Her Smoke Rose Up Forever
For a decade Alice Sheldon produced an extraordinary body of work under the pseudonym James Tiptree Jr, until her identity was exposed in 1977. HER SMOKE ROSE UP FOREVER presents the finest of these stories and contains the NEBULA AWARD-winning LOVE IS THE PLAN THE PLAN IS DEATH; HUGO AWARD-winning novella THE GIRL WHO WAS PLUGGED IN; HOUSTON, HOUSTON, DO YOU READ? - winner of both the HUGO and NEBULA - and of course the story for which she is best known: THE WOMEN MEN DON'T SEE.
This is a true masterwork - an overview of one of SF's true greats at the very height of her powers.
James Tiptree Jr (1915-1987)
Alice Hastings Bradley Sheldon wrote most of her fiction as James Tiptree, Jr - she was making a point about sexist assumptions and also keeping her US government employers from knowing her business. Most of her books are collections of short stories, of which Her Smoke Rose Up Forever is considered to be her best selection. Sheldon's best stories combine radical feminism with a tough-minded tragic view of life; even virtuous characters are exposed as unwitting beneficiaries of disgusting socio-economic systems. Even good men are complicit in women's oppression, as in her most famous stories 'The Women Men Don't See' and 'Houston, Houston, Do you Read?' or in ecocide. Much of her work, even at its most tragic, has an attractively ironic tone which sometimes becomes straightforwardly comedy - it is important to stress that Tiptree's deep seriousness never becomes sombre or pompous. Her two novels Up the Walls of the World and Brightness Falls from the Air are both remarkable transfigurations of stock space opera material - the former deals with a vast destroying being, sympathetic aliens at risk of destruction by it and human telepaths trying to make contact across the gulf of stars. She died tragically in 1987.