelists converging forever around a two-penny black, parts of all of us webbed eternally around great poems or symphonies or sunsets. Lovely. But look back in your memory. Moments of pure selfless love, yes – but what about the fearful vitality of the bad past – the shames, furies, disappointments, the lover defected, the prize that g
ot away? The pain. As the psychologists put it, aversive conditioning persists. One shock undoes a hundred rewards. If by wild chance Carrington’s theory is in some degree right, his immortality would be a hell beyond conception . . . until we can change ourselves. Drain the strength of pain from our nerves. Make love and joy as strong as evil. But how can we?

  Graham Sleight

  INTRODUCTION II

  First published in 1990 edition of Her Smoke Rose Up Forever

  It may not be the whole truth about American writers, but it is the story. So print the story. American writers, let us say, are like meteors. Flashes in the pan. Mayfly angels. Out of the nowhere, into the here they come, hurtling brazenly through their short day to give us joy, strewing largesse and seed about as though there were no tomorrow, which indeed there isn’t – because the air of the planet soon gets them, seizes shut the wings of song, burns them out. Afterwards, stuck together with mucilage and pulp, they may linger for a few years in the atriums of America, for hire; but it is not a warm world for sharecroppers, and after the mating flight American writers are terribly fragile, like beehives in a frost. They rust. They crumble at the touch. That is the story we are told, the legend we print; halfright but vicious. It may have shaped the lives (it has certainly poisoned our perception of the lives) of writers like Truman Capote, Dashiell Hammett, Jack Kerouac, Theodore Sturgeon. And James Tiptree Jr?

  Sometimes the shoe fits. Creative burn-out is not a curse peculiar to writers, nor to Americans; but writers, notoriously vulnerable in the solitude of their craft, can find it terribly difficult in America to discover a middle ground between total obscurity and the fifteen minutes of crowded fame we’re all supposed to get and catch our deaths from; and without that middle ground there is no respite. America, it might be said, is a land without a midlist, a land which affords no cushion – no community, no reciprocity, no clerisy, no network of readers – to sustain the writer in her flight. It is, therefore, all the more remarkable that, just a few generations ago, in the flat heart of this continent, a few men and women and boys and girls were able to give birth to the American SF community. They did not invent SF itself (though many of them thought they had), but they did manage to invent (or to re-invent) a mutual society in the heart of a cultural maelstrom, a society of readers and writers and workers which still exists, overgrown and market-driven and hype-ridden though it may sometimes seem to have become. From 1926 or so the SF writer, unlike his peers, comes from somewhere and has somewhere to land. From outside the kraal it must seem a warm world indeed.