Her Smoke Rose Up Forever

John Clute deemed Her Smoke Rose Up Forever one of the two or three most important collections of science fiction ever published. The greatest science fiction writers undermined John W. Campbell’s vision of heroic transcendence, and Tiptree does so by writing from an exhilarated meditation on death. She is a literary witness to suffering. Her stories are not nihilistic, but they are thematically difficult. This is a woman who wrote with a fierce and deeply personal insistence on her perspectives of human life.

The following sections are meant to speak to one another rather than exist in isolation, gradually building a picture of Tiptree’s literary importance. Her stories are notoriously tricky to describe, so at times I prefer commenting on the theme rather than the plot. I believe this collection represents one of the most impactful careers in twentieth-century literature. I will refer to Tiptree by her real name, Alice Sheldon.

“A Momentary Taste of Being” — 1975 — Clute referred to this story as potentially “the finest densest most driven novella yet published in the field.” I agree. It is among the most important science fiction stories I have read. Like Solaris, Sheldon makes us encounter human insignificance on a cosmic scale. The story weeps with pathos, complex theological gestures: the methodical deconstruction of absolutes. There is some sort of transfiguration happening here that demands careful attention — a futile hope of escaping pain and violence, to depart from reality itself. It should be no surprise then that all her stories find their coda in death. But we must not mistake her for a selfishly misapplied sorrow. Sheldon constructs a deeper phenomenological portrait of our species that says while we may be participants in a vast uncaring void of universal silence, there is something here amongst us that makes life worth living as it continues to strive for itself. If future historians ever bother to understand our age, this is a story they should be concerned with.

“The Women Men Don’t See” — 1973 — It is hard to imagine Robert Silverberg ever thought a man could write something like this. I imagine Sheldon enjoyed that hiccup that has followed him around for decades. While men could theoretically write such work, Silverberg’s error reveals how gender can shape our reading expectations. I am reminded of Samuel Delany’s career-long critique of the unimaginative portrayal of male protagonists in science fiction. His own work challenged cultural norms by creating complex, sexually explorative men who often subvert traditional masculine expectations. This tendency can also be found in writers like Barry Malzberg, who broke the traditional role of heroism by showing how masculine power does not necessitate noble outcomes, but rather failure, self-loathing, and darker collapse. Sheldon’s work here is one of the finest examples of detaching the masculine entirely from the narrative by reducing it to a monochromatic impulse of control and societal conditioning. Yet there remains something still tender in how she treats the male protagonist, almost a theological forgiveness that says “Father, they know not what they do” — as the heroine flees the entire epistemological framework of men.

“The Man Who Walked Home” — 1972 — Here we depart slightly from Sheldon’s dark existential intensity to find a more Stapledonian perspective. Her writing shares the ability to accelerate effortlessly across time with electric precision and idiosyncratic texture. Sheldon frequently uses italics to show psychic or metaphysical states in dialogue with physical reality — sophisticatedly ornate poeticisms that effectively bridge the otherworldly and the actual. This entry follows a man trapped in an atemporal slipstream, thrown out of time, who materializes periodically on the same patch of earth. A deceptively simple tale told from Sheldon’s original perspective. This is one of the more memorable science fiction stories I have come across that utilize golden-age mechanics.

“And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill’s Side” — 1972 — “Anything different-colored, different nose, ass, anything, man has to fuck it or die trying. That’s a drive, y’know, it’s built in. Because it works fine as long as the stranger is human.” In a distant future where alien races have intermingled with humanity, a journalist interviews a cargo engineer aboard a starship about his perspectives on the unprecedented change in the makeup of society. The man is doused in self-pity at his inability to have sex with any of the aliens, since they are biologically unequipped to do so. The story is a brief recollection of his failed attempts. Sheldon brilliantly inverts the possibility of humanity successfully integrating itself with extraterrestrials purely from the fact that our sexual desires will get in the way. Barry Malzberg also explored similar themes with the same level of satirical punch. Here is another masterful demonstration by Sheldon to encode such complex messages into her vision of humanity. I find this one sharply comedic as Sheldon yet again conjures the great phallus of man dancing around a Thanksgiving turkey with a dribble of spit and crusty underwear. We are a species with little to no impulse control.

