If the way Tiptree uses speculative setups to dissect gender dynamics hooked you, you’ll love how The Left Hand of Darkness sends envoy Genly Ai to icy Gethen and pairs him with the androgynous Estraven. Their fraught alliance, political exile, and survival trek over the Gobrin Ice let Le Guin probe gender, trust, and cultural misunderstanding with the same humane bite that made “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” so unforgettable.

Like Tiptree’s relentless fascination with the unknowable alien, Solaris strands psychologist Kris Kelvin in orbit over a living ocean that reads minds and resurrects memories as uncanny visitors. The station’s haunted scientists wrestle with guilt and epistemological limits, mirroring the way Tiptree turns desire and otherness into philosophical traps rather than puzzles with neat answers.

If the dawning horror of “The Screwfly Solution” stuck with you, The Power delivers that same cold rush as women worldwide develop a lethal electrical organ. Through Roxy’s rise, Allie’s cult, and Tunde’s reporting from collapsing states, Alderman charts societal inversion and brutality with the same unsparing, grim clarity that made Tiptree’s catastrophe feel chillingly inevitable.

Craving more identity puzzles after Tiptree’s gender inversions and body-tech in “The Girl Who Was Plugged In”? Ancillary Justice follows Breq, the last fragment of a starship AI once spread across many bodies, as she navigates a culture that collapses gendered language. Its cool, focused voice and questions about personhood and embodiment channel the same smart, destabilizing thrill.

If you loved how Tiptree’s shorts deliver intense, self-contained shocks, Butler’s collection lands just as hard. “Bloodchild” (Gan’s unsettling bond with the Tlic T’Gatoi), “Speech Sounds” (a ruined Los Angeles where language itself has collapsed), and “The Evening and the Morning and the Night” fuse intimate character stakes with big ideas—compact tales that linger like Tiptree’s best.