Her Smoke Rose Up Forever
Dec. 9th, 2005 03:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
coalescentI think I am jealous of anyone who was reading science fiction before 1976. [1]
I'm jealous because I wish I could have read the stories in Her Smoke Rose Up Forever without a legend leaning over my shoulder. It would have meant I could have read most of them twice: once before knowing that James Tiptree Jnr was Alice Sheldon, and once after. As it is, only the second reading was available to me. And I'm jealous because I want that moment of realisation. I want to know how I would react. Whether I would be Robert Silverberg, egg-on-face after insisting that Tiptree's writing was 'ineluctably masculine', or whether I would have been more agnostic. As it is, I can't ever know.
And I want to know because some of these stories are without question some of the most important--the most worth thinking about--in the science fiction canon. Oh, some of them have undeniably dated. The central image to which 'A Momentary Taste of Being' builds, for example, is striking, but it's also absurd; it's hard to read it with a modern eye, and impossible to imagine a modern writer carrying the same idea off with a straight face, except possibly at a much shorter length. But for the most part, even the ways in which the stories have dated are interesting. You can see science fiction changing before your eyes, as you read, from the pulps to the new wave. The conflict is almost literal in stories like 'And So On, And So On', and 'Houston, Houston, Do You Read?' but the threads are there throughout, even in the devastating critique of exogamy embedded in 'And I Awoke And Found Me Here on the Cold Hill's Side.'
Of course, this is not primarily science fiction about science fiction. In fact, the extent to which Tiptree used classic sf ideas was a surprise to me. I bought the reissued Her Smoke Rose Up Forever at the end of 2004 and had, until recently, only read four stories from it, and they hadn't been representative. (I wasn't going so slowly because I didn't want to read the book, but because I was reluctant to have read the book. Either the stories couldn't possibly live up to the hype (although just about every time I read one it turned out to be very good), or they would, and then I wouldn't have the book to look forward to any more.) They were, for want of a better phrase, respectable science fiction. Stories like 'The Women Men Don't See', 'The Screwfly Solution', 'The Last Flight of Doctor Ain'--set in the world, focusing on human reactions in the more-or-less here and now.
Half the stories in this collection, though, while not as outright bizarre as 'A Momentary Taste of Being', are about as brazenly science fictional as you could ask for. I think I was most surprised by the number of stories with an almost Stapledonian perspective, skipping across time like stones across water; and though 'She Waits For All Men Born' didn't do a lot for me, I suspect the final, vivd images of 'The Man Who Walked Home' and 'Her Smoke Rose Up Forever' (the future folding down into the present) will be with me for a while yet. And there are stories told completely from an alien perspective, too: 'Love Is The Plan The Plan Is Death' with its excitable, oblivious narrator, hurtling towards his end; and, more succesfully, 'We Who Stole The Dream', which flirts with parable and allegory without ever committing to either.
And the intensity of them! Tiptree tells her stories with a force, with a ruthless conviction that leaves much contemporary short sf looking distinctly anemic. Perhaps Lucius Shepard can match her in this regard, but perhaps he also has less range. Tiptree's themes--biology and society, intelligence and instinct, men and women--recur, but her visions are extravagant. And somehow, for all that most of the stories end with death, or decline, or loss, it is not, finally, a bleak collection. There is that feeling you seem to get only from science fiction, that humanity is a small part of a vast and uncaring universe, but that the passion of life is what makes it worth living, on its own terms. The extraordinary penultimate story, 'Slow Music', captures this best: at the end, we are told, 'mortal grief fought invading transcendence.' Tiptree makes the words more than dramatic rhetoric.