“The Girl Who Was Plugged In” — 1973 — With each story I am not only in admiration of what Sheldon emotively suggests but also how she is able to occupy language in such a novel way. This story contains a marvelous structure and is rightfully an important genre landmark. It is also a profound testament to writing itself. The story is told through a shifting narration style, much like the disembodied floating eye of documentary filmmaking. We fold in and out of narrative perspectives, which keep us from entirely involving ourselves with any particular character, unlike “A Momentary Taste of Being,” where Sheldon’s characterization swallows you. Here, the flux narrative reflects the spectacle of the protagonist, Delphi, by floating the reader alongside her like an invisible participant. I was aware of language as a visual object, for its capacity to move beyond pure statements. It is recognized as a cornerstone of feminist science fiction for its commentary on the female body in a high-tech world. It was also adapted into a television episode in 1998 for the series Welcome to Paradox, which is not completely successful, but a fun attempt.

“With Delicate Mad Hands” — 1981 — Clute described this story as showing signs of Sheldon’s burnout due to its “excessive length and sentimentality.” I agree with him again. This novella situates amongst the final dozen or so stories Sheldon published before her death. What’s more interesting is to observe how her stories changed due to the fact that her persona of Mr. Tiptree collapsed in 1977. Julie Phillips, a biographer of Sheldon’s life, mentioned that “although she eventually wrote a number of stories and another novel, nothing was ever as direct, honest and exciting as her work before she was exposed.” This story did not feel like the Tiptree I imagine pounding at the typewriter with a sweeping intelligence, taking periodic breaks for a cigarette to reflect on her perspicacious insights about humanity and revel in the grand edifice of her imagination. Rather, something here is decidedly more New Age in its cosmic romanticism that seems to not quite resonate with the first quarter of the novella — written with a violent one-dimensional hostility toward men that weakens her feminist perspectives by an unsteady fixation on drama. Even as her star was beginning its inevitable descent, this story is still her own in the telling. I got the impression that there is much of Sheldon in the protagonist, bleeding with depression and solipsistic loneliness. Six years after writing this, she would end her life after shooting her husband while he slept, a suicide pact. They were found in bed, holding hands.

“Her Smoke Rose Up Forever” — 1974 — This story first appeared in Edward Ferman and Barry Malzberg’s Final Stage anthology. As an ardent fan of Malzberg’s work, I can see him finishing this submission and not thinking a beat about whether or not to include it. Sheldon also had intimate correspondence with Malzberg; she admired his “capacity for uninhibited obscure outrage” and his “exasperated scream” that is shared in her own writing, flooded with the pain of sentience. This story is a rushing farrago of emotion; vertiginous counterpoints of life and death motivically spiral as language is transcended from its confines as mere structure. I could feel the weight of Sheldon’s prose on my chest. Her narrative captures a complex onslaught of vestigial echoes that reverberate through the protagonist’s memory like a threnody. But Sheldon’s perspectives of death are decidedly undying. Something goes on. The story follows a boy catapulted through the significant events of his life tied to the inseparable objects of his love and pain. He continually begins to de-phase into an immaterial plane that is populated only by a collective fearful past. This is science fiction in its utmost metaphysical form. Sheldon is writing about the potentiality of a psychic plane that exists beyond life and death, occupied by fear, shame, and defects. A plane that runs orthogonal to an Elysian Field of no sorrow. Sheldon took this idea from Whately Carington, who speculated that human beings live on after death as energetic patterns rooted in love and joy. Sheldon flipped this. Imagine Gilbert Simondon’s theory of individuation but all potentials are dread nodes. These passages equal the final pages of A Voyage to Arcturus in their sheer visceral impact. Both have terrifyingly brilliant endings.

“The Last Flight of Dr. Ain” — 1969; rewritten circa 1974 — Since Frederik Pohl included this story in the 1969 edition of Galaxy Magazine, it has gone on to be republished many times and in many languages. This was one of Sheldon’s first stories, but the text in this collection reflects her heavily reworked version. The collection begins here, which was a smart editing decision because while the direct generosity of language and emotion remains, this story is more accessible to the uninitiated reader and occurs before Sheldon really begins to take imaginative flight and become a demanding writer. Here we do find the obvious workings of a beginner, but nonetheless important, as “Dr. Ain” put Sheldon on the map as Mr. Tiptree, and the field turned its head toward that elusive figure who wrote so powerfully.

