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Her Smoke Rose Up Forever
Her Smoke Rose Up Forever
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With Delicate Mad Hands
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Like "The Women Men Don't See", this is another story of a woman who feels more at home with aliens than with our fellow humans (or at least the male half of the species.)
Carol Page, known as CP as well as a plethora of insulting nicknames, has a face apparently even a mother can't love. By working twice as hard as anyone else, she manages to get into the space program, where she's viewed by the new-NASA as a sex appliance for long missions guaranteed not to cause any jealous rivalries among the male crew, not to mention a great cook and cleaning woman. Eventually, on a mission out to Neptune orbit, she meets a captain whose misogyny is unbounded. And, she goes crazy.
Alone in her hijacked spaceship, in which she plans to die from lack of air, she improbably finds a rogue planet beyond the Ort Cloud, and on that world she finds alien life that accepts her for what she is.
Well, Tiptree writes really angry prose.
(The story has some minor problems with the science part, even granting telepathic/telekinetic aliens. But what hey!)
****
Carol Page, known as CP as well as a plethora of insulting nicknames, has a face apparently even a mother can't love. By working twice as hard as anyone else, she manages to get into the space program, where she's viewed by the new-NASA as a sex appliance for long missions guaranteed not to cause any jealous rivalries among the male crew, not to mention a great cook and cleaning woman. Eventually, on a mission out to Neptune orbit, she meets a captain whose misogyny is unbounded. And, she goes crazy.
Alone in her hijacked spaceship, in which she plans to die from lack of air, she improbably finds a rogue planet beyond the Ort Cloud, and on that world she finds alien life that accepts her for what she is.
Well, Tiptree writes really angry prose.
(The story has some minor problems with the science part, even granting telepathic/telekinetic aliens. But what hey!)
****
*1/2“Carol Page, or CP as she was usually known, was an expert at being unloved” - the space opera follows a girl’s life who has been rejected for her whole life because of a squashed pig-like nose. Male astronauts abuse and rape her while shoving her underpants over her face. But she endures that all because she was called as a child by a voice in her mind to a "pig-world" somewhere in space. She murders her collegues, mutinies, steals the space ship, travels to unknown territory, finds the pig planet and the pig aliens, one of them calling her.
Review
A post-apocalyptic world which slowly accepts women - who have to pay themselves for sterilization - into space programs. So far for the feministic part.
The overlong short story or very short novella is technically not very accomplished, a bit agonized and heavy-handed. One-dimensional characters, a boring plot, uneven pacing with over-stretched action parts in comparison to the delicate finish. The only interesting part was when the narration switched from a close third perspective on Carol to a distant third unhuman perspective for the last couple of pages. It felt like the author couldn't decide if she wanted to write an action-oriented space opera or a romance but went into a dark, sarcastic voice filled with hatred against rotten males. She clearly looses tension with length.
I'd say this was the worst story in the collection, so far.
With Delicate Mad Hands by James Tiptree Jr.
This story is part of the group discussion of James Tiptree Jr.'s short story collection Her Smoke Rose Up Forever. (See the discussion hub topic for more info.)