Product Description: What would happen if a feminist Jewish wit and scholar invaded David Lodge’s territory? Marleen S. Barr, herself a pioneer in the feminist criticism of science fiction, provides a giddily entertaining answer in this feisty novel...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

In this collection of fiction and essays, writers in the science fiction world explore our relationship to the future through the dual lens of science fiction and cultural studies and provide a rich testament to the power of science fiction to help us re-imagine reality. Each contributor was asked to reflect on our anxiety about the new millennium and to write about how science fiction could help us envision the far future and future cultural spaces. The resulting array of speculative writings, both critical and fictional, is diverse and illuminating - from a personal essay by Marge Piercy on love, sex and the power of fiction, to a story by Harlan Ellison in which consumerism is the opiate of the masses, to a fictional book review by Kim Stanley Robinson which imagines what future historians will say about science in the third millennium. (view table of contents)

Product Description: What do Amsterdam prostitutes, NASA astronauts, cross-dressing texts, and Star Trek  characters have in common?  In Genre Fission, Marleen Barr wittily and eccentrically revitalizes cultural and literary theory by examining the points where such vastly different categories meet, converge, and reemerge as something new...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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Product Description: Almost 20 years after the publication of Future Females: A Critical Anthology, feminist science fiction pioneer Marleen S. Barr, together with a talented crew of the field's established and emerging theorists, reveal new critical insights in Future Females, the Next Generation...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Archaeologists and anthropologists discover other civilizations; science fiction writers invent them. In this collection of her major essays, Marleen Barr argues that feminist science fiction writers contribute to postmodern literary canons with radical alternatives to mainstream patriarchal society. Because feminist science fiction challenges male-centered social imperatives, it has been marginalized and dismissed from the canon—thus, lost in space.Moving beyond feminist science fiction itself, Barr goes on to examine other literary genres from the perspective of 'feminist fabulation'—a term she has coined to encompass science fiction, fantasy, utopian literature, and mainstream literature that critiques patriarchal fictions. Discussing the works of such writers as Margaret Atwood, Joanna Russ, Salman Rushdie, Paul Theroux, Ursula Le Guin, Herman Melville, Saul Bellow, Edgar Allan Poe, and Marge Piercy, Barr illuminates feminist science fiction's connections to other literary traditions and contemporary canons. Her critical analysis yields a new and expanded understanding of feminist creativity.

Product Description: The surprising and controversial thesis of Feminist Fabulation is unflinching: the postmodern canon has systematically excluded a wide range of important women's writing by dismissing it as genre fiction.  Marleen Barr issues an urgent call for a corrective, for the recognition of a new meta- or supergenre of contemporary writing--feminist fabulation--which includes both acclaimed mainstream works and works which today's critics consistently ignore...read more

Product Description: This book offers a first step toward spanning the gap between the writing of male critics of speculative fiction, who do not devote enough attention to the contributions of new female voices to this genre, and feminist critics, who should study a genre that opens all possibilities to women...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: “A justification for paying serious attention to science fiction may by now be necessary only for other literary critics and scholars. Still, the question of why a book addressing itself to science fiction has to be faced briefly...read more