Her Smoke Rose Up Forever

James Tiptree Jr was the pseudonym of Alice Sheldon, a fascinating woman in her own right (I have her biography next up, but I thought I’d read the fiction first). In a thirty year career, she dazzled the field with short stories, including two Hugos and two Nebulas, and kept up a steady correspondence that hid her real identity.

Sheldon has her themes, and she hits the theme again and again. Those themes are best summed up in the titles of two of the stories, “The Women Men Don’t See” and “Love is the Plan the Plan is Death.” Her stories are full of ignored and abused women achieving a kind of tenuous victory in the face of the patriarchy, and immense urges to breed and die that overwhelm futuristic astronauts in orgies of race suicide and nuclear apocalypse. The scope is Ballardian, but where Ballard dreams submerged psychological behemoths rising through the consumer detritus of the Space Age, Sheldon sees the Space Age as a futile masculine gesture against death.

The short fiction is incredible. Sheldon can write 10 pages of high-concept weirdness that’ll knock your socks off. Unfortunately, that energy is dissipated rather than amplified over longer stories, which play around with drugged or mentally damaged unreliable narrators and non-linear temporality.

But holy shit, “The Screwfly Solution”. If she’d written just that, it’d be a career!