Almost 20 years after the publication of Future Females: A Critical Anthology, feminist science fiction pioneer Marleen S. Barr, together with a talented crew of the field's established and emerging theorists, reveal new critical insights in Future Females, the Next Generation. This groundbreaking collection includes contributors from across the globe who find effective venues for imagining feminist thought experiments. A multinational perspective runs through this innovative volume, focusing on the latest dynamic trends in feminist science fiction. These include such issues as race, gender, cyberfeminism, the media, and new writers in the field. Future Females, the Next Generation, which establishes the generational continuity characterizing a vibrant area of feminist literary and cultural inquiry, boldly goes where no feminist science fiction critical anthology has gone before.

Some storytellers use the distant future as the setting to make fantastic extrapolations and to explore compelling ideas. In this volume, however, the writers look forward a mere decade and present stunning scenarios, reveal exciting possibilities and warn against the harrowing pitfalls that may lie just a few steps ahead of us. What will life be like ten years from now? Sixteen extraordinary writers offer their own mind-bending answers to that question, their spectacular 2020 Visions...

There was something strange about Ann Bonney's mission to the unexplored world called Chameleon. Though only women were judged fit for space, Earth's Central Computer had for some reason placed a man among them ... an artist who was not docile like other men.

For Language Specialist Gia Kennedy, the answer lay in the baffling rituals of the planet's primitive natives -- an answer that hovered just out of reach. There, in the heart of an alien wilderness, Gia would defy her culture and discover an ancient truth.

ALTERNATE REALITIES

This is the tale of the many possible lives of Anastasia Valerie Stein which come to touch one another through a twist in the fabric of space-time: Ann, unhappy wife and mother in a world much like our own; Val, independent teacher in a timeline of scarcity; Stacey, a free spirit with two lovers, and Tasha, strangest of all, a professional sorceress in a world where the Third Reich rules England. Together they join to confront a force that manipulates all their worlds, and discover a truth that transcends their individual lives.

Finch combines compelling, believable characters, the ancient magic of the Tarot, and quantum physics to weave a spellbinding tale of the infinite possibilities of space and time.