Lucie Armitt is Professor in English Literature at the University of Salford. Her research interests are contemporary women's fiction, the Gothic, the fantastic in literature and illustration and gender theory.

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?

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.

Part 1: Writing through the Century: Individual Authors 1. The Loss of the Feminine Principle in Charlotte Haldane's Man's World and Katherine Burdekin's Swastika Night 2. 'Shambleau...and Others': The Role of the Female in the Fiction of C. L. Moore 3. Remaking the Old World: Ursula Le Guin and the American Tradition 4. Doris Lessing and the Politics of Violence Part 2: Aliens and Others: A Contemporary Perspective 5. Mary and the Monster: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Maureen Duffy's Gor Saga 6. Pets and Monsters: Metamorphoses in Recent Science Fiction 7. Between the Boys and their Toys: The Science Fiction Film 8. Your Word is My Command: The Structure of Language and Power in Women's Science Fiction 9. 'I'm not in the Business: I am the Business': Women at Work in Hollywood Science Fiction Part 3: Readers and Writers: SF as Genre Fiction 10. Writing Science Fiction for the Teenage Reader 11. Sex, Sub-atomic Particles and Sociology 12. Maeve and Guinevere: Women's Fantasy Writing in the Science Fiction Marketplace 13. 'Goodbye to all That...'