Best and worst stories? The weakest are the ones that are obviously the work of a beginner--'The Last Flight of Doctor Ain', ambitious beyond its means--or have lost their context, and therefore their relevance. 'A Momentary Taste of Being' is one of these, as mentioned, as is the overlong and overmanipulative 'With Delicate Mad Hands'; they are stories whose anger is directed at targets already mostly demolished. The strongest are, by and large, the ones that everyone already knows. There's the familiar, pitiable, unconsciously prejudiced viewpoint of the narrator in 'The Women Men Don't See', which serves as the most economic articulation of some of Tiptree's central arguments. There's the intense cynicism of 'The Screwfly Solution', and the firecracker writing (and unexpected poignancy) of 'The Girl Who Was Plugged In'. But even beyond the award winners there are important stories. 'And I Awoke And Found Me Here On The Cold Hill's Side' is chilling in its simplicity, manifold in its implications; 'Your Faces, O My Sisters! Your Faces Filled Of Light!' is harrowing. To complain too much, or to argue that these are the favourites everyone should have, just seems mean.
And there's probably my favourite story in the collection, 'Houston, Houston, Do You Read?' in which three astronauts are cast from Then into the Future, where they encounter a woman-only world (men having been killed in a plague). Elsewhere,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
immortalradical said that:
Let it be noted he liked the story, for demonstrating that women and men are as bad as each other. And admittedly, individual reactions to a story like this will vary; it's a mark of how skillfully Tiptree asks questions about gender and power. But to me, his reading seems a little lazy, and almost offensively wrongheaded. The society in 'Houston, Houston' is not obsessed with purity or the Greater Good; and I'm not claiming it as a utopia, but it's certainly not fascistic. It is, simply, a society that works tolerably well but that has no place for men--more, in fact: it is a society to which men are inimical. The astronauts are not perceived to throw a spanner in the works; they do throw a spanner in the works, just by existing. The women of 'Houston, Houston' do not need men to love, or for anything else. They don't hate men, either, and they certainly don't fear them. In fact, they're not missing much of anything. (Is there a reason they should, do you think?) There are some hints that their society is less vital and expansionist than it would otherwise be, but those are not inherently bad things, and their world is also clearly less conflict-riven world than our own (although part of that is likely to be simply that the population is much smaller than ours currently is). But the presence of men would inevitably destroy the society that has been created in their absence, and something worse would take its place.
The strength and the tragedy of the story, for me, then, is in just how comprehensively irrelevant men are, and that the narrator--clearly the most balanced of the astronauts, despite the unreliability of his perspective--has the self-awareness to realise the damage his life would cause and, while lamenting, face up to the consequences of it. It's not a question of refusing to recognise difference; it's that coexistence is not possible without one or other party being shackled. Is that a bleak view of the relationship between the sexes? Hell yes. In 'Houston, Houston', men and women are literally aliens to each other. Do I believe in it? No, and I don't think Tiptree did either. But to assume the premise makes for an extraordinarily powerful and provocative story.
As are many of the rest. It's unfair to compare a retrospective like Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (Michael Swanwick's introduction calls it 'a partial corrective') to most other collections I've read. The stories here are the pick of just twelve extraordinary years. But I'll say this: if you haven't read these stories, you need to--if only to argue with them.
[1] And there’s a moment of perspective for you. I had unconsciously assumed that, as it would today, the news of Tiptree’s identity had flashed around the sf community in the space of a day. But of course, no: we’re talking letters and fanzines, not the internet. 'Everything But The Signature Is Me', in Meet Me At Infinity, is compiled from letters between November 1976 and 1977; in his introduction to Her Smoke Rose Up Forever Clute uses 1977 (because it was the '77 Worldcon where it was hot news?); in In The Chinks of the World Machine Lefanu uses 1976.
I'm jealous because I wish I could have read the stories in Her Smoke Rose Up Forever without a legend leaning over my shoulder. It would have meant I could have read most of them twice: once before knowing that James Tiptree Jnr was Alice Sheldon, and once after. As it is, only the second reading was available to me. And I'm jealous because I want that moment of realisation. I want to know how I would react. Whether I would be Robert Silverberg, egg-on-face after insisting that Tiptree's writing was 'ineluctably masculine', or whether I would have been more agnostic. As it is, I can't ever know.
