The conflict is almost literal in stories like 'And So On, And So On', and 'Houston, Houston, Do You Read?' but the threads are there throughout, even in the devastating critique of exogamy embedded in 'And I Awoke And Found Me Here on the Cold Hill's Side.' You can see science fiction changing before your eyes, as you read, from the pulps to the new wave. But for the most part, even the ways in which the stories have dated are interesting. The central image to which 'A Momentary Taste of Being' builds, for example, is striking, but it's also absurd it's hard to read it with a modern eye, and impossible to imagine a modern writer carrying the same idea off with a straight face, except possibly at a much shorter length. As it is, I can't ever know.Īnd I want to know because some of these stories are without question some of the most important-the most worth thinking about-in the science fiction canon. Whether I would be Robert Silverberg, egg-on-face after insisting that Tiptree's writing was 'ineluctably masculine', or whether I would have been more agnostic. And I'm jealous because I want that moment of realisation. As it is, only the second reading was available to me.

It would have meant I could have read most of them twice: once before knowing that James Tiptree Jnr was Alice Sheldon, and once after. I'm jealous because I wish I could have read the stories in Her Smoke Rose Up Forever without a legend leaning over my shoulder. I think I am jealous of anyone who was reading science fiction before 1976. Book review, feminist sf, james tiptree jnr

Her smoke rose up forever