Books like Feminism and science fiction by Sarah Lefanu

A dystopian novel about a woman named Offred in a totalitarian theonomic society called Gilead, exploring themes of subjugated women and resistance.

Red Mars chronicles the early days of humanity’s colonization and political upheaval on Mars, blending environmental engineering, terraforming and nation‑building in a hard‑science vision.

In a future Los Angeles devastated by climate collapse and social breakdown, Lauren Olamina, a hyperempathic young woman, survives the destruction of her safe haven and journeys north, carrying a visionary idea that could redefine humanity's future.

Ursula K. Le Guin’s landmark 1969 novel explores a gender‑fluid alien society on the ice‑bound world of Gethen, challenging human assumptions about sex, politics, and humanity through a compelling diplomacy adventure.

In this radical collection, Joanna Russ presents four interlocking narratives of women whose lives collide across alternate realities, exposing gender, power, and identity in ways that challenge the status quo.

"Can science, steeped in Western, masculine, bourgeois endeavors, nevertheless be used for emancipatory ends? In this major contribution to the debate over the role gender plays in the scientific enterprise, Sandra Harding pursues that question, challenging the intellectual and social foundations of scientific thought. Harding provides the first comprehensive and critical survey of the feminist science critiques, and examines inquiries into the androcentricism that has endured since the birth of modern science. Harding critiques three epistemological approaches: feminist empiricism, which identifies only bad science as the problem; the feminist standpoint, which holds that women's social experience provides a unique starting point for discovering masculine bias in science; and feminist postmodernism, which disputes the most basic scientific assumptions. She points out the tensions among these stances and the inadequate concepts that inform their analyses, yet maintains that the critical discourse they foster is vital to the quest for a science informed by emancipatory morals and politics."--Publisher description.

The surprising and controversial thesis of Feminist Fabulation is unflinching: the postmodern canon has systematically excluded a wide range of important women's writing by dismissing it as genre fiction. Marleen Barr issues an urgent call for a corrective, for the recognition of a new meta- or supergenre of contemporary writing - feminist fabulation - which includes both acclaimed mainstream works and works which today's critics consistently denigrate or ignore. In its investigation of the relationship between women writers and postmodern fiction in terms of outer space and canonical space, Feminist Fabulation is a pioneer vehicle built to explore postmodernism in terms of female literary spaces which have something to do with real-world women. Branding the postmodern canon as a masculinist utopia and a nowhere for feminists, Barr offers the stunning argument that feminist science fiction is not science fiction at all but is really metafiction about patriarchal fiction. Barr's concern is directed every bit as much toward contemporary feminist critics as it is toward patriarchy. Rather than trying to reclaim lost feminist writers of the past, she suggests, feminist criticism should concentrate on reclaiming the present's lost fabulative feminist writers, writers steeped in nonpatriarchal definitions of reality who can guide us into another order of world altogether. Barr offers very specific plans for new structures that will benefit women, feminist theory, postmodern theory, and science fiction theory alike. Feminist fabulation calls for a new understanding which enables the canon to accommodate feminist difference and emphasizes that the literature called "feminist SF" is an important site of postmodern feminist difference. Barr forces the reader to rethink the whole country club of postmodernism, not just its membership list - and in so doing provides a discourse of this century worthy of a prominent reading by all scholars, feminists, writers, and literary theorists and critics.

Joanna Russ’s essays trace the intersections of science fiction, fantasy, and feminism, exploring gender, authorship, and popular culture from classic authors to contemporary critiques.