Over the next five months, I’m reading and reviewing ten pioneering works of science fiction written by women. This is my fifth pick. Stay tuned for more.
Alice B. Sheldon was an explorer, painter, Army Major, psychology Ph.D., socialite, and CIA agent. She is most known as the science fiction author who came to prominence in the 1960s writing under the pen name James Tiptree Jr. Of her choice of pen name, she said “I had the feeling that a man would slip by less observed. I’ve had too many experiences in my life of being the first woman in some damned occupation.” Tiptree’s writing was convincingly masculine, matching her trailblazing life among men. For more about Sheldon/Tiptree, I highly recommend her biography James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon which gives a nuanced picture of her life, work, and gender identity.
After being introduced to Tiptree’s fiction via her biography, I was delighted to do a deep dive into the theme’s of her work by reading Her Smoke Rose Up Forever, a collection of her most well known stories. These stories comprise a dark dystopian vision. Looking at a smattering of reviews from amateur critics on Goodreads and other platforms, among the scores of five-star reviews is a small but vocal selection of one-star reviews which praise Tiptree’s writing for its candor, but lament its dark outlook. If the reader wants happy visions of the future and human nature, Tiptree is not the prophet to which to turn. Her stories do not, as a rule, have happy endings. They do, however, have common themes: humans are a net-negative, gender-based violence is a reality, love is ephemeral, and transcendence is horrific.
Tiptree’s stories show humans, and especially men, as a net-negative influence on the universe. In “The Last Flight of Doctor Ain,” the eponymous Doctor Ain engineers and spreads a pathogen killing all humans, leaving the Earth to recover from human damage. In “The Screwfly Solution,” a woman flees a world of men infected with a pathogen that causes them to revile and kill all women. In “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” a group of male astronauts from the present is transported to a future run by women. When they are saved by a crew of female astronauts, they can’t keep instincts to rape and harass at bay, and are humanely killed rather than allowed back on Earth. In the “Women Men Don’t See,” an independent mother and daughter strive to make first contact with aliens with the goal of leaving behind a planet full of men that views women like themselves as aliens. In “A Momentary Taste of Being,” a female astronaut returns from a planetary expedition reporting it is ideal for human life and colonization, when in fact it contains a life form that changes humanity from aggressors to gentle, mindless creatures.
Rape, sexual violence, and gender-based discrimination are constant threats and realities for Tiptree’s characters. In “With Delicate Mad Hands,” the protagonist is a female top space captain who has sacrificed everything to succeed in her profession. When she is brutally raped, she takes revenge on her captor and through cosmic luck is able to travel to an alien planet devoid of humans. In “Your Faces, O My Sisters! Your Faces Filled of Light!” a woman hallucinates a future filled with women in which she is happy and safe. Eventually, this women is brutally raped and murdered, showing the true depth of her delusions. In “We Who Stole the Dream” an alien race that is brutally subjugated and raped by humans manages to steal a ship and return to their homeworld, where they find their own race just as brutal.
Love is explored, between men and women, between humans and aliens, and between aliens and aliens, but nowhere is love something which lasts. In “And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill’s Side,” a reporter enjoys his first travels and discovers himself prey to the same fetishizing of aliens that he has been warned against. This fetishizing of the alien is said to be the downfall of humanity. In “With Delicate Mad Hands,” the protagonist briefly meets joy in love and discovers the object of her affections to be an outcast among its people, but the protagonist nevertheless slowly dies of lack of oxygen and resources. In “The Man Who Walked Home,” a time traveler desperately attempts to return home to his love after an accident sends him much farther in the future than intended. The end result of his return is to cause a nuclear holocaust which forever ends the age of science and humanity. “Love is the Plan The Plan is Death” is a first-person tale of an alien spider-like creature’s life and love. The spiders attempt to resist their instincts but fail, and one devours the other. In “On the Last Afternoon,” a man makes contact with an alien life form with the power to save his people or to offer him transcendence. When the man’s will is insufficiently strong, he loses the opportunity to transcend and his people die.
When humans pursue transcendence, they lose it or it is a torture. In “Her Smoke Rose Up Forever,” a man swirls around in a timeless repetition of intense moments of his past, “all been done to him before and all is to do again and again without mercy forever.” In “Slow Music,” a man gradually travels to the River, a place where humanity is transcending to a non-corporal interstellar collective. Along his way, he meets a woman fiercely determined to resist transcendence and repopulate the Earth. He comes around to her point of view, but when they travel together to the River to say goodbye to his father, she follows her curiosity and annoyance past a boundary, a supremely human act, and inadvertently transcends. In “And So On, And So On,” humanity discovers it has reached the end of the galaxy, and that no frontiers are left. It is speculated that a long slow decline will begin without frontiers ever opening. In “The Girl Who Was Plugged In,” in a future where advertising is banned, advertisers control the bodies of beautiful celebrities to hawk their wares. This is done by grotesquely connecting a willing human. When the rich son of an executive and one such human fall in love, he discovers the truth, killing her in the process. Racked with grief, he decides to change the system from within. In “She Waits for All Men Born,” the core of humanity is an entity which brings death to all lifeforms in a series of vignettes spanning species from early time to the far futures.
Tiptree’s work in Her Smoke Rose Up Forever is incredibly diverse. The four themes I have presented are just one possible breakdown, and the degree each story fits neatly within a particular theme varies. Tiptree was a writer clearly driven not only by the urge to tell an inventive and engaging story, but also by the desire to communicate her broader societal perspective to the reader, however dark and depressing that might be.