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 SF magazines, Doris Lessing and feminist utopias, and the new generation of science fiction writers, including Joan Vinge, Sheila Finch and many others.