I finished reading the short story collection Her Smoke Rose Up Forever by James Tiptree, Jr. sometime back in January.
James Tiptree, Jr. being the pseudonym for Alice Sheldon. She wrote short science fiction fairly regularly from the early 1970s to the early 1980s. A fascinating woman, her short stories are exquisitely crafted. She uses science fiction to say things about, for example, male-female relations that would probably not be permissible in more “literary” fictional settings.
You can read two her short stories online: “The Screwfly Solution” and “The Women Men Don’t See”, although these aren’t, by any means, the best of the bunch.
The best short stories in this collection, in my opinion, are:
“The Last Flight of Dr. Ain”
“And I Have Come Upon This Place by Lost Ways”
“With Delicate Mad Hands”
“Lirios: A Tale of the Quintana Roo”
Alice Sheldon, as James Tiptree, Jr., was enormously influential in the science fiction circles. So much so, that there is now an annual award in her name: the James Tiptree, Jr. Award. There’s even a (sort of local) science fiction-inspired heavy metal band, called Bloodhag, which has written a song about her.