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

by James Tiptree Jr.

  For the woman who became James Tiptree Jr in 1968, and who nestled within that pseudonym for a decade – like an imago beyond price hiding deep inside the kind of Russian doll we now call a babushka – the world of SF may well have seemed irresistible. Though she remained invisible until her identity was uncovered, the SF community did nourish her, did constitute a middle ground she could (if only vicariously) live inside, as she attested in correspondence. We cannot know for sure why she became James Tiptree Jr, nor why she began almost to confess her true identity through the creation in 1974 of Raccoona Sheldon as a second pseudonym; and it is almost certain that speculations about the motives of Alice B Sheldon (1915– 1987), who became Tiptree, would be an impertinence against her memory. All we can know at this stage is that – during the years of secrecy – she burned like a meteor. All we know for sure is that the stories she wrote from 1970 until 1977 – when her health began to fail and her secret identity finally collapsed – comprise the finest and most moving single spate of creative energy the field has ever seen. In the secrecy of the male pseudonym she inhabited during the years of her astonishing prime, and under the cover of the gregarious, life-affirming, gemütlich personality she created in letters and non-fiction for that Tiptree self, Alice B Sheldon wrote free. She wrote young. She wrote to the edge and beyond. And she wrote like a man.

  (In 1975, in his introduction to Tiptree’s ‘Warm Worlds and Otherwise,’ Robert Silverberg gave voice to a bio-critical speculation about the author which has since become famous. ‘It has been suggested that Tiptree is female,’ he wrote, ‘a theory that I find absurd, for there is to me something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree’s writing.’ Given human nature, it’s unlikely many of Silverberg’s readers could have failed to enjoy the discomfiture he must have felt in 1977 when Tiptree’s identity was uncovered; and there is no denying that what he said was both inapposite in its self-assurance, and culture-bound in its assumption that an artefact of language – in this case the phallocentric assembly of themes and tropes and rhythms and rituals and syntaxes greased for power which makes up ‘masculine discourse’ – was in itself inherently sexed, so that only a biological male could utter it. Artefacts – like Jungle Jims, like pseudonyms – are in themselves inherently ‘learnable’. They can be climbed into. At the same time, of course, Silverberg did have a point. To deny that Tiptree did in fact sound ‘like a man’ is to deny one’s clear sense that male hegemony utters itself in recognizable terms; it also scants the masterly uses to which Tiptree put that artefactual language which owns the world and tells it: tells the world what it is, tells the world what to do. Having aerated and ennobled that language, having turned the tables on the biological presumptions it rides on, she used the sly potent enablement pheromones of ‘man talk’ as a kind of speed. She mainlined on the artefact, from within the babushka of Tiptree, itself snugly hidden inside the larger babushka of the SF community; and in that tongue she said some things which burned. Like ice. Like fire.)

  So she wrote like a man, and a meteor, a flash in the pan, a mayfly angel. Three years after beginning to write SF, she was already nearing her astonishing peak, and by 1977 (as we’ve already noted) she had begun to flame out, though the evidence for this was obscured till later by variable gaps between writing and publication of stories. Before 1977, all we knew of James Tiptree Jr was that he was no longer young, because he had told us that he was middle-aged; he also claimed to be Chicago-born, often abroad in his youth, involved in intelligence work in World War Two; and postal evidence suggested that he lived somewhere near Washington, DC. Even told all this, many of us still found it extremely hard to imagine that James Tiptree Jr was not, in fact, a person perhaps rather younger than he claimed, and certainly in the very peak of condition. I myself thought of him as a wiry sharp man whose colour was the colour of marmalade, like a tiger out of Blake. Whether or not I was ever induced to think of him as a woman I cannot remember; but I know I was very short of being prepared to think of him as a 60-year-old woman whose health was precarious, whose first serious heart attack in 1977 would quite possibly mark the end of any hope she might have to launch herself again, like a tightrope-walker across the void, like a man who walked home, burning energy like a tiger in the night, giving us the tale still taut from the young muscle of her hands, the touch of her secret breath.