And I want to know because some of these stories are without question some of the most important--the most worth thinking about--in the science fiction canon. Oh, some of them have undeniably dated. The central image to which 'A Momentary Taste of Being' builds, for example, is striking, but it's also absurd; it's hard to read it with a modern eye, and impossible to imagine a modern writer carrying the same idea off with a straight face, except possibly at a much shorter length. But for the most part, even the ways in which the stories have dated are interesting. You can see science fiction changing before your eyes, as you read, from the pulps to the new wave. The conflict is almost literal in stories like 'And So On, And So On', and 'Houston, Houston, Do You Read?' but the threads are there throughout, even in the devastating critique of exogamy embedded in 'And I Awoke And Found Me Here on the Cold Hill's Side.'
Of course, this is not primarily science fiction about science fiction. In fact, the extent to which Tiptree used classic sf ideas was a surprise to me. I bought the reissued Her Smoke Rose Up Forever at the end of 2004 and had, until recently, only read four stories from it, and they hadn't been representative. (I wasn't going so slowly because I didn't want to read the book, but because I was reluctant to have read the book. Either the stories couldn't possibly live up to the hype (although just about every time I read one it turned out to be very good), or they would, and then I wouldn't have the book to look forward to any more.) They were, for want of a better phrase, respectable science fiction. Stories like 'The Women Men Don't See', 'The Screwfly Solution', 'The Last Flight of Doctor Ain'--set in the world, focusing on human reactions in the more-or-less here and now.
Half the stories in this collection, though, while not as outright bizarre as 'A Momentary Taste of Being', are about as brazenly science fictional as you could ask for. I think I was most surprised by the number of stories with an almost Stapledonian perspective, skipping across time like stones across water; and though 'She Waits For All Men Born' didn't do a lot for me, I suspect the final, vivd images of 'The Man Who Walked Home' and 'Her Smoke Rose Up Forever' (the future folding down into the present) will be with me for a while yet. And there are stories told completely from an alien perspective, too: 'Love Is The Plan The Plan Is Death' with its excitable, oblivious narrator, hurtling towards his end; and, more succesfully, 'We Who Stole The Dream', which flirts with parable and allegory without ever committing to either.
And the intensity of them! Tiptree tells her stories with a force, with a ruthless conviction that leaves much contemporary short sf looking distinctly anemic. Perhaps Lucius Shepard can match her in this regard, but perhaps he also has less range. Tiptree's themes--biology and society, intelligence and instinct, men and women--recur, but her visions are extravagant. And somehow, for all that most of the stories end with death, or decline, or loss, it is not, finally, a bleak collection. There is that feeling you seem to get only from science fiction, that humanity is a small part of a vast and uncaring universe, but that the passion of life is what makes it worth living, on its own terms. The extraordinary penultimate story, 'Slow Music', captures this best: at the end, we are told, 'mortal grief fought invading transcendence.' Tiptree makes the words more than dramatic rhetoric.
Best and worst stories? The weakest are the ones that are obviously the work of a beginner--'The Last Flight of Doctor Ain', ambitious beyond its means--or have lost their context, and therefore their relevance. 'A Momentary Taste of Being' is one of these, as mentioned, as is the overlong and overmanipulative 'With Delicate Mad Hands'; they are stories whose anger is directed at targets already mostly demolished. The strongest are, by and large, the ones that everyone already knows. There's the familiar, pitiable, unconsciously prejudiced viewpoint of the narrator in 'The Women Men Don't See', which serves as the most economic articulation of some of Tiptree's central arguments. There's the intense cynicism of 'The Screwfly Solution', and the firecracker writing (and unexpected poignancy) of 'The Girl Who Was Plugged In'. But even beyond the award winners there are important stories. 'And I Awoke And Found Me Here On The Cold Hill's Side' is chilling in its simplicity, manifold in its implications; 'Your Faces, O My Sisters! Your Faces Filled Of Light!' is harrowing. To complain too much, or to argue that these are the favourites everyone should have, just seems mean.
