Lisa Tuttle (1952– ) is an influential US science fiction and fantasy writer whose work often contains a deep vein of horror. A longtime resident of the United Kingdom, Tuttle now has dual British–American citizenship. She has won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer (1974) and the Nebula Award (1982; she refused the award because of campaigning by another nominee, which she objected to), among others. Her first short story collection to be published in France, Ainsi naissent les fantȏmes (Ghosts and Other Lovers), won the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire in 2012.
Prolific and inquisitive, Tuttle has published more than a dozen novels, including Familiar Spirit (1983), Gabriel (1987), Lost Futures (1992), The Mysteries (2005), The Silver Bough (2006), and The Curious Affair of the Somnambulist & The Psychic Thief (2016). Her fiction has been compiled in several short story collections and her nonfiction titles include a reference book on feminism, Encyclopedia of Feminism (1986). She has also edited such anthologies as Skin of the Soul: New Horror Stories by Women (1990) and has reviewed books for publications such as The Sunday Times. Along with such writers as Howard Waldrop and Bruce Sterling, Tuttle helped found the Turkey City writer’s workshop in 1973. Tuttle’s collaborative novella with George R. R. Martin, “The Storms of Windhaven,” was nominated for a Hugo Award (1976). They later published a novel-length version titled Windhaven (1981).
Tuttle has published several short stories considered classics in the field. “Replacements” (1992), reprinted in, among others, Joyce Carol Oates’s American Gothic Tales (1996) and The Weird: A Compendium of Strange Dark Stories (2011), is one such tale. Another is “Wives,” a classic of feminist science fiction and of alien contact, thought-provoking and sinister. It lives comfortably alongside Chad Oliver’s “Let Me Live in a House” (1954), found elsewhere in this volume. Asked about the story, written in 1976, Tuttle responded, “I fear [it] is still depressingly relevant today, rather than being a quaint artifact of the bad old sexist, violent, aggressively colonialist days as my younger self would have wished.”