  But she was a 60-year-old woman. Her health was indeed precarious. One way or another, the air of the planet did get her. And the work she produced in her last decade – though it would grace the oeuvres of many writers – seemed, in comparison with the work of her prime, churchy and fey, self-pitying and exiguous. Unfortunately, because her publishing career was oddly shaped, most readers by the end of the 1980s knew nothing more of Tiptree than that late work. She had written two novels – Up the Walls of the World (1978) and Brightness Falls from the Air (1985) – but only the latter, weaker volume seemed readily available. The late short stories had been generously hardbacked with the release of Tales of the Quintana Roo (1986), The Starry Rift (1986) and Crown of Stars (1988); and The Color of Neanderthal Eyes (1990), her penultimate tale, and the best work she produced in the final spate that preceded her suicide, finally received book publication as part of a Tor Double. Two stories from her prime had also appeared in book form as doubles – The Girl Who was Plugged In (1988) and Houston, Houston, Do you Read? (1989) – but the great mass of her best work had become difficult to trace for those who remember it. Her finest stories had appeared in four paperback volumes – 10,000 Light-Years from Home (1973), Warm Worlds and Otherwise (1975), Star Songs of an Old Primate (1978) and Out of the Everywhere, and Other Extraordinary Visions (1981) – and though each one of them could claim to be among the very few permanently significant collections to appear during that period, not one of them was ever even published in hardback (except for the first, released in England by Methuen in a setting that boasted unjustified right margins and a whole new crop of proofing errors to augment the contemptible slurry of goofs that corrupted the ill-edited original version from Ace). Subsequently, Doubleday did publish, in Byte Beautiful (1986), complete with expurgations to fit its contents to the library market, a collection of old and new work oddly sorted and poorly argued as a conspectus of her distinguished career. James Tiptree Jr had become virtually unknowable.

  The publication of Her Smoke Rose Up Forever, as edited by James Turner, comes therefore as an important event. Because almost every story James Tiptree Jr wrote at the apogee of her passage across the heavens is here assembled, Her Smoke Rose Up Forever ranks as one of the two or three most significant collections of short SF ever published. Of the 18 stories in the volume, I would have myself omitted only one, ‘And I Have Come Upon This Place by Lost Ways’ (published in 1972 but written at the end of 1968: all further citations will be of year of composition only), because the cartoon crudity of its telling conforms all too well to the melodramatic epiphanising of its close. And of those stories Turner has had to omit, I would have argued fervently only for one, ‘All the Kinds of Yes’ (1972), a tale which refines and darkens and speeds up and in the end utterly transforms the comic clatter of Tiptree’s earliest work, so that ‘Yes’ closes on a twist of plot (just who isn’t an alien in the bloody thing) which is an epiphany which is a world-view which is a shrug which is a benediction, all at once. Of the 17 remaining stories, every single one is a joy, a consolation of achieved form; swift in nuance, extravagant in density, extroverted, athletic; but also (because James Tiptree Jr was possibly the darkest writer ever to publish SF of the first rank) every single one tells some sort of death.

  Almost every story collected in Her Smoke Rose Up Forever ends in death, literal or metaphorical, experienced or nigh. Our touch upon the planet is death; sex is an intricacy of death; exogamy (our lust for other species and for the stars) is death; the ultimate taste of any human being (as in the 1973 title story) is of an anguish unto death. Death comes as the end; the end is Death’s come. The plan is Death
. But none of this makes Tiptree a dour writer, though her messages are grim. Because she is an author who talks about the world before turning in, the extroversion of her stories is genuine and exultant. They are crowded with events and folk and things to think about; folding the world and its outcomes into one breath – one telling – they almost seem to grin. Like a shaping bone within the babushka of the world, the skull of death may ultimately stare the show shut, but the grin on the mask of James Tiptree Jr is the tender knowing omen-haunted gong-tormented grin of a wise lover with no time to spare, whose time is limited.

  As so many young writers in America have done, she flashes across the firmament like a meteor, but with one difference. Most American writers burn out because they have ransacked too savagely experiences too slender to grow back after the frost of exposure; James Tiptree Jr burns out from the freight and convergence of the years. The spirit is willing but the body is weak. She burns out old. She leaves behind her a body of work no young writer could have conceived, no old writer should have had the energy to shape. And that, in the end, is the secret of her Janus face – her antic glances so deathward-bound, her deathward gaze so full of life.

