A New Species: Gender and Science in Science Fiction

by Robin Roberts

This fascinating study is the first to examine the history of gender and science fiction and the first to discuss science fiction pulp magazines' images of women, as well as postmodernism and feminist science fiction. Robin Roberts begins with Shelley's Frankenstein, in which a female alien appears, and continues through H. G. Wells, the 1950s pulp science fiction magazines, Doris Lessing and feminist utopias, and the new generation of science fiction writers, including Joan Vinge, Sheila Finch, Vonda McIntyre, Ursula Le Guin, and Octavia Butler.
 

Genres: Feminism, Nonfiction

182 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1993

Reviews

[Sarah Nolan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like all good academics, I read the intro, the 2 chapters that most interested me, and skimmed the rest. What that amounted to was a book with a lot of very cool readings of different SF novels and some helpful nuggets for me, that was generally pretty dry.

[TammyJo Eckhart · Rating 4 out of 5]

Robin Roberts covers some of the same books and stories of other feminist studies of science fiction but she also covers new authors and new texts. This new material is the most important contribution to the field because frankly some of the arguments were very similar to those I've read in other books.

Back in 1992, I did an undergraduate study of feminism science fiction and at that point I had dozens of books and articles to consult and their arguments were very similar to this book which was published in 1993. I was hoping for something new here compared to what I found when I wrote that paper decades back. Even though my "study" was years ago, as a speculative fiction author and a feminist, the topic still interests me so I continue to read books when they are available.

The major difference between this book and others that I read before my 1992 paper is that Roberts applies a comparison between different stages of science fiction to the development of feminist science fiction, finding examples of the feminist earlier than most studies I've read have. I particularly like her comparisons of cover art for pulp science fiction because too often we separate the text from the image when both would have impacted readers who would become writers in later generations. I actually would love to see a much larger study just on this issue.

[Kirk · Rating 4 out of 5]

Robin was a good friend of mine when I was at LSU in the early 90s. She was always very kind and encouraging, and I was really proud to be there when this book-her first-was accepted. It's a really interesting study of representations of women in sci-fi, which is Robin's speciality. (Check out her new bio of Anne McCaffrey). I had never heard of many of the books she discusses at the time, but this book made me want to read them. There are also great reproductions of pulp covers. I didn't really appreciate how intellectually compelling the study of pulp books could be until I read this.