Houston, Houston, Do You Read? by James Tiptree Jr.

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. 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. 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. Sheldon wrote a group of stories that remain among the finest achievements of modern science fiction.

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?Īnd '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.

Houston, Houston, Do You Read? by James Tiptree Jr.