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Women, Science and Fiction Revisited is an analysis of selected science fiction novels and short stories written by women over the past hundred years from the point of view of their engagement with how science writes the world. Beginning with Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland (1918) and ending with N K Jemisin's The City We Became (2020), Debra Benita Shaw explores the re-imagination of gender and race that characterises women's literary crafting of new worlds. Along the way, she introduces new readings of classics like Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, examining the original novels in the context of their adaptation to new media formats in the twenty-first century. What this reveals is a consistent preoccupation with how scientific ideas can be employed to challenge existing social structures and argue for change.
List of contents
1. Introduction: The Nearly Silent Listener.- 2. Herland: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Literature of the Beehive.- 3. Swastika Night: Katharine Burdekin and the Psychology of Scapegoating.- 4. 'No Woman Born': C. L. Moore's Dancing Cyborg.- 5. The Left Hand of Darkness: Ursula Le Guin and the Haploid Heart.- 6. The Handmaid's Tale: Margaret Atwood and the Politics of Choice.- 7. The Power: Naomi Alderman and Archaeologies of Gender.- 8. The City We Became: N. K. Jemisin and Posthuman Urbanism.
About the author
Debra Benita Shaw is a Reader in Cultural Theory at the University of East London, UK. She is the author of
Technoculture: The Key Concepts (2008) and
Posthuman Urbanism: Mapping Bodies in Contemporary City Space (2018). She is also co-editor (with Maggie Humm) of
Radical Space: Exploring Politics and Practice (2016). She has published extensively in the fields of science fiction, gender politics and urban studies and is a founding editor of the
Radical Cultural Studies series published by Rowman & Littlefield. The original edition of
Women, Science and Fiction was published by Palgrave in 2000.
Report
"Debra Benita Shaw's Women, Science and Fiction Revisited (2023) presents a thought-provoking reassessment of women's impact on speculative literature across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. ... Shaw's work is a powerful testament to the enduring relevance of feminist perspectives in reshaping and reimagining speculative fiction for these peculiar times. It is well worth the read." (E Mariah Spencer, Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 51, November, 2024)
"In Women, Science and Fiction Revisited, Debra Benita Shaw provides a contemporary feminist analysis of women writers of science fiction, in which she explores how these writers re-imagine the role of women through this literary genre. ... Women, Science and Fiction Revisited, is an illuminating new approach to reading such fiction and the realisation that fiction which explores the impact of science on women is 'as vital as ever,' ... ." (Caroline Summerfield, The British Society for Literature and Science, bsls.ac.uk, September 21, 2023)
