Dawn
The opening of Xenogenesis, Butler's masterwork of unsentimental first contact — a fixture of university courses on posthumanism and the standing rebuke to comfortable alien-saviour stories.
Book Entry · Science Fiction
What is Her Smoke Rose Up Forever about?
The posthumous omnibus that secured the legend: eighteen stories including 'The Screwfly Solution' (a gendered extermination seen from inside, published as by Raccoona Sheldon), 'Love Is the Plan the Plan Is Death' (alien biology narrating its own tragedy), 'The Women Men Don't See' (two women who prefer aliens to patriarchy, narrated by a man who can't see why), and 'A Momentary Taste of Being' (humanity as gamete). Tiptree's universe runs on the death-wired intersection of sex and extinction, delivered in prose that grabs the reader by the collar. The essential collection.
Why it matters
The canonical single-volume case that Tiptree belongs among the greatest short-story writers in or out of genre; required reading, frequently literally, on university syllabuses.
Read next
'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman
Hugo and Nebula winner, and one of the most reprinted SF stories ever written — the genre's definitive fable of civil disobedience.
2001: A Space Odyssey
Half of the most influential SF artefact of the twentieth century.