Quando la fantascienza è donna (When Science Fiction Is Female) by Eleonora Federici is a book of many merits: its theoretical framework is informed by recent perspectives from gender studies, it boasts an extensive bibliography, and it is written in captivating and accessible prose. It is an intelligent book that fills an important gap in the literature, as few works on women science fiction writers have been published in Italian. Indeed, while much has been written on women's science fiction in the English language, such a tradition has yet to develop in Italian, with one of the first exceptions being Ida Magli's 1980 essay “L'immagine simbolica femminile e le sue costanti mitico-culturali nella fantascienza” (“Science-Fictional Representations of Femininity and Its Mythical and Cultural Origins)” in Luigi Russo's La fantascienza e la critica (Science Fiction and Criticism [Milan: Feltrinelli, 1980], 103–12). Federici's book thus serves not only as a pleasant read but as a guide to the rich tradition of English-language science fiction from the 1800s (chapters 1, 2, and 3) to today (chapter 6). Quando la fantascienza è donna will be of great utility for those wanting to teach science fiction in schools or universities, but also for those looking to carry out research on the women authors that form its focus, as it provides many cues for further research and a comprehensive bibliography.The book includes in its scope a wide range of writers, and yet the author is able to skillfully draw out her key themes from across these sources. The most important is a gender perspective, highlighting the ways in which the texts, from the second half of the twentieth century onward, create a dialogue that addresses complex issues within feminist theory, most importantly around the question of “sexual difference.” Another central theme is that of women's bodies in relation to technology and the concept of the cyborg. And last is the author's interest in the new language and linguistic innovations in utopian/science fiction elsewhere. Federici in particular uses her analysis of science-fiction texts to look at the ways in which modifying linguistic structures and masculine lexicons is a necessary part of a feminist critique of patriarchy (chapter 4.4: “Liminalità e linguaggio al femminile” [“Liminality and Female Language”]).In her emblematically titled introduction, “Perché una fantascienza al femminile?” (“Why Write Women's Science Fiction?”), Federici seeks to identify the characteristics that make up women's science fiction, where the lead character is a woman who offers a vision of a nonpatriarchal society. To do this, women writers use intertextual and intersectional strategies, creating a dialogue with male writing traditions in order to subvert or revise traditional themes and characters. Federici thus makes use of Marleen Barr's concept of feminist fabulation (Feminist Fabulations: Space/Postmodern Fiction [Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992]) “to demonstrate the ways in which women's science fiction offers us a different world to the one we know, forcing the two alternatives into a confrontation. Women science fiction writers deconstruct the traditional science-fiction narrative told from a male perspective and reveal the hidden cultural mechanisms that underpin it, offering a women's viewpoint on the same themes” (11; my translation).1 Women's science fiction therefore distinguishes itself from the male tradition because it focuses on individuality and the capacity to empathize with the other.The fourth chapter, “Dalle utopie femministe degli anni Settanta agli anni Ottanta” (“Feminist Utopias of the Seventies and into the Next Decade”), turns to issues that are very much at the fore of contemporary debates: the environment, pollution, reproduction, colonialism, and the pacifist movement. Utopian writing by women from the last three decades of the twentieth century, as Federici underlines, has given voice to new utopian models, visions of a better society where feminine cultural ideals are truly valued: pacifism, living in harmony with nature, empathy, and the capacity to live collectively and democratically. Utopian writing allows us to visualize unusual situations and to experiment with new models of behavior. Women writers have thus been able to put into practice Ursula Le Guin's quotation on the heuristic value of science fiction: “One of the essential functions of Science Fiction, I think, is precisely this kind of question-asking: reversals of a habitual way of thinking, metaphors for what our language has no words for as yet, experiments in imagination” (“Is Gender Necessary?” in Dancing at the Edge of the World [London: Gollancz, 1984], 6).Federici draws out this distinction between technophobic visions that oppose technology tout court, viewing the body-technology binary as entirely negative, and the more technophile utopias that envisage the utilization of technology to aid the environment and, most importantly, to relieve women of their childbearing and child-raising role while inducing men to experience maternity and collective living in a different way. Social reproduction thus takes place outside of women's bodies; children are born in incubators, and embryos are fertilized in vitro. In this science fiction women writers emphasize the importance of allowing women a say on the direction that scientific development takes, entering thus into the debate initiated in the same period by women scientists to deconstruct the myth of gender neutrality in science (Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985]; Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution [1980; San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1990]).The rethinking of utopian writing and science fiction carried out by women writers (Vita Fortunati, “The Revision of the Utopian Paradigm in Ursula Le Guin's Work,” in Modernisierung und Literatur, ed. W. Gobel, S. Kohl, and H. Zapf [Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag], 223–31) like le Guin but also Joanna Russ (The Female Man, 1975) and Marge Piercy (Woman on the Edge of Time, 1976) has prompted a redefinition of the genre that has come to be known as “the critical utopia” (Tom Moylan, Demand the Impossible [New York: Methuen, 1986]): a utopia that examines its own internal limits and is able to propose alternative solutions that are fluid, dynamic, and nondefinitive—a horizon to work toward. These utopias question not only the formal limits of utopian writing but also the standard characteristics of the classical utopia: its dogmatism, static temporality, and intolerance of diversity. In the critical utopia even the inhabitants' attitudes have changed. They are no longer passive followers of orders but active participants in the realization of alternative possibilities. They strive to explore human potentialities, to explore revolutionary strategies for confronting and changing an unsatisfactory reality.In the last chapter of her book, “Dal passato al futuro” (“From the Past to the Future”), Federici discusses the most recent developments in science fiction: the rewriting of history that sees women writers enter into dialogue with New Historicism and carry out a rereading of history from a gendered perspective, where history is no longer History but the recounting of women's lives. Two important examples are Connie Willis's rereading of the Middle Ages and Octavia Butler's history of Afro-America: “These histories not only deconstruct patriarchal myths and ideologies, they also problematize racial, class and sexual difference” (148; my translation).2 The other two tendencies Federici looks at are lesbian science fiction and the science fiction of women writers in the diaspora, such as the Jamaican Canadian Nalo Hopkinson and the Chinese Canadian Larissa Lai, “whose novels encompass themes belonging to non-Western cultures, making for a rewriting of the themes of science fiction from a different cultural-linguistic perspective” (155; my translation).3 The message Federici seeks to convey is therefore one inspired by the legacy of Ursula Le Guin: that utopia and science fiction represent a dimension of the mind, a tension that is in constant renewal and as such should not be tied to rigid literary conventions or reduced to static and bounded visions.