Sarah Lefanu's study of the intersection between feminism and science fiction is a tightly packed two-hundred-odd pages, and though expansive in exploring the different texts, the passages of analysis are densely written and complex enough to make the project of reviewing this review at once a challenge and an awful temptation. I could go on forever.

The starting point that Lefanu chooses for her study is in itself interesting and suggestive enough for a volume. She approaches the history of feminist science fiction not in terms of Mary Shelley and the feminine adventurestory tradition of the gothic novel, (she covers this later), but in terms of fandom: Susan Wood and others in the 1970s recognising their dissatisfaction, asserting their interests and fighting for ‘Women and sf’ panels. The invocation of the special relationship between artists and audience in sf is significant for Lefanu's argument. It is also particularly interesting for me to read this history of the revolution, because by the time I met the sf world many people found the idea of ‘Women and sf’ panels depressing and wished they did not exist. Revolutions have a tiresome habit of (r)evolving in this way.

However, for this study at least, the evolution is benign. In the Chinks of the World Machine is not another story of how weird, or how thrilling, it is to see a dog walking on its hind legs. Though consideration of the sf background always arises out of Lefanu's politics and is never prioritised above her first concern, the discussion has the confidence to be about science fiction as well as about feminism: about the genre's powers to deconstruct and inform, and its towering preoccupations: the fictional world that deals (I paraphrase) with the problem of difference in all its aspects.

Sarah Lefanu's title In the Chinks of the World Machine, has a ring of irony. The full quotation is from a James Tiptree story, and runs: ‘What women do is survive. We live by ones and twos in the chinks of your world machine…’ Alice Sheldon, otherwise known as James Tiptree Junior, is a key icon in this study, the woman who fooled the sf establishment with her straightfaced presentation of male stereotypes—and was bitterly entertained, it is clear, when her victims responded with ecstatic little cries of recognition.