Where No Man has Gone Before

<p>How do women writers use science fiction to challenge assumptions about the genre and its representations of women?</p><p>To what extent is the increasing number of women writing science fiction reformulating the expectations of readers and critics?</p><p>What has been the effect of this phenomenon upon the academic establishment and the publishing industry?</p><p>These are just some of the questions addressed by this collection of original essays by women writers readers and critics of the genre. But the undoubted existence of a recent surge of women’s interest in science fiction is by no means the full story. From Mary Shelley onwards women writers have played a central role in the shaping and reshaping of this genre irrespective of its undeniably patriarchal image. Through a combination of essays on the work of writers such as Doris Lessing and Ursula Le Guin with others on still-neglected writers such as Katherine Burdekin and C. L. Moore and a wealth of contemporaries including Suzette Elgin Gwyneth Jones Maureen Duffy and Josephine Saxton this anthology takes a step towards redressing the balance.</p><p>Perhaps above all what this collection demonstrates is that science fiction remains as particularly well-suited to the exploration of woman as ‘alien’ or ‘other’ in our culture today as it was with the publication of <em>Frankenstein</em> in 1818.</p>