Houston, Houston, Do You Read? by James Tiptree Jr.

Ginny: You never talk to me… Ginny, love, he thinks involuntarily. Irretrievably trapped for life in everything he does not enjoy. The cabin curves around over his head surrounding him with their alien things: the beading rack, the twins' loom, Andy's leather work, the damned kudzu vine wriggling everywhere, the chickens. He flinches wryly now, so many years later, not looking at the women's faces. The sickening wrongness of shapes, faces turning. His fly open, his dick in his hand, he can still see the grey zipper edge of his jeans around his pale exposed pecker. Himself running blindly – or was he pushed?-into the strange toilet at Evanston Junior High. No help he lives it again, that long ago moment. Lorimer gazes around the big crowded cabin, trying to listen to the voices, trying also to ignore the twitch, in his insides that means he is about to remember something bad.

A devastating plague has reduced the human population to just a few thousand, all female, whose only means of reproduction is the cloning of several basic genome types. In it a crew of three American astronauts are caught up in an intense solar storm which apparently propels them through a time vortex into a world several hundred years into their future.

'Houston, Houston, Do You Read?' won both the Hugo (in a tie with Spider Robinson's 'By Any Other Name') and Nebula awards as the best novella published in 1976. The most notable story is again an investigation into the gulf between the sexes.

Houston, Houston, Do You Read? by James Tiptree Jr.