Titan

Female action heroes were rare-to-nonexistent when this book was published in 1979.

I will boast that I was slightly ahead of my time (or at least my friends) in embracing this novel’s intrepid protagonists. Get this: the two women, a captain and a navigator, are piloting an interstellar exploration vessel when they discover a planetoid. They set down on its surface.

The planetoid, Titan, is a living entity that proceeds to destroy the ship and devour the crew alive. Our two heroes are examined and expelled, though now physically transformed. They proceed to explore this bizarre planet-entity.

I just love… show more.

Quintessential 1980s science fiction that takes creationism to new levels.

A group of astronauts find a very strange bio-ship orbiting Saturn, and it unexpectedly sucks them inside. When you find out what's really going on, your jaw will drop.

No, seriously. It will.

I’m cheating a little here by recommending a trilogy, but they read like one book.

In Varley's breakout novel, a team of NASA astronauts discover that one of Saturn's moons is a giant artificial structure—and in the process get trapped inside. The bizarre environment holds creatures genetically created by a godlike intelligence gone mad. With their spaceship reduced to scrap, there's no escape for the explorers, so instead of getting out they have to find a place for themselves in an alien society. Varley wrote two sequels, building expertly on this book and revealing new secrets.