ShelfLook
Tools About
Cover of Her Smoke Rose Up Forever

How long does it take to read Her Smoke Rose Up Forever?

James Tiptree, Jr.

Her Smoke Rose Up Forever by James Tiptree, Jr. takes about 9 hours 19 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.

About 9 hours 19 minutes

A week or two of reading

First published 1990. 508 pages, about 139,700 words.

19 days at 30 minutes a day

Estimate based on 275 words per page.

At other speeds

Slow, 150 words a minute 15 hours 31 minutes
Average, 250 words a minute 9 hours 19 minutes
Fast, 400 words a minute 5 hours 49 minutes

The page count is the median across 9 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.

About the book

Is there any hope for us? For how many of us, me in my way, you in yours, are not our pens the weapons with which we can do something-a tiny something-about wrongs? Even if only to name them? And "name them" she did: from behind the facade of a Virginia post office box and under a pseudonym swiped from a jar of marmalade, Alice B. Sheldon wrote a group of stories that remain among the finest achievements of modern science fiction. At first distinguished primarily by an unremitting manic energy, Sheldon's work soon began to embody the intense and tragic vision of a thoughtful humanist. The destruction of the natural environment, the enigma of human sexuality, the insidious overpopulation of the species, the feverish hyper-intensity of communication, the cultivation of technology too terrible for human control—such were the themes through which Alice Sheldon explored the apocalypse and beyond. Here are such classic SF stories as the Hugo Award-winning "Girl Who Was Plugged In," in which a social outcast relinquishes her humanity to a remote-control manikin; the Nebula Award-winning "Love Is the Plan the Plan Is Death," in which an exposition of alien existence becomes a parable of physiological determinism; and the multiaward-winning "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?" in which a futuristic feminist Utopia renders male aggression superfluous. Central to the Tiptree oeuvre is the magnificent "On the Last Afternoon," in which a dying Earthman must make an anguished choice between social responsibilities toward his fellow human beings and his own desire for a personal immortality among the stars. In the end, Sheldon's tortured protagonist fails either to save his race or to redeem himself; through his pointless death, he becomes a classic paradigm for the existential plight of modern man, torn between tyrannic biological drives while striving to transcend his own humanity.

Subjects: American Science fiction, Fiction, general, Fiction, science fiction, general, Science fiction, american, American fiction--women authors, American fiction

More by James Tiptree, Jr.

Books like this

Popular books of similar length