Ever-perishing, ever-resurgent, it foams to higher, more complex victories upon an avalanche of its corpses.

Her Smoke Rose Up Forever, a collection of James Tiptree’s/Alice Sheldon’s best stories, explores the intersections of love and death, male and female, hope and despair. Cumulatively, they offera vision of Life and Death locked in a continual struggle from which neither can emerge victorious: Death without Life is mere nothingness, and Life without Death is a twilit ennui. Though grim and unsentimental, Tiptree’s stories are not forlorn: their protagonists face their absurd fates with the aplomb of Sisyphus putting his shoulder to the stone, and push on because to not do so isn’t an option.

The most successful stories use the trappings of science fiction to explore gender roles. “Huston, Houston, Do You Read?” and “Your Faces, O My Sisters! Your Faces Filled of Light!” imagine world defined by gender imbalance, and the cruelty inflected on the weaker sex (men in the former, women in the latter). “The Women Men Don’t See” feels almost autobiographical: a woman who lives in a world dominated by men–in this case, the Washington, DC, intelligence industry–makes a gambit for freedom for herself and her daughter through a pact with apparently sexless aliens, not unlike, perhaps, a woman writing as a man in the overwhelmingly masculine yet adolescent world of science fiction. And in “The Screwfly Solution,” Tiptree lets the underlying connection between sex and violence destroy humankind, with sly nods toward how we manipulate the reproductive habits of the inset majority on our planet.

The more experimental pieces–”Love is the Plan the Plan is Death,” “She Waits for All Men Born,” “Her Smoke Rose Up Forever”–never quite come together like these more traditional science fiction tales. They lack the concrete characters and concise language that make the other stories so memorable and affecting. But even they are rich with ideas and offer troubling insights that make them well worth the time.