ABSTRACT
Science fiction is a system for generating and interpreting narratives that reflect insights derived from, technological offshoots of, and attitudes toward science. Decoding gender can be fun, whether one is tracing the hidden assumptions in a straightforward adventure story or sorting out the perspectives in a complex novel of cultural conflict. Donna Haraway points out that even the distinction between social gender and biological sex, central to many discussions of the topic, is meaningless in languages such as German, in which a single term indicates both. The field of gender studies grows out of the feminist insight that women and men play roles that are not inborn but culturally determined. Historians and philosophers of science such as Sandra Harding, Donna Haraway, and Evelyn Fox Keller have pointed out that science itself, despite its pose of impersonality, incorporates gender distinctions in its language, its social structure, and even its epistemology.
