According to Robert J. Sawyer, one of the most prolific and popular of the younger generation of science-fiction writers in Canada, "Phyllis Gotlieb is the grande dame of Canadian SF." Gotlieb has achieved this eminence through four decades of writing and publishing stories and novels that both celebrate and interrogate some paradigmatic science-fiction conventions. She has, from the beginning, written work that would fit into the general megatext of American science fiction, and almost all her science fiction has been published in the United States. She is best known in Canada as a poet of wide range and moral insight, and her developed style, as M. Travis Lane says in The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature (1997), offers readers "musicality, colloquialism, relish for detail, and affirmation of her Jewish heritage." These qualities appear in her science fiction as well, giving it a distinctive tone.

While her imagination has traversed...