And there's probably my favourite story in the collection, 'Houston, Houston, Do You Read?' in which three astronauts are cast from Then into the Future, where they encounter a woman-only world (men having been killed in a plague). Elsewhere,
immortalradical said that:The society developed by the women in 'Houston, Houston' is fascistic, sterile and myopic, yes. It has become obsessed both with purity and the Greater Good, and is not particularly interested in individual identity, exploration or new knowledge except in so far as it contributes to that Greater Good. When something turns up that is perceived to throw a spanner in the works of that unity and purity, it is treated with initial fascination, its usefulspermcharacteristics taken and assimilated, and the individuals concerned exterminated.
The fact that our narrator, having seen his friends degraded, dehumanised and manipulated, and having realised that there is no free place in such a society for him, willingly goes along with his murder is hardly an argument in favour of that society.
Let it be noted he liked the story, for demonstrating that women and men are as bad as each other. And admittedly, individual reactions to a story like this will vary; it's a mark of how skillfully Tiptree asks questions about gender and power. But to me, his reading seems a little lazy, and almost offensively wrongheaded. The society in 'Houston, Houston' is not obsessed with purity or the Greater Good; and I'm not claiming it as a utopia, but it's certainly not fascistic. It is, simply, a society that works tolerably well but that has no place for men--more, in fact: it is a society to which men are inimical. The astronauts are not perceived to throw a spanner in the works; they do throw a spanner in the works, just by existing. The women of 'Houston, Houston' do not need men to love, or for anything else. They don't hate men, either, and they certainly don't fear them. In fact, they're not missing much of anything. (Is there a reason they should, do you think?) There are some hints that their society is less vital and expansionist than it would otherwise be, but those are not inherently bad things, and their world is also clearly less conflict-riven world than our own (although part of that is likely to be simply that the population is much smaller than ours currently is). But the presence of men would inevitably destroy the society that has been created in their absence, and something worse would take its place.
The strength and the tragedy of the story, for me, then, is in just how comprehensively irrelevant men are, and that the narrator--clearly the most balanced of the astronauts, despite the unreliability of his perspective--has the self-awareness to realise the damage his life would cause and, while lamenting, face up to the consequences of it. It's not a question of refusing to recognise difference; it's that coexistence is not possible without one or other party being shackled. Is that a bleak view of the relationship between the sexes? Hell yes. In 'Houston, Houston', men and women are literally aliens to each other. Do I believe in it? No, and I don't think Tiptree did either. But to assume the premise makes for an extraordinarily powerful and provocative story.
As are many of the rest. It's unfair to compare a retrospective like Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (Michael Swanwick's introduction calls it 'a partial corrective') to most other collections I've read. The stories here are the pick of just twelve extraordinary years. But I'll say this: if you haven't read these stories, you need to--if only to argue with them.
[1] And there’s a moment of perspective for you. I had unconsciously assumed that, as it would today, the news of Tiptree’s identity had flashed around the sf community in the space of a day. But of course, no: we’re talking letters and fanzines, not the internet. 'Everything But The Signature Is Me', in Meet Me At Infinity, is compiled from letters between November 1976 and 1977; in his introduction to Her Smoke Rose Up Forever Clute uses 1977 (because it was the '77 Worldcon where it was hot news?); in In The Chinks of the World Machine Lefanu uses 1976.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-12-09 03:29 pm (UTC)I think the point in 'Houston do you read' is that the women are assessing whether the men are capable of behaving non-destructively, and they end up concluding they aren't. But it isn't specified whether the women are right or wrong. My personal feeling is that the men are locked into destructive behaviour by the military culture that they are coming from and they can't break out of that stereotyped behaviour, even though their lives depend on it.
I also think the women's society is damaged by having only a small number of genotypes, which are endlessly repeated, and there is at least hope that the new DNA they get off the men might open up the society a bit.
no subject
Date: 2005-12-09 03:35 pm (UTC)This would certainly explain how Dan and I could end up with such completely opposed readings. I can see how they could be wrong about men in general--if they cloned new men using those sperm, for instance--but I think about those three astronauts (and by extension what they stand for) they're fairly clearly right.
