Angela Carter's fantastic fiction is noteworthy for its stylistic excellence, its treatment of feminist themes, and its reliance on and reaction to motion-picture, fairy-tale, folklore, gothic, and science-fiction sources. Despite the fact that her postapocalyptic novel Heroes and Villains (1969) represents a significant early feminist experiment with science-fiction motifs, Carter has never been associated with the British New Wave movement of the 1960s. In one of her final interviews before her death from lung cancer in 1992, Carter even dismissed the importance of science fiction to her writing. Although some of her novels have been reviewed and discussed in science-fiction journals, Carter avoided the label of a science-fiction writer by embracing a variety of other fictional modes and models and by making an apparently conscious decision not to emphasize the parallels between some of her work and commercial science fiction. Despite having written several novels and short stories that can...