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Two big restaurant delivery websites — Grubhub and Seamless — have announced a merger. Together, they'll allow diners in 500 cities the convenience of ordering from thousands of restaurants with just a few clicks on their computer. For restaurants, the costs of being on these websites can be hard to swallow.

If you're a takeout or delivery customer, websites like Seamless and Grubhub are a marvel. No more shouting into the telephone receiver, hoping to make yourself understood to someone in a noisy kitchen.

Just type and click your order. It's a big improvement.

But if you're a restaurant, this shift to the web may not sit so well with you.

"The more business we bring Seamless, the more commission they charge us," says Pedro Munoz, who owns Luz, a Latin-American restaurant in Brooklyn.

Two years ago, Munoz signed up with Seamless. The commission seemed high — they'd take $1 out of every $10 order — but he was willing to give it a try. And at first, Munoz really liked the results.

"Almost [instantly] the business started picking up," he says. "We had to hire another delivery guy."

But then little things started bugging Munoz. There was a $150 a month "marketing fee" that he couldn't understand, and Seamless only paid him every 30 days, which left him chronically short of cash.

When his monthly orders increased to over $10,000, Seamless raised its take from 10 percent to 14 percent. Munoz couldn't believe this. When he orders more from his vegetable supplier, the price goes down. With Seamless, the opposite was happening.

"I asked them, 'I'm bringing in three times as much money to Seamless as before. Can we negotiate the fees?'" he says. "They said they could drop me any day, and they don't negotiate fees."

Matt Maloney, CEO of the newly merged Grubhub-Seamless, says the relationship isn't adversarial, it's supportive. He says that they don't make money unless the restaurant makes money, but Seamless provides a valuable service that restaurants can't easily match.

"If a restaurant's not on Grubhub-Seamless, then their best option is to distribute paper menus around their neighborhood," Maloney says.

A lot of restaurant owners agree that is ineffective. Tom DeSimone owns the tiny RBBTS Caf in Manhattan. He says the food delivery website connects his restaurant to law firms and banks. Big companies that use vouchers for websites like Seamless to reward their employees.

"It got us to the 100th floor of some building that you would never slip your menu underneath, and I just feel it opened us up to more of an online community," DeSimone says.

The commission might be high, he says, but that even if Seamless increased its cut, he would still stick with them.

"And I thought, 'Oh, if I could get these little people, I could make something like that. And if I made something really creepy, I could get a rise out of my husband,' " she says.

Her husband liked it so much, he put a photo of it on Reddit. Within a week, Goldman says the photo got 6 million hits. Next came requests from friends and strangers. The dioramas became a hobby.

Now, Las Vegas gallery owner Marty Walsh represents Goldman's work. The 4-inch cubes sell for $100. Larger dioramas cost more. And there's always a waiting list, Walsh says.

Brooklyn, N.Y., restaurant owner Chance Johnston walked into the gallery while visiting Las Vegas. Now he has three of Goldman's works in his loft. He doesn't consider himself a morbid person — he just finds the dioramas fascinating, and says he loves watching his friends' reactions to them.

"They really do make me happy," he says. "And everybody that sees them, it is a sort of a love 'em or hate 'em reaction."

Goldman gets request for commissions. But she usually declines. She likes to do what she wants.

"I can't make someone's mother-in-law, despite the request," she says. "I can't recreate some, like, miserable scene from your high school days that you wanted to go a different way."

Goldman admits her dioramas can be seen as comments on society's fetish for violence. But she says most people react to the tiny fake blood and body parts with laughter. Even if it's nervous laughter.

Tiptree was both a feminist and a pessimist, unsure whether our deepest problems have solutions, yet still certain society had to change. In Houston, Houston, Do You Read?, male astronauts discover that an all-female future has no use for them; in the brisk, terrifying "The Screwfly Solution," a cult, or a chemical weapon, turns men's sex drive to murderous "blood lust" (it doesn't take much). In "Love Is the Plan the Plan Is Death," two spider-like aliens fall in love and try to resist the instinct that will make one devour the other after mating, as their species always does.

Such work made Tiptree a pioneer in writing about gender and sexuality. But Sheldon, as Tiptree, thought just as hard about escape, and about why we — as children or adults, men or women or both or neither — must use our imaginations, why we stay unsatisfied. "We're built to dream outwards," a space station worker explains — we want the new, the exotic, the perfect love, the best trip, even if it kills us, and whether or not it's real.

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