Since Mary Shelley drew inspiration for Frankenstein from the scientific
speculations to which she attended as a 'nearly silent listener' at the
now famous chateau in Switzerland, many other women have been similarly
motivated to produce works informed by scientific theory. Successive
chapters trace the history of women's science fiction writing from the
turn of the century to the early 1990s, analysing how women writers have
utilised the genre to critique the ideology that informs what counts as
scientific knowledge.