Writers drawn to speculative fiction have always been, well, different. In his essay "A Novel about the End of the World," Walker Percy describes the type of writer willing to risk the hazards of being associated with science fiction. This writer has a prophetic streak and is explicitly concerned with the dissonance between man and environment. So instead of dealing with familiar characters and plots, "he is more apt to set forth with a stranger in a strange land where the signposts are enigmatic but which he sets out to explore nevertheless." In other words, the speculative writer usually sees the world as it is as so strange and alien that nothing short of truly alien and strange will do to describe it.

Readers fortunate enough to have discovered James Tiptree, Jr., in the 1960s and '70s were ushered into such strange lands with even stranger characters. Tiptree, winner of multiple science fiction awards, was best known for wild and hard-hitting stories like "The Last Flight of Dr. Ain," which tells, backward, the story of humanity's destruction, and "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?": three male astronauts who have been sent ahead in time slowly discover that Earth has been beset by a plague that reduced its population to 11,000 people—all female—who reproduce by cloning. A favorite of mine is "The Girl Who Was Plugged In," a story about a deformed young woman who willingly hides her real person underground in order to "live" neurologically through a beautiful model. The woman sacrifices many of her sense perceptions (due to lack of bandwith) in order to be admired by others. Like all great science fiction, this story concerns itself less with the question of fantastic technology and more with the desires that fuel it; in this case, the self-loathing at the core of our demand for cosmetic surgery and increasingly virtual identities. Like Shelley's Frankenstein, "The Girl Who was Plugged In" spawned its own "hideous progeny," including the subgenre of cyberpunk. ...

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