The Adventuress

Also known as Bluestocking.

What begins as Leiber-esque fantasy in the story “Bluestocking” (originally published as “The Adventuress”) traverses time and space into science fiction and finally metafictional commentary, creating a wonderful mosaic of stories that both entertain the reader in the conventional way—adventures, deadly danger, mysteries to solve—and also provoke thought about the roles of women in speculative fiction. It’s also open to quite a bit of reader interpretation, by the end.