269 BOOKS IN REVIEW BOOKS IN REVIEW SF’s Queer Ecologies. Bridgitte Barclay and Christy Tidwell, eds. Gender and Environment in Science Fiction. Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2019. 215 pp. $95 hc, $39.99 pbk, $38 ebk. In “The Man-Trap,” the first episode of the first season of the first STAR TREK series (1966-1969), a peculiar set of circumstances unfolds on the outpost planet M-113. Here, a mind-reading, shape-shifting, salt-sucking hominid takes the form of beautiful women in order to lure men to their demise. Once it has the victim secured, it reverts to its natural form: a shaggy beast with pale green skin and a mouth like a giant suction cup. It uses this and its long green fingers, similarly equipped with suction cups, to drain the victim of their vital salts. By the end of the episode, Captain Kirk and his crew have killed the deadly creature, but the mood on the Enterprise is one of regret. The salt-sucking vampire was the last of its kind. Captain Kirk likens its fate to that of the American buffalo, hunted to near extinction as a result of colonization and colonial excess. In the end, the general consensus is that it was not really evil, just really desperate. One might say the same thing about the tortured and contorted plot machinations that require the salt sucker to get its fix this way in the first place. After all, as we learn throughout the episode, the creature possesses many impressive talents. It can take any shape; it can sift through the memories of its intended victims in order to choose just the right human forms to lure them, and it is by all appearances an excellent conversationalist. Given that the creature is not only equipped with vocal chords but also with a stunning range in terms of making use of them, it has always struck me as odd that it never once simply entreats the crew of the Enterprise for a giant shipment of salt, a lifetime supply, and that it resorts instead to elaborate and romantically coded interactions to leech the salt from its victims. It is a talented killer, in other words, but an inefficient one, and the pleasure of the episode seems to stem not from the hope that this endling, the last of its kind, will somehow manage to endure against the odds, but from watching a duplicitous female form appear in different guises to different men in order to manipulate and sap them of their vital essence. The demise of this singular creature and the attendant narrative strategies that lead to its execution have some interesting commonalities with the superb new collection of scholarship edited by Bridgitte Barclay and Christy Tidwell, Gender and Environment in Science Fiction. In this well-researched and extremely well-presented anthology, the editors and contributors reach into the rich archive of sf history to consider how stories of environment and gender interweave. Each piece, from the carefully framed and co-authored introduction to the ten stand-alone essays to Tidwell’s thoughtful conclusion, demonstrates how sf has always, from the creature features of the 1950s to the more sophisticated formal experiments of the present day, complicated 270 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 47 (2020) accepted epistemologies, and hence ontologies, regarding environment, ecology, gender, sexuality, and science. The salt sucker is a useful figure for encapsulating the many different aspects that the contributors to Gender and Environment in Science Fiction highlight. As the sole inhabitant of a colonized planet, it succumbs to but also resists colonization. It is both human and animal in its natural appearance, and its gender is ambiguous. When it hunts, its form is typically that of a beautiful female human being, but when it feeds it cloaks its body over its victim in a vampiric posture of sexual dominance, suggesting rape. Yet it draws salt out through suction rather than penetration, further complicating a simple performance of masculine dominance. Additionally, when Kirk links it to the colonized landscapes of the American West, its singular identity collapses into the strange landscapes of M-113 that are filled with exotic, Edenic vistas, replete with fruits and...