And I agree with your point about genetic diversity, although it's a small-population effect, not a one-gender effect specifically.
There's some discussion of 'And I Awoke' here.
no subject
Date: 2005-12-09 03:37 pm (UTC)Er, one sex. Obviously.
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Date: 2005-12-10 02:04 pm (UTC)I also got the feeling (altho this may be overly reading into it) the women were interested in a fairly scientific way about what they could do with the sperm -- breeding programs, genomes, more genetic diversity, seeing whether or not they could knock some of the aggressiveness out, &c.
no subject
Date: 2005-12-10 02:05 pm (UTC)I also got the feeling (altho this may be overly reading into it) the women were interested in a fairly scientific way about what they could do with the sperm -- breeding programs, genomes, more genetic diversity, seeing whether or not they could knock some of the aggressiveness out, &c.
What's also sort of funny about that story is if you read it as being written by a male author, some of the points about women are v stereotypical (or maybe that's just the consciousness of the lead character/quasi-narrator). But now that it's widely-known the story is by a woman, the emphasis is on how unfair the women are to the astronauts.
(no subject)
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Date: 2005-12-09 03:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-09 03:39 pm (UTC)Precisely. Because people are gits, regardless of their gender. Why, I bet we're not beyond drugging people to force them into acting how we want and expect them to act, in order to justify our extermination of them.
The problem anyone defending the solution the women of Houston, Houston enact is that it is simply morally unacceptable to kill people for your own convenience, which by your own admission is precisely what they do. I would have assumed this was a pretty uncontroversial viewpoint but apparently the rules change when it comes to discussing feminist SF stories.
no subject
Date: 2005-12-09 03:40 pm (UTC)No, it's exactly what they don't do.
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Date: 2005-12-09 03:59 pm (UTC)I take it the trip to Germany was rather boring then?
Wonderful piece
Date: 2005-12-09 04:00 pm (UTC)If you're interested, I'm looking for a few 100 word exactly articles and reviews for the January 31st issue of The Drink Tank. I'd love to have something from ya
Chris
no subject
Date: 2005-12-09 04:14 pm (UTC)Weird.
From:Re: Weird.
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Date: 2005-12-09 04:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-09 05:48 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2005-12-09 06:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-09 05:29 pm (UTC)I can't be arsed finishing the rest of HSRUF (or Hssruff as I'll call it from now on). Do you want to borrow Up The Walls Of The World? I enjoyed that more.
no subject
Date: 2005-12-09 06:21 pm (UTC)And not in a kinky way.
Anyway, here is my opinion on this story, which i have not read:
"Good in its own way, but Kurt Vonnegut is funnier."
-- tom
no subject
Date: 2005-12-09 06:30 pm (UTC)This thread is on the verge of seriousness implosion - get me pirates, STAT!
Date: 2005-12-09 06:56 pm (UTC)ARRRR!!
Employ ninjas.
P-)
-- tom
Re: This thread is on the verge of seriousness implosion - get me pirates, STAT!
Date: 2005-12-09 07:23 pm (UTC)Hell yeah!
no subject
Date: 2005-12-10 02:01 pm (UTC)Great analysis, and yeah, I think that's the point of the story. I don't think Tiptree is saying "This is a utopia" or "This is a dystopia" or anything else; the story's sort of the obverse of "The Women Men Don't See," where two women slip away unnoticed out between the gear teeth of the patriarchy; here men try to force themselves into a matriarchy. I think it's a mistake to compare it to "When it Changed," which is a great story but deals with an isolated world, a temporary colony that has no way to defend itself against the men who are going to inevitably come (the classic moment in that story is when one of the astronauts asks "But what happened to all the people?" -- i.e., the men). That narrator is telling her life from a future perspective -- it's a eulogy. The eulogy in "Houston," on the other hand, is for the utterly vanished way of life we recognize as our own. When you pair it with the "Screwfly Solution," Tiptree's view of the relationship between the sexes is indeed fairly dire.
