Christine Brooke-Rose is most often portrayed as a writer of extremely challenging and deeply intellectual prose whose experiments with fictional form reflect a French rather than a British literary heritage. Her failure to reach a wider audience stems largely from her determination to destabilize the very language her work inhabits. Even in an era in which such a commitment might be included under the rubric of postmodernism, her writing has remained singular in intention and idiosyncratic in outlook. Yet, her linguistic playfulness, which extends to her interest in the semiotics of science fiction and a contemplation of mutability of language, is strengthened by a much more traditional desire: she is deeply committed to the poetic possibilities of the novel form and to its relationship to other fields of knowledge. Brooke-Rose's excursions into science fiction are, in this sense, excursions into the multiform relationship between science and fiction. Her...