“She Waits for All Men Born” — 1976 — Stories like this reveal to me a garden in which I am treading. Each flower is a preternatural visitation grown from distant yet somehow intimately known soil. As I look to the horizon, it is torn between conflicting seasons as what appears to be a deathly blizzard entangles itself within a clash of coruscating sunlight attempting to snap the grey. While Sheldon’s writing is centered on death, her writing is a life-affirming practice. Something aches and cries out of the ash to give form yet upon resolution continues to bear its shadow. That something is a human being, which is who Sheldon writes for. This story, told as fable, follows the entropic struggle between life and death to achieve a transcendent symbiosis beyond mortality — starting with the destruction of dinosaurs, Neolithic and modern man, and finally the human race after the bomb drops. In this post-apocalyptic future a blind girl named Snow is born into a tribe struggling to survive against flying predators that live in the hills and attack the enclave. She holds a power that transcends the forces of life and death. Such tender and generous beauty.

“On the Last Afternoon” — 1972 — If there is something of an “enemy” in Sheldon’s writing, it is humanity itself. This makes her writing decidedly New Wave, as science fiction turned its focus upon the inner landscape of our species. Her stories express the repercussions of crashing up against the metaphysical silence of the universe as we seemingly call out to nothing. All of Sheldon’s writing is a dance of inescapable energy that oscillates between life and death, love and pain, radiance and shadow, as we attempt to place ourselves within some steady framework of morality and benevolence. Here Sheldon’s enemy is literal monsters of the Lovecraftian persuasion that threaten to destroy a small enclave of human beings surviving on an alien planet. They represent the entropic force of nature itself, bulldozing along without an apparent compass or consideration for anything but their own survival. Sound familiar? The story seems to lack the effective characterization and evocative register found in her other entries due to an excessive preoccupation with action dialogue.

“And I Have Come Across This Place by Lost Ways” — 1972 — Here I am reminded of the atmospheric horror of Clark Ashton Smith. And again the theme of cosmic indifference is attended to. A starship has been investigating a new planet with no promising signs of meaningful research or knowledge to bring home. There are aliens on this planet, but they seem rather dumb and unremarkable to the crew. An anthropologist named Evan feels otherwise. In the distance there is a strange mountain that becomes an object of obsession for Evan. He believes that something resides at the top, something that local aliens are keeping from them. In a quest for understanding he rebels against ship protocol, making his way to the hills. The ship leaves him behind, and he is left with no other choice but to discover the mystery. As usual, Sheldon confronts the face of death. Imaginative and engaging world-building, perhaps one of her more accessible stories.

“Your Faces, O My Sisters! Your Faces Filled of Light!” — 1976 — This story first appeared under Sheldon’s other pseudonym, Raccoona Sheldon. I was able to track down an old fanzine called Janus, which published a review of Aurora: Beyond Equality, the anthology Raccoona’s story appeared in. Sheldon snuck in another story under Tiptree called “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” One reviewer was “much taken” by the Wisconsin writer’s (Raccoona) story but found the Tiptree to be “especially malevolent.” Another testament to her stylistic breadth, and an amusing anecdote of her sneaking in two stories like a thief in the night. Here is yet another beautiful and painful piece of writing. Sheldon wrote along a path in the tunnel at the end of the light, but the light nevertheless remained, always gently cutting the dark, yet swarmed by shadow in its tender glow. The suffering of her stories strangles like a kudzu vine. Another masterpiece of feminist literature.

“Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” — 1976 — This is one of Sheldon’s most famous stories. Like “The Girl Who Was Plugged In,” it also appeared in a Tor Double next to her longtime pen pal, Joanna Russ. An effective and angry piece of feminist literature that risks showing some naiveté about men being nothing more than one-dimensional aggressors, although both sexes are intentionally not beyond reproach here, and the whole thing is particularly clever as an imagining of a world that simply does not need men. I do not think Sheldon believed this — but like her other stories, adopting the theme created a powerful provocation. While the scale of drama collapses some of the characterization, the story is near perfect in the telling, with exceptional world-building, plot twists, and an unforgettable ending.

