From http://shawjonathan.wordpress.com/200...

James Tiptree Jr aka Alice Sheldon is the old primate in question, and a depressive old primate s/he is – I wouldn’t recommend these stories to anyone prone to letting grim prognoses for the planet take them on a nose dive. For all her feminism, her stories here feature an unhappy biological determinism, and even way back in 1978 she was terribly aware of looming ecological, viral or nuclear disaster.

Part of Tiptree's project was to introduce what she calls software into hardware science fiction – she was very au fait with cutting edge and out-on-the-edge psychological research of her time, and found in it the stuff of poetry.

An overshadowing grimness is characteristic of the stories, so even though there’s much that is rich in this book, I don’t see it becoming a favourite.

And a niggle from a Down Under editor: It’s nice that Tiptree made Australian women the main surviving humans in ‘Houston Houston Do You Read?’, and gave the humanity of the future an Australian accent (‘date’ is pronounced ‘dyte’), but I wish she or her editors had checked the spelling of ‘Woomera’. I just checked in Google Books, and see that it wasn’t corrected in a 2004 collection named after it. Hooston, do you read? ( )

http://nhw.livejournal.com/746102.htm...

This pulls together just eight stories in 270 pages, including two which I had already read ("Your Haploid Heart" and the Hugo and Nebula winner "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?"). With the exception of the shortest story, a five page stream-of-consciousness vignette, I found them all not only enjoyable but also thought-provoking. Tiptree was really good at not so much subverting the genre's conventions but more putting subversive material into the framework while none the less respecting it. ( )

One of those authors that I am vaguely suprised is out of print.
There are a few scholarly works available but the actual stories? No, They are maybe not simplistic enough to be comercial in the modern sf genre, But they won awards and acclaim in their day. Indeed, nowadays there is a James Tiptree Jr. memorial award.
Perhaps instead the estate has no interest. There were after all no children. An argument maybe for changing copyright laws? ( )