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.
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no subject
Date: 2005-12-09 04:22 pm (UTC)I think that's exactly right - had the astronauts been female and the clones men, the denouement would have been identical. Absolutely - this is what I'm trying to get at, because it's what lends the lie to Niall's straight gender reading. I think he's right that Tiptree often didn't agree with her own stories, and as such I don't want to take the narrator's 'there's no place for me here' at face value. I think, as you point out, that there's no place for anyone from his world - male, female, dog or cat - in the world he has wound up in.
I'd take your analysis a step further, though, and suggest that the real heart of this story is that a totally equal society is undesirable, because it would result in precisely the cold stagnation we see in Houston, Houston. Im this story, an equal society necessarily means a less diverse society, both in terms of gender and individuals, and from her other stories it rather seems to me that Tiptree was in love with this diversity, however painful and problematic it often is. I think that this is the real, disquieting heart of the story, rather than any soft-headed proclamations about 'gender types'.
no subject
Date: 2005-12-09 04:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-09 04:42 pm (UTC)I think Geneva is spot-on, though, when suggesting that the story is also wider and more universal than that. Here is a story not about a hypothetical society but about our own as seen through the lens of one we sometimes think we'd like to live in. It challenges us to rethink our gender roles, social and economic models, and personal relationships whilst preserving diversity and tolerating inequality, rather than conforming to the received wisdom that 'this is just how people/things are', and condemning ourselves to the false dichotomy of total inequality and total equality.
Which makes the story sound much better than I actually thought it was (I liked it fine, but it's not that good), but hey. :P
no subject
Date: 2005-12-09 06:44 pm (UTC)I agree, and I take it as a tribute to Tiptree's skill, but I do see gender as pre-eminent. That it's an argument about power imbalance doesn't mean it's not specifically about power imbalance as distributed across genders. Similarly, though I could describe my reaction to the ending as 'being disconcerted because the power I take for granted is suddenly irrelevant', and it would be absolutely true, it is more accurate to say it throws me because the power I unconsciously associate with my gender is suddenly irrelevant. It demonstrates just how much it's not irrelevant in day-to-day life.
no subject
Date: 2005-12-09 06:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-09 07:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-09 07:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-10 08:15 am (UTC)Why? Why would you do that?
no subject
Date: 2005-12-10 10:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-10 12:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-10 12:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-10 04:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-10 04:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-09 04:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-12-09 04:43 pm (UTC)Actually, I was thinking of female astronauts/female clones, but changing it to female astronauts/male clones would probably have the same effect again, I agree. Or at least, I can imagine versions of the story where this is the case, and I think the versions I'm imagining are relevantly similar to the original.
I'd take your analysis a step further, though, and suggest that the real heart of this story is that a totally equal society is undesirable, because it would result in precisely the cold stagnation we see in Houston, Houston.
I was wondering above, when I categorised the women's society as an equal one whether that was really the best categorisation of it - are we talking about equality or about something bigger - a society in which a variety of negative characteristics have been eliminated and only neutral/good characteristics are left. (Note: it's been a while since I read it, so I don't remember the actual details that well.)
So the question becomes - can good exist without bad, can we have a society that is valuable overall without including negative qualities in it somewhere? Maybe I'm going too broad here. ;)
Im this story, an equal society necessarily means a less diverse society, both in terms of gender and individuals,
See, I'd say that this lack of diversity isn't just the product of an equal society, but of a society that has eliminated many of the social qualities that are deemed 'undesirable'. There's no reason why an equal society shouldn't include aggression/anger/etc. - the elimination of those goes one step beyond equality. Which is why I was thinking it might not just be about the equality aspect of things.
no subject
Date: 2005-12-09 04:48 pm (UTC)I don't think so, actually. That was very much what I was implying - the idea that 'equal' societies are only possible in the most extreme, undesirable and, yes, maybe fascistic circumstances. Because 'equal' societies require something significantly less than diversity, they also require the purging and forcible prevention of the very negative characteristics that can be seen to drive better people towards achievement. After all, it's aggression, anger, jealousy and territoriality that make society unequal in the first place.
no subject
Date: 2005-12-09 06:38 pm (UTC)I think it's fairly clear that there's more than just neutral/good characteristics left; that's why the society is not a utopia. For starters, as has been noted, it's less genetically diverse and less innovative--both things that I think, broadly speaking, are good. And I don't think there's anything to suggest that anger and aggression are completely absent, just that they are not present in extreme and destructive forms. So I don't think 'equal' is a particularly useful word to think of the society with; I prefer 'healthier (in many ways)'.
no subject
Date: 2005-12-09 06:44 pm (UTC)I don't think these are the sorts of negative characteristics Geneva was talking about. These are (arguably) negative effects of removing what are defined as negative characteristics (male aggression, and the tendency towards hierarchy, for example)
I don't think 'equal' is a particularly useful word to think of the society with
Even though there are no ranks, no permanent professions, no centralised governance, and no personalities that do not in some way contribute to a wider whole? Um.
no subject
Date: 2005-12-09 08:45 pm (UTC)I don't see Tiptree as arguing the right or wrong of this society so much as using an exaggerated example to highlight both why the dominate side feel threatened by the alien, and why the alien feels oppressed. In this respect Tiptree's feminism has not just been about women but also about how men deal with women. To look at another story title: it isn't 'The Invisible Women' but 'The Women Men don't see' and thus men are an active part in what is under discussion as much as the women.