Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (S.F. MASTERWORKS)
Read Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (S.F. MASTERWORKS) Online
Authors: James Tiptree Jr.
‘Tiptree is one of the best story writers in or out of the field’
Locus
‘Exquisite, lyrical prose . . . keen insight and ability to depict singularity within the ordinary’
Publishers Weekly
‘There is just one great collection of Tiptree’s fiction still in print . . .
Her Smoke Rose Up Forever
’
New York Times Book Review
Her Smoke Rose Up Forever
JAMES TIPTREE, JR.
Enter the SF Gateway . . .
In the last years of the twentieth century (as Wells might have put it), Gollancz, Britain’s oldest and most distinguished science fiction imprint, created the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series. Dedicated to re-publishing the English language’s finest works of SF and Fantasy, most of which were languishing out of print at the time, they were – and remain – landmark lists, consummately fulfilling the original mission statement:
‘SF MASTERWORKS is a library of the greatest SF ever written, chosen with the help of today’s leading SF writers and editors. These books show that genuinely innovative SF is as exciting today as when it was first written.’
Now, as we move inexorably into the twenty-first century, we are delighted to be widening our remit even more. The realities of commercial publishing are such that vast troves of classic SF & Fantasy are almost certainly destined never again to see print. Until very recently, this meant that anyone interested in reading any of these books would have been confined to scouring second-hand bookshops. The advent of digital publishing has changed that paradigm for ever.
The technology now exists to enable us to make available, for the first time, the entire backlists of an incredibly wide range of classic and modern SF and fantasy authors. Our plan is, at its simplest, to use this technology to build on the success of the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series and to go even further.
Welcome to the new home of Science Fiction & Fantasy. Welcome to the most comprehensive electronic library of classic SFF titles ever assembled.
Welcome to the SF Gateway.
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!
If I could describe a “human being” I would be more than I am—and probably living in the future, because I think of human beings as something to be realized ahead.. . . But clearly “human beings” have something to do with the luminous image you see in a bright child’s eyes—the exploring, wondering, eagerly grasping, undestructive quest for life. I see that undescribed spirit as central to us all.
—T
IPTREE
/S
HELDON
I know of no more powerful a collection of short science fiction than this. Even more than usual, readers may feel that the author’s personal story has a bearing on their work, so it may be worth telling that story first.
In 1968, a writer called James Tiptree Jr began publishing with a story called “Birth of a Salesman”. Within a couple of years, Tiptree became one of the most prominent authors in the field, solely on the basis of short fiction. Very little biographical information was known about the author, though. For instance, introducing the Tiptree story in his anthology
Again, Dangerous Visions
(1972), Harlan Ellison wrote, “That he lives in the state of Virginia and does a good deal of traveling (for a purpose I don’t know) is all I have on him. His reasons for remaining private seem to me deeply and sincerely motivated, so I won’t defy them.” But he was clear about the author’s stature: “Tiptree is the man to beat this year. [Kate] Wilhelm is the woman, but Tiptree is the man.”
By that stage, Tiptree had begun corresponding with a few figures in the sf field. One of these was Jeff Smith, a fan who subsequently became Tiptree’s literary executor. Tiptree published occasional non-fiction pieces in Smith’s fanzines
Kyben
and
Phantasmicom
describing, for instance, trips to Mexico, occasional health problems (including a heart attack), and the demands of caring for “an aged and ornery mother”. Tiptree stories also began appearing in some venues alongside tales by one “Raccoona Sheldon” who, many felt, had a similar style to Tiptree.
In late 1976, an American explorer named Mary Hastings Bradley died and her obituary appeared in some newspapers. These revealed that she had had a daughter, Alice – now Alice Sheldon. Some of the biographical details described in Tiptree’s writings tallied with those of Alice Sheldon, and speculation began about whether they were one and the same. And so, shortly afterwards, Alice Sheldon wrote to Jeff Smith confirming that she was Tiptree: “Five feet eight, sixty-one years, remains of a good-looking girl vaguely visible, grins a lot in a depressed way, very active in spurts. Also, Raccoona.”
Alice Sheldon is the subject of the finest biography yet written about any sf writer, Julie Phillips’s
James Tiptree Jr: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon
(2006). I would strongly recommend it to anyone interested in an extraordinary life; Charles Platt’s fine profile in Dream Makers (1980) also gives a strong flavour of her personality. In 1983, Sheldon described her childhood in an autobiographical profile for
Contemporary Authors
:
From age 4 to 15, Alice Sheldon’s childhood was dominated by the experience of accompanying her parents on their (widely reported) explorations and trips. . . . She found herself interacting with adults of every size, color, shape, and condition – lepers, black royalty in lionskins, white royalty in tweeds, Arab slavers, functional saints and madmen in power . . . and above all, women: chattel-women deliberately starved, deformed, blinded and enslaved; women in nuns’ habits saving the world; women in high heels saving the world, and women in low heels shooting little birds; an Englishwoman in bloomers riding out from her castle at the head of her personal Moslem army; women, from the routinely tortured, obscenely mutilated slave-wives of the ‘advanced’ Kibuyu, to the free, propertied, Sumarran matriarchs who ran the economy and brought six hundred years of peaceful prosperity to the Menang-Kabau; all these were known before she had a friend or playmate of her own age.
She worked as an artist and illustrator before World War II, and then joined the US Army from 1942. She became the first female US photo-intelligence officer. While working in occupied France, she met and subsequently married Colonel Huntingdon D Sheldon. Huntingdon Sheldon subsequently became one of the founding officers of the nascent CIA, and Alice Sheldon continued to do work for it, particularly around photo-intelligence. Judging by her own testimony, she became sceptical of the value and efficacy of intelligence work as practised by the CIA, especially around the Bay of Pigs fiasco. But she was also fond of emphasising her connection with this world. One of her editors, David Hartwell, once told me that she was fond of dropping into conversation tantalising snippets like, “You have no idea how tough it was in the 1960s when we were trying to get hold of a sample of Fidel Castro’s urine.” In the late 1950s she had a hiatus for taking stock, which led to another change of career. She took degrees in psychology, concentrating on the workings of visual perception. This culminated in a PhD in 1967.
It was around this time that her sf career began. She had, by her own account, discovered
Weird Tales
magazine at the age of nine, and had subsequently read avidly in sf. When asked by Smith to cite some influences, she said:
Christ,
all
of them, in different ways. Harrison’s
Bill the Galactic Hero
, for the ultimate in grim clowning; Sturgeon’s “Man Who Lost the Sea,” for total wow (sometimes when my stuff bores me worse than usual I go through the opening paragraphs of a flock of Sturgeons and contemplate suicide); Damon Knight’s “The Handler,” for classic social comment, Le Guin, Ellison, Delany, Zelazny, Lafferty (for total raconteur ease), Niven, Ballard (for brilliance). Oh man,
all
of them. Hundreds. And a special place for Philip K Dick. All genuflect.