ABSTRACT
What is feminist science fiction? In 1666, when Margaret Lucas Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, published her world-building fantasy The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing-World, she had clear goals, recognizable today. She was claiming a space for women in the new enterprise of writing about science. Equally, she satirized the scientific establishment: the men who blocked her way, and who were guilty, in her eyes, of having too much faith in their gadgets, too little trust in observation and intuition. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818), credited by Aldiss (1973) as the first true sf novel, established a different pathway: fusing anxiety about science and a layperson’s direct interest in contemporary science (Galvanism) with the emotional charge and grotesque invention of the Gothic novel.
