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Cover of Her Smoke Rose Up Forever

Her Smoke Rose Up Forever

James Tiptree, Jr.

520 pages

A feverish, brilliant descent into the darkest, most tragic corners of human biology and desire.

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What it feels like

Reading this collection feels like plugging directly into a brilliant, feverish, and deeply troubled mind. The stories move with a manic, kinetic energy, pulling you through high-concept science fiction premises that inevitably reveal devastating truths about human nature. There is a profound sense of tragedy woven into the fabric of these worlds, where characters are often trapped by their own biology, desires, or the inescapable constructs of gender. The prose is visceral and sharp, crackling with an intelligence that is as cynical as it is deeply empathetic to the doomed. It is an unsettling, dread-soaked experience, but one that leaves an indelible mark. This is for readers who want their speculative fiction to be ruthless, psychologically complex, and unapologetically bleak.

Mood
  • feverish
  • unsettling
  • dread-soaked
  • melancholic
Tone
  • cynical
  • manic
  • tragic
  • fiercely intelligent
  • unflinching
Pace
brisk
Themes
biological determinism · alienation of gender · destructive desire · existential despair · illusion of free will
The writing
Visceral, kinetic, and sharply observant, blending pulp-era momentum with devastating psychological precision.
The arc
Begins with kinetic, high-concept curiosity and spirals into a profound, lingering sense of existential tragedy.
Who it's for
Readers who crave dark, philosophically challenging science fiction that ruthlessly dissects human nature, gender, and biology.
Content notes
  • sexual violence
  • suicide
  • body horror
  • existential dread
  • misogyny

About the book

Is there any hope for us?

For how many of us, me in my way, you in yours, are not our pens the weapons with which we can do something-a tiny something-about wrongs? Even if only to name them?

And "name them" she did: from behind the facade of a Virginia post office box and under a pseudonym swiped from a jar of marmalade, Alice B. Sheldon wrote a group of stories that remain among the finest achievements of modern science fiction. At first distinguished primarily by an unremitting manic energy, Sheldon's work soon began to embody the intense and tragic vision of a thoughtful humanist. The destruction of the natural environment, the enigma of human sexuality, the insidious overpopulation of the species, the feverish hyper-intensity of communication, the cultivation of technology too terrible for human control—such were the themes through which Alice Sheldon explored the apocalypse and beyond.

Here are such classic SF stories as the Hugo Award-winning "Girl Who Was Plugged In," in which a social outcast relinquishes her humanity to a remote-control manikin; the Nebula Award-winning "Love Is the Plan the Plan Is Death," in which an exposition of alien existence becomes a parable of physiological determinism; and the multiaward-winning "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?" in which a futuristic feminist Utopia renders male aggression superfluous. Central to the Tiptree oeuvre is the magnificent "On the Last Afternoon," in which a dying Earthman must make an anguished choice between social responsibilities toward his fellow human beings and his own desire for a personal immortality among the stars. In the end, Sheldon's tortured protagonist fails either to save his race or to redeem himself; through his pointless death, he becomes a classic paradigm for the existential plight of modern man, torn between tyrannic biological drives while striving to transcend his own humanity.

Description from Open Library.

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