Overview
- Authors:
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Debra Benita Shaw
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Department of Architecture and Visual Arts, University of East London, London, UK
- Analyzes science fiction novels and short stories written by women over the past hundred years
- Explores gender and race in women's literary world-building
- Provides new readings of classics by Le Guin and Atwood
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Table of contents (8 chapters)
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Back Matter
Pages 177-181
About this book
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.
Reviews
“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) “Shaw’s rich and insightful analysis of feminism in and through science fiction receives a welcome update in this new, fully revised and expanded edition that adds in wonderfully rich discussions of more recent case studies, including the television adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and N.K. Jemisin’s The City We Became.” (Dan Hassler-Forest, Assistant Professor, Utrecht University, The Netherlands)
Authors and Affiliations
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Department of Architecture and Visual Arts, University of East London, London, UK
Debra Benita Shaw
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.
