Benjamin Bauer’s Reviews > Her Smoke Rose Up Forever > Status Update

Just finished On the Last Afternoon. Bleeaaaaaak. Truly apocalyptic. Love it.

Love is the Plan the Plan is Death

Finished We Who Stole the Dream. Reminiscent of Leguin's The Word for World is Forest. Brutally ironic anti-colonial tale with a typically Tiptree-ish sour ending twist. This time though, it felt as though it sadly rang true.

Just finished A Momentary Taste of Being. Not my favourite. A bit overlong. I enjoyed the build-up and tension for the first chunk of it, and a lot of the characters were great. It could just be that the unrelenting cynicism of it turned me off. That said, gotta give credit where it's due. Conceptually it was quite unique.

Finished With Delicate Mad Hands. Beautiful. A lot of feels, painful and lovely, in this one. Maybe my favourite in this collection so far.

Read Houston, Houston, Do You Read?. Rarely have I laughed with so much joy during a reading experience. This upending of male-driven space-exploration science-fiction is a welcome breath of fresh air after Tau Zero a few weeks ago. Obvious precursor to BKV's Y: The Last Man.

Read Your Faces, O My Sisters! Your Faces Filled of Light!.

...fuck. Well, this makes a darker counterpoint to similar themes in The Women Men Don't See. Here a post-apocalyptic wasteland being preferable to dealing with the modern, male-dominated world. Talk about a gut-punch of a story. All too real.

Read Your Faces, O My Sisters! Your Faces Filled of Light!.

...fuck.

Read The Women Men Don't See. Wow does Tiptree ever manage to capture the psyche of a comfortably misogynistic male with the protagonist's viewpoint. Was also quite taken with how the story had an air of eerie menace to it, but was also incredibly funny. Aliens > the patriarchy.

Read And I Have Come Upon This Place By Lost Ways. Beautifully written tale of stifling, bureaucratic academia and the act of breaking away from it. Like all Sheldon stories I've read so far, not terribly uplifting.