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Her Smoke Rose Up Forever
Her Smoke Rose Up Forever
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Your Faces, O My Sisters! Your Faces Filled of Light!
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★★★A young woman wanders as a messenger in a post-apocalyptic world westwards, meeting helpful Sisters everywhere, loving the world, her job, her life. But the real world is different, brutal, full of rape.
Review
What a wonderful title! It remembers me a lot of Ellison's story titles. But what a dark, depressing content. This story by Alice Sheldon, aká James Tiptree, Jr., was published under her pen-name Raccoona Sheldon. I liked the easy flow, the alternating fantasy/reality, ending in a predictable bleak ending.
Another excellent story. Loved this, despite the ending, really.
A young woman whose had a few too many sessions of electroshock therapy has wandered away from her sanitarium. She suffers a delusion that she's a courier delivering mail through a post-apocalyptic wasteland, her mind blotting out other people and signs of habitation. She sees the world as a beautiful, universally friendly place where everyone is her "sister", much in the tradition of Elwood P. Dowd.
The story alternates between the girls delusional point of view and the view of those who are looking for her, fearful her naïveté a will get her hurt. And it's quite an indictment that the girl's delusion, despite it being a ruined wasteland, it is actually a more pleasant world than reality.
*****
A young woman whose had a few too many sessions of electroshock therapy has wandered away from her sanitarium. She suffers a delusion that she's a courier delivering mail through a post-apocalyptic wasteland, her mind blotting out other people and signs of habitation. She sees the world as a beautiful, universally friendly place where everyone is her "sister", much in the tradition of Elwood P. Dowd.
The story alternates between the girls delusional point of view and the view of those who are looking for her, fearful her naïveté a will get her hurt. And it's quite an indictment that the girl's delusion, despite it being a ruined wasteland, it is actually a more pleasant world than reality.
*****
G33z3r wrote: And it's quite an indictment that the girl's delusion, despite it being a ruined wasteland, it is actually a more pleasant world when reality.I agree; that's one of the biggest takeaways of this story. I have to say it left me a little more bummed overall than ready to sing the story's praises, though!
It's interesting to know that this was published under the Raccoona pseudonym ... wonder why.
Your Faces, O My Sisters! Your Faces Filled of Light! 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.)