Still diagree with you about "Ain," tho -- that's one of the best-structured stories I've ever read, and the ending is like a punch to the gut. That story is all about everything it doesn't say. (I had nasty flashbacks to it when I was staffing a big medical conference here in Seattle and acted as usher to several large presentations about AIDS, SARS, &c.)
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Date: 2005-12-10 02:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-10 02:15 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2005-12-10 03:23 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2005-12-11 03:33 pm (UTC)Fascistic in intent, probably not. But in practice - well, yes, it would seem so. Certainly insofar as the clones' dealings with the astronauts, any way. A society that is unwilling to accept anything new, anything different, on the basis of their assumptions and a rather dodgy "experiment", and sees murder as the only option to protecting itself, certainly has fascistic tendencies.
It's clear that enough animals were unaffected by the plague to make farming sustainable. It's clear that two million people living in one small area of the planet have nothing to fear from three blokes living somewhere else on the same planet. No attempt is made to allow the men to go and make their own lives elsewhere - in fact, this option is explicitly denied them. Why? Because the destruction of the that which is different is the only choice these women are prepared to make.
in fact: it is a society to which men are inimical... the presence of men would inevitably destroy the society that has been created in their absence
More accurate perhaps to say that it is a society which believes that to be the case; and which sets out to prove it be fair means or foul. We are told that it is March when the men come aboard the Gloria, and New Year's Eve when they're drugged - there's been no indication in that time that there have been any untoward incidents. In fact, after *nine months* of living with the men, the women have to resort to mood-altering and inhibition-suppressing drugs to get the proof they want before they go ahead and murder them. Hardly unchecked and wanton destruction of the existing social order by the men, is it?
Yes, these particular men (or rather two of these particular men) are steeped in military hierarchy. All of them are products of their time and culture (which is also true of this story), and that leads them to be as confounded by the clone society as the clone society is confounded by them. That this leads to the men's murder is an indictment of that society. That even the most sympathetic of them (although he is blind to his own deep-seated prejudice until the final moments) is murdered (and it *is* murder) shows how unbending this society is willing to be. The fact that the men have to be drugged into acting reprehensibly is, for me, the deciding factor - this society condemns the men as barbaric, uncivilised and an inherent danger, then goes to any lengths necessary to prove this to be true, in order to justify to itself the equally barbaric act of murder.
the narrator...has the self-awareness to realise the damage his life would cause and, while lamenting, face up to the consequences of it
I simply can't agree. He's murdered, just as the others are. The fact that takes the drink doesn't make it any less murder (the fact that Judy doesn't resist Bud doesn't make it any less rape). He has only two options - fight, or drink. Either way he's dead in the next few minutes. He chooses the path of least resistance, because that's inherently who he is. But he doesn't kill himself, he makes no sacrifice, he doesn't choose to die rather than to live. He simply makes a choice about the manner of his murder.
I mentioned that this story is a product of its time. Both sexes are drawn in relatively broad stereotypes - the men are sexist, dominating, sexual predators who lack understanding and empathy; the women are manipulative, passive-aggressive, talkative, and equitable. Anyone writing a story now with such unsophisticated gender politics would be rightly criticised. Which, I suppose, goes to show just how far we've come in the past thirty years.
no subject
Date: 2005-12-11 04:24 pm (UTC)And the women don't--fear, that is. But the men are carrying the cultural equivalent of the black death, and that needs to be addressed.
He has only two options - fight, or drink. Either way he's dead in the next few minutes.
This could be his motivation, given the bare facts of the situation, but it's not the motivation given in the text. The motivation given in the text is that he realises he's carrying the black death.
That's the central point from which all our disagreements flow; see also Geneva's analysis of the story as about power imbalance elsethread. You and Dan are reading it far too literally, I think--taking for too much about the narrator's perceptions of the women's society at face value. The women are not stereotypes; he sees them as stereotypes, because that's what he's been conditioned to do.
The fact that the men have to be drugged into acting reprehensibly is, for me, the deciding factor
That's a 'Billly' situation, and like 'Billy' you can't resolve it either way. "It wasn't something in you, Wesley. It was something done to you."
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