“We Who Stole the Dream” — 1978 — Interestingly, alongside “With Delicate Mad Hands,” this is another one of my least favorite stories in the collection, both of which were published after Sheldon was exposed as the woman behind the man known as Tiptree. This story reminded me of Ursula Le Guin’s The Word for World Is Forest. It takes a similar approach, where a race of aliens are enslaved by humanity and hatch an escape plan. The dynamics of power are very similar to Le Guin’s novella, where we feel particularly bad about the aliens since they are little munchkins cowering in the face of our species. I have always found this method to be off-putting. I prefer when an author works for my feelings to come through as opposed to dangling a gleaming hook of allegory in front of me. Perhaps my least favorite in the collection.

“Slow Music” — 1980 — “Death was the engine of their lives, death fueled their sexuality. Death drove them at each other’s throats and into each other’s arms. Dying, they triumphed. . . . That was human life.” Clute called this Sheldon’s last great story before her illness started to take shape. It is decidedly different than her other entries in that it functions as an ode to life first before non-violently becoming an ode to death. Further, masculinity does not threaten here, and there is no structural breakdown between the sexes. It is without damage, only a process of love becoming aware in the presence of a woman. The story follows a young man who is following humanity on their final trip to the river, a metaphysical stream that carries their species to immortality and celestial bliss. On his journey he meets a girl who is building a farm, learning to survive off the land, and wants to stay on Earth and raise a family. She awakens in him the true human impulse toward the call to make life and desires to bear a child. There is a lachrymose weight to Sheldon’s passages, which emanate from decades of experience and apperception. Here is the one story in the collection that, while it must also end in death, does so on wings that soar into a paroxysm of poetry. It could be argued that this entry is one of her greatest achievements in its remarkable ability to home in on all of the complex pain and joy of human life.

“The Screwfly Solution” — 1977 — Another one of Sheldon’s most famous stories that has been subject to thoughtful analysis across intellectual disciplines. This story was also published under her other pseudonym, Raccoona Sheldon. The apocalyptic theme has been utilized in literature since the advent of religious texts and in visual media for at least a century. Human beings have always been fascinated by death and their own potential for extinction. Where Sheldon departs from the usual cacophony of destruction or brain-hungry zombies is in her use of sex itself as the modality of our unbecoming. Sheldon wrote with an intensity that I only wish I could have seen shock the field upon its arrival.

“Love Is the Plan the Plan Is Death” — 1973 — This is an idiosyncratic story that tells the tale of an alien predator in which the female cannibalizes the male during mating. The story is told from the perspective of the male while he is being eaten. There is a strong and complex narrative voice here, but it is foreign and demanding to read. I adore this quality of Sheldon’s writing, but here I had difficulty attaching myself to the world she was building.

“And So On, and So On” — 1971 — “Ahead lies only the irreversible long decline. For the first time we know there is nothing beyond ourselves.” This story functions as a coda to the collection, and in that sense it is entirely effective. It could be read as a mission statement for science fiction and for art as a whole. A spaceship populated by humans and aliens alike come to the conclusion that the known galaxy has been entirely traversed within their technical abilities. The only thing that remains is the exploration of inner space, the mind itself — and who knows what perils and beauty exist inside microcosms of individual and collective experience.

These stories demand effort but offer experiences unlike anything else in the genre. I will leave you with an interview that Jeff Smith conducted with the then-unknown Tiptree. When asked what science fiction is, she responded:

“What but a staggering, towering, glittering mad lay cathedral? Built like the old ones by spontaneous volunteers, some bringing one laborious gargoyle, some a load of stone, some engineering a spire. Over years now, over time the thing has grown, you know? To what god? Who knows. Something different from the gods of the other arts. A god that isn’t there yet, maybe. An urge saying Up, saying Screw it all. Saying Try. To… be… more? We don’t know. But everyone has made this. Limping, scratching, wrangling, clowning, goony, sauced, hes, shes, its, thems, bemmies for all I know, swooping glory, freaked out in corners, ridiculous, noble, queerly vulnerable in some ways others aren’t—totally irrelevant, really. These are the nearest to winged people that we have and I would shut up forever rather than hurt one of them. Dead or alive.”