In the following essay, Roberts explores feminist Science Fiction and the "images of women in science fiction."

One of the major theoretical projects of the second
wave of feminism is the investigation of gender and
sexuality as social constructs. . . . The stock conventions
of science fiction—time travel, alternate worlds,
entropy, relativism, the search for a unified field theory—
can be used metaphorically and metonymically
as powerful ways of exploring the construction of
'woman'.
(Sarah Lefanu . . .)

Women's science fiction, or feminist science fiction, is a more recent development than the genre as a whole, but today constitutes one of the most exciting and most vigorous aspects of the mode, in terms both of actual SF texts and of criticism. It is also, following on from the previous chapter, a development that dates primarily from the 1960s, one that has grown up in dialogue with the more maleoriented SF...