In the few years after The Birth Machine first came out (from The Women's Press), there was quite a bit of scholarly interest in it, and it appeared on university course reading lists. Those courses were Women's Studies courses, and the academics writing about it were exclusively women, writing about it as a feminist text (there's a list on my website). As the years went by, the book achieved a different kind of status. It was claimed chiefly as science fiction, appearing in the Science Fiction Encyclopaedia and written about in 2017 by the science fiction commentator, Joachim Boaz. (I have to say that this came as a surprise to me: as Margaret Atwood has said about The Handmaid's Tale - which came out around the same time - as far as I was concerned, I was writing about something that was actually happening, not some kind of speculative future.) However, it is true that Maureen Barr had already included it in her 1993 book, Lost in Space: Probing Feminist Science Fiction and Beyond, and I had indeed drawn a parallel within the novel between the situation of my protagonist, Zelda, strapped to a machine on a hospital bed, with that of Frankenstein's monster. Now, in a recent paper focusing on The Birth Machine, Franciso José Cortés Vieco teases out this notion, and sees the book indeed as a rewriting of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (dubbing me Mary Shelley's 'younger sister'!)
Funny how books can go on having new, and different, lives. The edition pictured above was a reissue by Salt in 2009. The print version of this is not now available, though there is a Kindle version. Print copies of an earlier revised edition I published myself (The Author's Cut) can be obtained by messaging me via my website), as can used copies of the first, Women's Press, edition (below), the structure of which was edited in a way I was never happy with, and which I was shocked to see on sale on Amazon recently for over £300!