  The stories collected in Her Smoke Rose Up Forever have been sorted into several rough thematic categories, and need little further bush. The first two – ‘The Last Flight of Doctor Ain (1969; rewritten circa 1974) and ‘The Screwfly Solution’ (1976) – are lessons in what might be called eschatological ecology. Both are told in skewed and variable retrospect, exceedingly complicated to describe but crystalline in the reading. Both are famous. Because the human race is destroying the Earth its mother, Doctor Ain spreads a virus which will destroy the human race (he could be spreading his death seed in anguish and rage this very day). In the second tale, aliens destabilize the fragile equipoise that keeps the two human sexes masked from one another; and men begin to kill the women of the world, because that is the plan of our nature when stripped.

  Four tales that further frame our state now follow. ‘And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill’s Side’ (1971) argues that any superior alien race will have a Cargo effect on humans, binding them most utterly in the region where they are most explosively at risk – which for Tiptree is always the stress-knot of sex (but always she is Janus-faced, because clearly she loves sex, finds sex fascinating, writes finely of sexual love). ‘The Girl Who Was Plugged In’ (1969) and ‘And I Have Come Upon this Place by Lost Ways’ (1968), show a risky aggressiveness of diction and plotting, which the author has not yet fully controlled; the whole flippant time-travel narrative frame of ‘Girl,’ for instance, while elbowing us ostentatiously away from the sentimental tale it glosses, in truth only underlines the nurse-romance (but how brilliantly she almost carries the farrago off). And ‘The Man Who Walked Home’ (1971) inscribes the longing for a return to Eden in great flashes across the sky, so vividly that ‘Man’ has become a kind of paradigm of the tale of exile.

  Tiptree’s most famous single story heads the next three. ‘The Women Men Don’t See’ (1972) manages almost miraculously (pace some feminist readings of the tale as a univocal advocacy of radical misandry) to retain a sense of the humanity of the ageing alpha male who narrates, who miscomprehends the women with whom he is cast into extremis, who watches them leave the planet altogether rather than remain chinks in his world-machine. ‘Your Faces, O my Sisters! Your Faces Filled of Light!’ (1974) and ‘Houston, Houston, Do you Read?’ (1974) both carry the analysis further – the first in terms of experience traumatized beyond salvation, the second within a science-fiction frame whose orthodoxy makes the arguments it contains about the nature of male humans all the more crushing.

  We are barely halfway through. ‘With Delicate Mad Hands’ (1980) and ‘We who Stole the ‘Dream’’ (1977) both show some signs of burn-out, the first through excessive length and sentiment, the second through moral gimmickry. But then, wordperfect over its great length, and almost unbearably dark in the detail and momentum of the revelation of its premise that humans are gametes looking to consummate an exogamous fuck they cannot survive, ‘A Momentary Taste of Being’ (1973) may be the finest densest most driven novella yet published in the field. ‘Her Smoke Rose Up Forever’ (1973) we have mentioned; ‘Love is the Plan, the Plan is Death’ (1971) has a juggernaut drive, a consuming iron melancholy, a premise the author never backed away from; ‘On the Last Afternoon’ (1971) pits personal transcendence against the cultural/biological survival of the race in a tale of such cumulative dialectical drive that it nearly causes burn-out to read; ‘She Waits for All Men Born’ (1974) casts in fable form a lesson about Death, who is the dance and the Dancer and the very flesh of Love; and ‘Slow Music’ (1977), Tiptree’s last great story, serves as a requiem for all the gay gorged gangrenous world she loved and gave us the pulse of. At the nub end of our span on earth, two last young people meet, mate, fail to breed, trek a false river to an ambivalent alien transcendence, stop and trip and slide into the beam of transcendence to become an ode by Keats, deathless but thoroughly dead. It is the end. It was very nearly the end for James Tiptree Jr.

  Soon she was utterly spent. She died old. She is here.

