Where No Man has Gone Before

How do women writers use science fiction to challenge assumptions about the genre and its representations of women? To what extent is the increasing number of women writing science fiction reformulating the expectations of readers and critics?_x000D_ 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. Essays on the work of writers such as Doris Lessing and Ursula Le Guin, Katherine Burdekin, C. L. Moor, Suzette Elgin, Gwyneth Jones, Maureen Duffy and Josephine Saxton demonstrate 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 Frankenstein in 1818.