Introduction: The Nearly Silent Listener

It is possible to argue that we are now living in the future predicted by science fiction when it originally emerged as a literary genre in the mid-twentieth century. This raises questions about the function of the genre now, a little over one hundred years since Mary Shelley first published Frankenstein and in a cultural milieu which increasingly questions scientific orthodoxy. This introduction to the second edition of Debra Benita Shaw’s Women, Science and Fiction argues that, nevertheless, the imagined worlds of science fiction authors who identify as women have gained in significance in that, across the decades, they have continued to offer a penetrating analysis of gender and its importance in the perpetuation of social inequalities.