A review by triscuit807
Souls/Houston, Houston, Do You Read? by Joanna Russ, James Tiptree Jr.

5.0

This. This is what an award winning SF story is. "Houston, Houston" is the novella that won a Nebula in 1976 and the Hugo and Locus awards in 1977. Take a US spaceship, the Sunbird, on a circumsolar mission which on emergence from the "back" of the sun attempting to contact Houston. Add a nearby spaceship, which shouldn't be there, make radio contact instead. Sunbird is off course and will go out into space and the three astronauts will be lost. Instead the 3 men from Sunbird fly from their ship to the other ship where they're astounded to find only women. And one man, Andy. They are welcomed, but carefully. All three men are aware that they are not in their own time, but 300 years in the future, and an epidemic caused sterility. But it's the scientist Lorimer who eventually realizes the 3 of them have been drugged, who realizes the women are clones, that Andy is actually an hormone enhanced woman, and that they are the only three men in existence. This is a short book, but it contains so much! In the end it is an indictment of men (and patriarchy) as the men, each in his own way, react to new world order (much as Earth's men reacted with war and violence and rape to the effects of the epidemic). Before he goes to sleep - is put to sleep - Lorimer asks what they call themselves. The answer: the human race. James Tiptree, Jr. was the pseudonym of Alice S. Bradley; the Tiptree Award celebrates SF & F that expands or explores our understanding of gender. I read this for my 2016 Reading Challenge "read a feminist SF novel" (Bustle Reads).