SOURCE: Grossman, Kathryn M. “Woman as Temptress: The Way to (Br)Otherhood in Science Fiction Dystopias.” Women's Studies 14, no. 2 (1987): 135-45.

In the following essay, Grossman explores depiction of women as the “other” in several dystopian novels—including Isaac Asimov's The End of Eternity and Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451—noting that it is often the character of the female temptress who reveals the world as it really is.

All fiction is metaphor. … Space travel is one of these metaphors; so is an alternative society, an alternative biology; the future is another. The future, in fiction, is a metaphor.

Ursula K. Le Guin, Introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness

The temptress figure is one negative female stereotype that has pervaded western consciousness ever since Eden was lost to a beguiled Adam.¹ But in such classic science fiction dystopias as Eugene Zamiatin's We (1924), George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 (1953), and...