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Adam Roberts is a prolific new writer who was shortlisted for the 2001 Arthur C Clarke Award for his first novel, Salt. He is also a lecturer in English at Royal Holloway, University of London. This makes him ideally qualified to write this book, part of Routledge's New Critical Idiom series which includes books on topics such as parody, gender and narrative.

Though the book is aimed at academics, it is also of interest to the general SF reader and it is from this perspective that I will review it. Of course there is a large swathe of SF readers for whom the phrase 'literary criticism' is an invitation to reach for their revolvers. However, for those of us who find the approach illuminating, there is much here to admire.

The book starts with an examination of the definition of science fiction. This is a perennial topic within the field and often a tedious and thankless one. Roberts takes a typically tough-minded approach, rejecting immediately the famous, self-referential definitions of people such as Damon Knight. Instead he takes three serious definitions by other SF critics as a starting point to explore the fundamental qualities of SF. This does not produce a T-shirt slogan definition but he does make a persuasive case that the concepts of 'alterity' (otherness, difference) and 'novum' (the point of difference) are those most integral to science fiction. As he later concludes: "The SF obsession with alien encounter... is the key trope", where he uses 'alien' in the broad sense.

This section is followed by an overview of the history of science fiction. Inevitable this section (the longest in the book) is too short. He is good on proto-SF and pre-War SF but everything afterwards is sketchy. The subject needs its own book and in fact Roberts is in the process of writing just such a book, the Palgrave History of Science Fiction. To be fair though, some additional historical overview is provided in the rest of the book.

These introductory chapters are followed by three chapters on themes within science fiction; gender, race and technology -- "the questions that have defined the age we live in." These themes fit in with his emphasis on alterity. Each of these chapters (as well as the preceding two) closes with a case study, for example Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand Of Darkness for gender. These are perhaps the best part of the book, with one exception I will mention later.

After placing feminist science fiction in a historical context Roberts moves on to an examination of such texts, mostly written by women but including an overview of gender in the Alien films.

He then attempts the same for race but with less success. At the beginning of the chapter, Roberts states that race in science fiction is "more than a simple matter of coding 'the alien' as black, although it sometimes is." The problem is the qualifier at the end of that sentence. For example, he then goes on to say of Alien:

"It doesn't take much cultural decoding to see this as an expression of white middle-class fear at the potential for distrust of an alienated black urban underclass."

Martin Lewis lives in South London; he is originally from Bradford, UK. He writes book reviews for The Telegraph And Argus.