The Routledge Companion to Gender and Science Fiction ed. by Lisa Yaszek et al. (review)

Reviewed by: The Routledge Companion to Gender and Science Fictioned. by Lisa Yaszek et al. Karina A. Vado The Pasts, Presents, and Futures of Gender and/in Science Fiction. Lisa Yaszek, Sonja Fritzsche, Keren Omry, and Wendy Gay Pearson, eds. The Routledge Companion to Gender and Science Fiction. Routledge, 2023. xix+ 411 pp. 250 hc. As of 15 March 2024, 484 anti-LGBTQ+ bills have been introduced across the United States. The bills are expansive in their aims and scope and have far-reaching implications. From attempts to "legally" re-define "sex" in ways that exclude transgender and gender non-conforming folx, to End Page 336curriculum-based restrictions such as Florida's "Don't Say Gay" laws and the proliferation of anti-trans "bathroom bills, " these renewed investments in gender essentialism and gender policing and the material and often deadly impacts of such investments speak to the continued power of white supremacist cis-heteropatriarchal imaginaries and the ever-pressing necessity of imagining and actualizing more liberatory modes of knowing and being in the world. The recent publication of Lisa Yaszek, Sonja Fritzsche, Keren Omry, and Wendy Gay Pearson's The Routledge Companion to Gender and Science Fictionis thus a timely and welcome addition to a growing body sf scholarship that is critically engaging anti-racist, decolonial, feminist, and queer modes of speculation across geography, media, and time. This Companionfeatures an impressive fifty-three chapters—inclusive of section introductions—penned by a diverse array of established sf, media, and literary and cultural studies scholars such as Marleen S. Barr, Ritch Calvin, Paweł Frelik, Joan Gordon, Michael Pitts, John Rieder, Sherryl Vint, Ida Yoshinaga, and, of course, the collection's editors, as well as emerging scholars from around the globe. Resisting chronological and geography-based organization, The Routledge Companion to Gender and Science Fictionis divided into five thematic "conversations": "What: Gender and Genre"; "How: Theoretical Approaches"; "Who: Subjectivities"; "Where: Media and Transmedialities"; and "When: Transtemporalities. " Interrogating the "what, how, who, where, and when" of gender and sf, the collection "introduces readers to the ways that SF artists communicate their ideas about gender across centuries, continents, and cultures, " offering layered meditations on how the genre has and continues to "question gender, including bringing feminist and queer perspectives to bear on masculinities and recognizing the existence and importance of transgender and nonbinary folx as both creators and consumers of SF" (4). Though focused on speculative explorations of gender (and sexuality), the collection highlights differing approaches to reading and theorizing representations of gender in sf that include, but are not limited to, animal studies, critical race and ethnic studies, ecocriticism, disability studies, and queer, feminist, and women's studies. Notably, and refreshingly, sf is not consigned to the literary here; readers will come across articles featuring works of sf in fashion, film, music, television, and video games, to name a few. The collection, in short, is ambitious in its themes, theoretical, and aesthetic approaches, each section an invaluable source for scholars across (post) humanistic (and posthumanistic social science) disciplines. In the first and shortest section—"What: Gender and Genre"—Yaszek offers a condensed yet expansive overview of the history of gender, of sf, and of the makings of this particular collection. The section then moves on to a roundtable discussion, led and described by sf film scholar Ida Yoshinaga "as an act of hope for a liberatory future, " gathering five BIPOC and LGBTQ+ contemporary sf writers (when shared by the artist, author, or scholar, I include their respective pronouns): Joyce Cheng (she/her, End Page 337they/their), Jaymee Goh, Andrea Hairston, Lehua Parker, and Bogi Takács (e/em/eir, they/them). Throughout their discussion, the authors reflect on their narrative speculations of liberatory gender and sexual imaginaries, consider questions of genre and market (ability), and reflect on the future of gender and sexuality in sf (for instance, the inclusion of more intersex representation in the genre). For folx newer to the field of sf studies and its debates on questions of gender and genre, this first section might seem a tad hurried and overly condensed. Considering the space constraints that come with producing such a wide. . .