This consideration of the uses of silence and language creation in women's science fiction is drawn from a much larger study which examined popular fiction, marketed as science fiction in Britain, during the 1980s. At the beginning of the 1980s, quite a drastic change occurred in the look, content and form of print science fiction in Britain. Partly this was due to deeper structural changes in the British publishing industry and book production, especially in the context of multi-national and multi-media leisure corporations. It was also due to the way that the publishing industry began to perceive science fiction as a commercial genre. To generalize, this change resulted in the term ‘science fiction’, as a category for selling popular fiction, losing its prominence in the bookshop. It was replaced initially by fantasy and increasingly by horror and these generic distinctions adopted a new iconography for their titles and cover designs.

Defining science fiction is a quagmire, especially when considering how it was redefined by publishers, writers, booksellers and readers during the 1980s. The definition used by this study was therefore Norman Spinrad's infamous statement that science fiction is whatever is sold as science fiction. The study's main focus became two groups of writers, one predominantly male and the other a group of women writers who continued to write and had their writing signified as science fiction. They wrote fiction which addressed and explored contemporary science and scientific practice, new technology and social change. Both groups, that is cyberpunk and feminist science fiction, were recognized by critics and readers from outside a specialist interest in the genre. Both prospective futures featured imminent and far-reaching social change. Cyberpunk proposes an urban high-tech dark future medievalism, which was not denied by the feminist fiction. However, in contrast women writers offered the possibility of a collective pastoral guild-ordered life in the fictional future which may nor may not utilize new technology.

In order to consider the representation of silence in this fiction we are going to look at a smaller group of the feminist science fiction writers. It is a pleasing peculiarity of the genre that feminist writers could appropriate science fiction forms, conventions and marketing for their critique of contemporary society and social relations.