  John Clute

  THE LAST FLIGHT OF DOCTOR AIN

  DOCTOR AIN WAS RECOGNIZED on the Omaha-Chicago flight. A biologist colleague from Pasadena came out of the toilet and saw Ain in an aisle seat. Five years before, this man had been jealous of Ain’s huge grants. Now he nodded coldly and was surprised at the intensity of Ain’s response. He almost turned back to speak, but he felt too tired; like nearly everyone, he was fighting the flu.

  The stewardess handing out coats after they landed remembered Ain too: a tall thin nondescript man with rusty hair. He held up the line staring at her; since he already had his raincoat with him she decided it was some kooky kind of pass and waved him on.

  She saw Ain shamble off into the airport smog, apparently alone. Despite the big Civil Defense signs, O’Hare was late getting underground. No one noticed the woman.

  The wounded, dying woman.

  Ain was not identified en route to New York, but a 2:40 jet carried an “Ames” on the checklist, which was thought to be a misspelling of Ain. It was. The plane had circled for an hour while Ain watched the smoky seaboard monotonously tilt, straighten, and tilt again.

  The woman was weaker now. She coughed, picking weakly at the scabs on her face half-hidden behind her long hair. Her hair, Ain saw, that great mane which had been so splendid, was drabbed and thinning now. He looked to seaward, willing himself to think of cold, clean breakers. On the horizon he saw a vast black rug: somewhere a tanker had opened its vents. The woman coughed again. Ain closed his eyes. Smog shrouded the plane.

  He was picked up next while checking in for the BOAC flight to Glasgow. Kennedy Underground was a boiling stew of people, the air system unequal to the hot September afternoon. The check-in line swayed and sweated, staring dully at the newscast. SAVE THE LAST GREEN MANSIONS—a conservation group was protesting the defoliation and drainage of the Amazon basin. Several people recalled the beautifully colored shots of the new clean bomb. The line squeezed together to let a band of uniformed men go by. They were wearing buttons inscribed: WHO’S AFRAID?

  That was when a woman noticed Ain. He was holding a newssheet, and she heard it rattling in his hand. Her family hadn’t caught the flu, so she looked at him sharply. Sure enough, his forehead was sweaty. She herded her kids to the side away from Ain.

  He was using Instac throat spray, she remembered. She didn’t think much of Instac; her family used Kleer. While she was looking at him, Ain suddenly turned his head and stared into her face, with the spray still floating down. Such inconsiderateness! She turned her back. She didn’t recall his talking to any woman, but she perked up her ears when the clerk read off Ain’s destination. Moscow!

  The clerk recalled that too, with disapproval. Ain checked in alone, he reported. No woman had been ticketed for Moscow, but it would have been easy enough to spli
t up her tickets. (By that time they were sure she was with him.)

  Ain’s flight went via Iceland with an hour’s delay at Keflavik. Ain walked over to the airport park, gratefully breathing the sea-filled air. Every few breaths he shuddered. Under the whine of bulldozers the sea could be heard running its huge paws up and down the keyboard of the land. The little park had a grove of yellowed birches, and a flock of wheatears foraged by the path. Next month they would be in North Africa, Ain thought. Two thousand miles of tiny wing-beats. He threw them some crumbs from a packet in his pocket.

  The woman seemed stronger here. She was panting in the sea wind, her large eyes fixed on Ain. Above her the birches were as gold as those where he had first seen her, the day his life began. . . . Squatting under a stump to watch a shrewmouse he had been, when he caught a falling ripple of green and recognized the shocking girl-flesh, creamy, pink-tipped—coming toward him among the golden bracken! Young Ain held his breath, his nose in the sweet moss and his heart going crash—crash. And then he was staring at the outrageous fall of that hair down her narrow back, watching it dance around her heart-shaped buttocks, while the shrewmouse ran over his paralyzed hand. The lake was utterly still, dusty silver under the misty sky, and she made no more than a muskrat’s ripple to rock the floating golden leaves. The silence closed back, the trees burning like torches where the naked girl had walked the wild wood, reflected in Ain’s shining eyes. For a time he believed he had seen an oread.