Status Updates From Her Smoke Rose Up Forever

So far, she is edging closer and closer towards Ursula Le Guin. I don’t know what it is about both of their writings. It’s can’t just be the fact that it’s sci-fi. It’s this dated sci-fi that just doesn’t flow for me whatsoever.

Apparently this was the third time that I've read "A Momentary Taste of Being" - perhaps explaining the little I did remember, that it was three years ago, not eleven, that I last read it. But for the longest Tiptree story in this collection - by two hours! - it drags. The ending is not satisfying for a novella-length work; there's not enough else to it to make me want to linger on it.

Disappointed to only now realise that "The Women Men Don't See" is the original "women would rather be in a forest with a bear than a man"

"And I Have Come Upon This Place By Lost Ways" is a reminder that we've been saying "don't let computers do all your thinking for you" for 50+ years and people still aren't listening

"The Girl Who Was Plugged In" has depths to it that are far from exhausted in the age of influencer culture - although the idea that ads might be banned feels like a far fetched utopia now - but I still struggle to get through the language, especially in audio format. When I read this again in Warm Worlds and Otherwise, I'm going to try to take it slow, see if I can parse Tiptree's future dialect better.

I read this collection 11 years ago. The opening double header - a story about an airborn pandemic and a story about a massive growth in femicide - hit differently now. Stories from the 1970s, maintaining their relevance today - in a way I love it, but in another way, I hate it!