In her iconic “A Cyborg Manifesto” (1991), Donna Haraway had declared the boundary between science fiction and social reality to be an optical illusion. One possible interpretation of this is the breaking down of the distance between telling stories and living in them, in a world where “we are all cyborgs”; where the “cyborg” is a construct of an inevitable posthumanism, a rejection of the boundaries between human, animal and machine. In many ways, Haraway was pointing the way forward, to a feminist future of SF and speculative fiction, even as she made a critique of exclusionary, western feminism.

At around the same time, another feminist theorist, Sarah Lefanu (Feminism and Science Fiction, 1988), credited feminist discourse from the mid 1960s onwards with having finally shifted the status quo of gender politics in SF, and explored how “science fiction, despite its preponderantly male bias, offers a freedom to women writers, in terms of style as well as content, that is not available in mainstream fiction.” Lefanu studied SF written by women as offering a means of “fusing political concerns with the playful creativity of the imagination”. In the decades that have followed, both Haraway and Lefanu have proven to be prophetic as SF...