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A review by grayjay
Her Smoke Rose Up Forever by James Tiptree Jr.
3.0
Tiptree's stories are startlingly dark, knowing, and full of rage. Her writing is preoccupied with perspectives, be they sex, gender, scientific, or dominant/submissive. I found some of them too dark for me but they have a lot to say about gender dynamics, and sexual violence.
**Some spoilers below.
"the screwtape letters"
A man rushes home from field work in South America to be with his wife during a plague of male violence against women, but when he arrives he finds that he has caught the plague himself.
"And I awoke and found me here on the cold hill's side"
Reporter comes to the space station to interview humans about aliens and runs into a human who has become obsessed with having sex with aliens.
"The girl who was plugged in"
Woman on her deathbed is rescued by a corporation plugs her in to a remote body. Her job is to buy things, go to parties, and drive nice cars, as anti-Huckster laws have made advertising illegal. The only way to get product out is by word of mouth, so companies pay people to advertise through use. She is essentially an influencer.
"The men who walked home"
In a time travel experiment gone wrong, a man is thrown into the future and back again but at a rate of a few seconds per year. A global disaster crushes civilization and and what's this man has forgotten his apparition which appears once every year is first thought of as a monster and then a mystery and then it is rediscovered what happened.
"And I have come upon this place by lost ways"
An scientists becomes obsessed with a mountain on the planet his ship is in orbit around believing that it has some kind of significance beyond what the other scientists are interested in. In this world scientists explorer using remote technology not by going out into the field and he is criticized for wanting to discover things in person. He abandons the ship and his mission climbing the mountain to find out what secrets it holds.
"The women men don't see"
A plane crashes in the bush leaving the Maya pilot a fisherman and a mother and daughter from Maryland stranded. The fisherman and the mother venture away from the wreckage to find water but once they're in the forest strange things begin to happen. The woman has a cynical view of men who she says control the world and even though women have made advances in civil rights they are still controlled by men who could take them away at any time. She dreams of getting away from everything and at the end of the story finds a way through weird circumstances.
"Your faces oh my sisters your face is filled with light"
A young woman is traveling through Chicago to Des Moines currying messages. She lives in a world after some kind of apocalyptic destruction and only women remain. Narrative alternates between her and another world in which her husband and parents are searching for her after she has escaped from a mental institution. Tiptree creates a thrilling disconnect between the two worlds and your concern for her safety increases as you realize how delusional she is about her surroundings.
"Houston, Houston do you read?"
Five male astronauts on their way around the Sun, slip through some kind of time distortion and are sent several hundred years into the future. A ship of female astronauts pick them up and it is slowly revealed that soon after the male astronauts left Earth, a pandemic destroyed the male genome on Earth and humanity recovered by cloning and breeding only the female genomes going forward. The male astronauts all represent extreme versions of toxic masculinity and prove to the female astronauts why they're fine without males. There were some great ideas in the story but it was really hard to read due to the severe portrayal of the toxic masculinity and one particularly gross rape scene.
**Some spoilers below.
"the screwtape letters"
A man rushes home from field work in South America to be with his wife during a plague of male violence against women, but when he arrives he finds that he has caught the plague himself.
"And I awoke and found me here on the cold hill's side"
Reporter comes to the space station to interview humans about aliens and runs into a human who has become obsessed with having sex with aliens.
"The girl who was plugged in"
Woman on her deathbed is rescued by a corporation plugs her in to a remote body. Her job is to buy things, go to parties, and drive nice cars, as anti-Huckster laws have made advertising illegal. The only way to get product out is by word of mouth, so companies pay people to advertise through use. She is essentially an influencer.
"The men who walked home"
In a time travel experiment gone wrong, a man is thrown into the future and back again but at a rate of a few seconds per year. A global disaster crushes civilization and and what's this man has forgotten his apparition which appears once every year is first thought of as a monster and then a mystery and then it is rediscovered what happened.
"And I have come upon this place by lost ways"
An scientists becomes obsessed with a mountain on the planet his ship is in orbit around believing that it has some kind of significance beyond what the other scientists are interested in. In this world scientists explorer using remote technology not by going out into the field and he is criticized for wanting to discover things in person. He abandons the ship and his mission climbing the mountain to find out what secrets it holds.
"The women men don't see"
A plane crashes in the bush leaving the Maya pilot a fisherman and a mother and daughter from Maryland stranded. The fisherman and the mother venture away from the wreckage to find water but once they're in the forest strange things begin to happen. The woman has a cynical view of men who she says control the world and even though women have made advances in civil rights they are still controlled by men who could take them away at any time. She dreams of getting away from everything and at the end of the story finds a way through weird circumstances.
"Your faces oh my sisters your face is filled with light"
A young woman is traveling through Chicago to Des Moines currying messages. She lives in a world after some kind of apocalyptic destruction and only women remain. Narrative alternates between her and another world in which her husband and parents are searching for her after she has escaped from a mental institution. Tiptree creates a thrilling disconnect between the two worlds and your concern for her safety increases as you realize how delusional she is about her surroundings.
"Houston, Houston do you read?"
Five male astronauts on their way around the Sun, slip through some kind of time distortion and are sent several hundred years into the future. A ship of female astronauts pick them up and it is slowly revealed that soon after the male astronauts left Earth, a pandemic destroyed the male genome on Earth and humanity recovered by cloning and breeding only the female genomes going forward. The male astronauts all represent extreme versions of toxic masculinity and prove to the female astronauts why they're fine without males. There were some great ideas in the story but it was really hard to read due to the severe portrayal of the toxic masculinity and one particularly gross rape scene.