At the heart of this stimulating and provocative study is a science fiction story by James Tiptree Jr (Alice Sheldon-Bradley, 1916–1987) about a brother and a sister (and 58 other human beings) who encounter an alien while on a starship travelling to discover a habitable planet. The book includes an outline of Tiptree’s work and of her remarkable life as the only child of jungle explorers, as a painter, an American agent during and after World War II, an experimental psychologist, and a female science fiction writer in male disguise.

There is relatively little scholarship out there that delves deeply into the complexity of Tiptree's often bleak visions of the future. [...] This book seeks to do just that. The book is a well-wrought contribution to feminist criticism in general and Tiptree studies in particular.