[Rose] writes pleasantly and translucently in his important study, Alien Encounters… He persuasively argues that ‘the opposition of human versus inhuman…defines the field of interest within which science fiction as a genre characteristically operates’ …He has something fresh and apposite to say, and goes a good way toward a ground-breaking definition of science fiction’s characteristic concerns. These appear not only in the surface structures of science fiction, but also lurking within its subterranean metaphors.
-- Peter Nicholls Washington Post Book World

An established Spenser and Shakespeare scholar here takes science fiction seriously. Without trying to borrow respectability for it, he places it within the context of recent western ideas and belles-lettres…[and] offers it as the most responsive vehicle for the alienated modern sensibility.
-- American Literature