Five Science Fiction Books You Should Read Right Now

Editor Harry Harrison’s 1973 introduction to Tiptree’s first book is, in a way, as fascinating as the forcefully imagined stories inside. Harrison hails Tiptree’s talent, and notes that it’s the writing that matters, not the fact that “he spent a good part of World War II in a Pentagon sub-basement” or other aspects of his manly-man biography. As readers now know—and as Harrison, at the time, didn’t—Tiptree was the pseudonym of Alice B. Sheldon, Chicago debutante turned bohemian turned intelligence officer. (Julie Phillips’s Sheldon bio, Double Life, tells the whole remarkable tale.) The lead story, “And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill’s Side” is a startling feminist critique of the genre’s imperialist thrust, its main speaker a wreck of curdled machismo.

Like some cross between Poe and Alice Munro, Ingalls’s specialty is the long short story of creeping, inexorable doom. But her best book is this brief 1983 novel, which takes a B-movie premise—an aquatic monster escaped from a lab—and has him strike up a romance with Dorothy, a dissatisfied suburban housewife. The storytelling is unflappable and slyly funny: I like, for instance, that his name is “Larry.” Perhaps in an alternate universe, Vanity Fair is calling this, not Lolita, the only convincing love story of the last century.