Abstract

The opportunity to review this assembly of recently published texts is testament to a growing readership for scholarly engagement with science fiction (SF) as well as to the rich resource that science fiction offers to both women’s studies and to feminists working within longer‐established academic disciplines.1 The collection edited by Marleen S. Barr is a somewhat idiosyncratic but nonetheless lively assemblage of fiction, critique, and personal essay that claims to “chart science fiction’s newest new‐wave trajectory” (ix), while the anthology edited by Judith A. Little collects over twenty pieces of short fiction and novel extracts to provide resources for thinking through philosophical issues in the context of gendered utopias and dystopias. Sherryl Vint’s Bodies of Tomorrow draws on feminist philosophy and literary scholarship in close readings of key SF texts published in the last twenty years to make a plea for an ethical posthumanism that takes full account of human embodiment, and Lisa Yaszek’s Galactic Suburbia is a deceptively clear reevaluation of the contribution made to both feminism and science fiction by women writing science fiction after the Second World War and before the women’s liberation movement.