Då Adam Robert varit uppe som möjlig gäst till ConFuse och då vissa personer på bokmötet igår inte tyckte Tiptree-historien var väldigt bra kan jag ju citera vad han skriver:
http://www.strangehorizons.com/reviews/2006/11/her_smoke_rose_.shtml
But I think I had nevertheless been walking around with a caricature version of Tiptree in my head. Specifically, I'd seen her as embodying a slightly old-school feminist version of "the theme of gender," the story of women as oppressed by patriarchy. In fact this woman-as-oppressed, man-as-oppressor line did not really bring out the best in Tiptree as a writer. There is an obvious exception to this statement, of course: 1973's quite stupendously good "The Women Men Don't See"\u2014perhaps the best single SF short-story of the 1970s\u2014which famously and unforgettably alienises men. Its two female protagonists are, simply, a marvel of characterisation, achieved by a process of, as it were, colouring-in the area around them with such skill that the two character-shaped empty spaces left achieve utter believability. I'm not sure I can think of any other writers capable of the expert lightness of touch in a serious context required to pull it off. The point, of course, is that this presence-by-absence is exactly the (gender) theme of the story. "Women have no rights, Don, except what men allow us," says one of the women. "What women do is survive. We live by ones and twos in the chinks of your world-machine." When the mother and daughter twosome swap a masculine human world for passage on a space-ship it's presented as more of the same-old.