Women are unilaterally excluded and erased from the contributive narrative of our history. Pick any aspect of culture - be it art, history, military strategy, or in this case, the burgeoning of science fiction - and you'll find women who are underrepresented or forgotten despite their (often) titular contributions to our world.

It's unfortunate that science fiction, then, is also assumed to have always been a male-dominated field. Ideas like this perpetuate a myth that women today dreaming, working, and striving are exceptions to the rule, rather than heralding a line that goes back just as long as men. After all, it's increasingly understood by your average Joe that the first work of science fiction as we know it was written by a woman.

The subheading for this book gives a better idea of what this anthology caters than a simple "science fiction" claim, however. While there are a few stories in here that are very obviously Victorian-era sci-fi (I think The Blue Laboratory and The Miracle of the Lily are good examples), the term "Scientific Imagination" cues us as readers into a few more things. A scientific imagination, to me, includes a sense of wonder and inquiry about the unknown, and an ability to extrapolate into the future with what we understand now to predict what challenges, beliefs, and opportunities could arise for us. Under such an idea, many more of the stories fit in, including the utopic Sultana's Dream and even Edith Nesbit's The Moonstone Mass, although it's a bit of a stretch. Some of these works seem more supernatural than science fiction, but I also feel that perhaps my own bifurcation of "science" away from "the supernatural" is more a product of our modern culture than it is a real truism. In fact, many of the things we can now explain by science were and still are incredible phenomenon that we at best barely get our minds around. So I give a lot of lee-way to Mike Ashley's interpretation of "Sci-fi" here, both considering the time period and the fact that even today I would argue for a more ambiguous interplay between the supernatural and the scientific.

The short stories themselves varied in quality and interest in my opinion. The final two were a powerful and resounding few notes to end on, and there were bright points all throughout, but some just felt a little plodding, despite being short stories. That might be a product of Victorian-era writing style or something else. Either way, I'm glad I read this not only for the insight it gave into women of the period and the questions they had for our future, but also just getting short glimpses into Victorian norms and customs and beliefs. Brief mentions of race and marriage, of class and it's relationship to love, satire for feminism, etc. were all really cool to get sort of a micro view of a larger cultural attitude - while also seeing the seeds of change growing inside it.