""Decoding Gender addresses [Science Fiction] issues in powerful ways through its nuanced exploration of both masculine and feminine SF writing traditions. Attebery's wide-ranging but judicious use of feminist theory balances especially nicely with his detailed analyses of individual SF texts; both, in turn, provide fresh perspectives on SF history--or, more accurately, on SF's multiple histories. The concluding chapters convincingly demonstrate why these multiple histories matter....he has given us a way to see them more clearly. Highly recommended."-Lisa Yaszek, "Extrapolation, Spring 2003 ""Decoding Gender's greatest strength is its methodology. Attebery uses cultural theory to play the kind of 'what if' game so near and dear to the collective heart of the SF community. This framing technique is more than just a useful device for decoding gender and genre; it's also quite fun. The 'what if' game also enables Attebery to tell dynamic SF histories that complicate their smooth evolutionary predecessors. Elsewhere, feminist theory provides Attebery with the means to generate new histories across conventional SF periodization. Rather than giving readers a Darwinian tale of the triumph of a single literary species, Attebery depicts the development of SF as a series of complex and sometimes contradictory processes."-Lisa Yaszek, "Extrapolation, Spring 2003 "This is a thorough examination of the good, the bad, and the ugly in the history of gender representations in science fiction."- Regina Cross, Journal of the Fantastic of the Arts, 2002 ..."a commendable work, a pleasure to read and a source of new insights into the political minefield that gender studies havebecome over the years."-Donna Spalding Andreolle, Utopian Studies ..."a welcome addition to the list of key texts...that address science fiction's problematic relationship with gender. [I]t is vital precisely because it theorizes gender as a dual system rather than conflating the study of gender with the study of the female."-Science Fiction Studies, 2004
About the Author
is Professor of English and Director of American Studies at Idaho State University. He is author of Strategies of Fantasy
and The Fantasy Tradition in American Literature
, and co-editor, with Ursula K. Le Guin, of The Norton Book of Science Fiction.