I thought Enemy Mine was one of the best movies of it's genre, it has stuck in my mind for a very long time! Asimov is kind'a my #1 hero. I assume you have read Asimov's Guide to the Bible? Alas I have not. The quality and volume of Asimov's work is stunning. I don't recall reading any Barry B. Longyear, but I have read so much SF that I well may have. My fave unknown is James Tiptree Junio.r
Quite an unusual lady for any time
http://mtsu32.mtsu.edu:11072/Tiptree/
Alice Bradley Sheldon was born in 1915 in Chicago, Illinois, daughter of Mary Hastings Bradley, a prolific author, mostly of travel literature, and Herbert Bradley an attorney, African explorer, and naturalist. At an early age, she accompanied her parents on their world travels, including an African safari in 1921-1922. Initially, she pursued a career as a graphic artist and a professional painter. She married, in 1934, William Davey--a marriage which ended in 1941. In 1941, she began a two year stint as an art critic for the Chicago Sun, then joined the United States Army in 1942, being assigned to Air Intelligence the following year.
At the end of the war, she married Huntington Sheldon, and in 1946, she was discharged from the Army after attaining the rank of Major. The same year, she was published for the first time, a piece called "The Lucky Ones" (in The New Yorker) and began to co-manage a small, rural business with her husband. In 1952, however, they both returned to Washington to be in on the ground floor development of the new Central Intelligence Agency, then located in temporary buildings near the Reflecting Pool in Washington. In 1955 she resigned from the C.I.A. In 1959 the C.I.A. moved to Langley Virginia and the Sheldons to nearby McLean, VA.
In 1956, she enrolled at American University, receiving a B.A. in 1959. At George Washington University, she began work on a doctorate in Experimental Psychology, which she finally earned in 1967. In the wake of her pursuit of a graduate degree, after a first career in government service, Sheldon, uncertain what to do with the rest of her life, began to write. In 1968, with the help of her husband and the inspiration of a jar of marmalade, she adopted the pseudonym of "James Tiptree, Jr." and began to publish science fiction short stories, widely admired for their "male" author's ability to delineate female character and explore profoundly women's issues.
In 1973, a first collection of her work, Ten Thousand Light Years from Home, was published by Ace Books. In 1974, her first story--"Angel Fix"--under a second pseudonym, "Raccoona Sheldon"--this time the product of a favorite denizen of her yard and her actual last name--appeared. (She would write four others in subsequent years.) A second collection of stories, Warm Worlds and Otherwise, was issued by Ballantine in 1975--its introduction by Robert Silverberg, full of praise for Tiptree as a terribly perceptive, but distinctly "male" author, demonstrating well that her true identity had not yet been discovered. Her first novel, Up the Walls of the World, was published by Putnam in the same year. By the time her next book, Star Songs of an Old Primate, again a collection of short fiction, appeared from Ballantine in 1978, the secret was out: "James Tiptree, Jr." was a woman.
In the wake of her mother's death in 1976, her trick was exposed, but she also won a Nebula award the same year for her novella, "The Screwfly Solution." Continuing to publish in the science fiction magazines, she collected more stories in the 1981 book Out of the Everywhere and Other Extraordinary Visions (Ballantine). Brightness Falls from the Air was published in 1985.
On May 19, 1987, she took the life of her invalid husband, then 84, blind and bedridden, and then shot herself in the head. They were found dead, hand in hand in bed, in their Maclean, Virginia home, fulfilling a wish, made in a letter (to Robert Silverberg) of 1976, to "take myself off the scene gracefully . . . while I am still me" (Davis A14).
