URSULA K. LE GUIN & HER COHORT
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018), daughter of a writer and an anthropologist, was born in Berkeley, California. After an education in the East (Radcliffe ‘51, Columbia M.A. in French ‘52, post-graduate work), travel and study in France, marriage to Charles Le Guin in 1953, she and her husband moved to Portland, Oregon in 1959. There they remained and raised a family, and there Ursula would die in January 2018. Over a five-decade writing career, however, Ursula would travel the universe, travel time, and travel into worlds of her creation that would shape worlds in other writers’ and readers’ hearts and minds for generations. She wrote short stories, poetry, novels, essays, and writing guides. She translated the Tao and other works. She wrote introductions to classics being revived, to works of foreign writers who she wanted known in the English-language market. She gave commencement addresses and award acceptances that made international news. She wrote letters of commendation, endorsement, protest, activism. She thrived as an anarchist, a lover of cats, a mentor to writers.
Ursula wrote with a graceful clarity. She was observant in a glancing and peripheral way, reporting to the reader not only what happened but more importantly why it happened and what it meant and what reverberations may ensue, all of this simultaneously. Her writing is not dense, but it is so fluid, so mercury-like, so Taoist in its course over and through barriers, that second and third (and lifetime) re-readings are productive. She is simply one of the best writers of her century, and the list of other writers influenced by her is too long to elaborate, but you may begin with J.K. Rowling and Neil Gaiman and Margaret Atwood and Michael Chabon and Salman Rushdie and David Mitchell and Iain Banks.
Be prepared to be surprised. Be prepared to be re-taught how to understand the world. Le Guin was a remarkable artist, and her legacy is to entertain, to provoke, to bless, to confound, and to inspire those fortunate enough to read her.
Her Smoke Rose Up Forever:
Her Smoke Rose Up Forever:
Her Smoke Rose Up Forever collects eighteen brilliant short stories from a luminary of the science-fiction genre, James Tiptree, Jr. This updated edition is the quintessential Tiptree collection and contains revisions from the author’s original notes. Tiptree’s fiction reflects the darkly complex world its author inhabited: exploring the alien among us; the unreliability of perception; love, sex, and death; and humanity’s place in a vast, cold universe.
Praise for Her Smoke Rose Up Forever
“‘There is just one great collection of Tiptree’s fiction in print…Her Smoke Rose Up Forever from Tachyon Publications. It contains all of her major short stories.’”
—New York Times Book Review
“You need to read James Tiptree, Jr. If you’ve never read her, and you’ve any interest in SF, you need to rectify that anomaly. But even if, like me, you have read her, perhaps a while ago, you need to reread her. Tachyon’s handsomely produced catch-all collection Her Smoke Rose Up Forever is the perfect place to begin: a lovely piece of book production, from its attractive John Picacio cover art through each of its eighteen indispensable stories printed across well-laid-out pages. It’s a beaut, and you need to read it. Or to reread it.”
—Strange Horizons
“Her Smoke Rose Up Forever showcases what are undoubtedly the best of Tiptree’s stories.”
—SF Site
“The stories of Alice Sheldon, who wrote as James Tiptree, Jr. (Up the Walls of the World) until her death in 1987, have been heretofore available mostly in out-of-print collections. Thus the 18 accomplished stories here will be welcomed by new readers and old fans. ‘The Screwfly Solution’ describes a chilling, elegant answer to the population problem. In ‘Love Is the Plan the Plan Is Death,’ the title tells the tale—species survival ensured by imprinted drives—but the story’s force is in its exquisite, lyrical prose and its suggestion that personal uniqueness is possible even within biological imperatives. ‘The Girl Who Was Plugged In’ is a future boy-meets-girl story with a twist unexpected by the players. ‘The Women Men Don’t See’ displays Tiptree’s keen insight and ability to depict singularity within the ordinary. In the Hugo and Nebula award–winning ‘Houston, Houston, Do You Read?’ astronauts flying by the sun slip forward 500 years and encounter a culture that successfully questions gender roles in ours.”
—Publishers Weekly
“One of the first hardbacks I ever bought and still one of my most read.”
—Locus
“I can’t recommend this book enough, and we are so lucky to have had Tiptree in our genre.”
—Ventureadlaxre
Biography
James Tiptree, Jr., was born Alice Bradley in 1915 in Chicago, Illinois. When she began writing science fiction in 1968, she used a pseudonym to maintain her privacy. Alice Bradley Sheldon became the reclusive, enigmatic genius James Tiptree, Jr. His adventures and writing—gleaned from the details of Sheldon’s life—were convincingly masculine; when Sheldon finally revealed herself, her ruse was met with both surprise and delight. In 2006, interest in Tiptree’s life and work were rekindled with the publication of Julie Phillips’s definitive biography James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Washington State Book Award, and a Hugo Award.
Praise for Neat Sheets: The Poetry of James Tiptree, Jr.
“James Tiptree was one of the best short-story writers of the last half of the twentieth century.”
—Gardner Dozois
“The poetry has a heightened sense of emotionalism, a clear message of isolationism and loneliness, a disappointed romanticism, and the occasional lash of a sharp wit.”
—from the introduction by Karen Joy Fowler
“…phrases such as ‘I am burned to a fine white bone of truth’ and ‘“Life” is just another name for agony’ speak of pure Sheldonian anguish. Read and weep.”
—Asimov’s Science Fiction
“Some of the poems are powerful and lucid. Others probably had private meaning. They form a footnote to a significant career.”
—Aboriginal Science Fiction
Table of Contents
Introduction by Michael Swanwick
A Momentary Taste of Being
And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill’s Side
And I Have Come Upon This Place by Lost Ways
And So On, and So On
Her Smoke Rose Up Forever
Houston, Houston, Do You Read?
Love Is the Plan the Plan Is Death
On the Last Afternoon
She Waits for All Men Born
Slow Music
The Girl Who Plugged In
The Last Flight of Doctor Ain
The Man Who Walked Home
The Screwfly Solution
The Women Men Don’t See
We Who Stole the Dream
With Delicate Mad Hands
Your Faces, O My Sisters! Your Faces Filled of Light!