We Who Are About To…, Joanna Russ

We Who Are About To…, Joanna Russ (1977)
Review by Joachim Boaz

We Who Are About To… is the third of Joanna Russ’ science fiction novels I’ve read over the past few years. For some reason I was unable gather the courage to review The Female Man and might have been too enthusiastic about And Chaos Died. We Who Are About To… is superior to both (although, not as historically important for the genre as The Female Man). This is in part because Russ refines her prose — it is vivid, scathing, and rather minimalist in comparison to her previous compositions — and creates the perfect hellish microcosm for her ruminations on the nature of history, societal expectation, memory, and death.

Highly recommended for fans of feminist + literary science fiction.

The classic situation: multi-dimensional explosion hurls a spaceship en route to a new colony onto a barren planet. Due to the nature of starship travel (folding space) there is zero chance of contacting others. Rescue is never a possibility. The unnamed narrator, a musicologist, leaves an audio diary — her words, recorded in secret almost every day, is the version of events we read.

Russ manipulates this common sci-fi scenario. None of the characters have survival skills. The planet contains no aliens or fascinating vistas. Rather, a human drama unfolds — a twisted, dark vision. Be warned, Russ does not conjure the Star Trek miracle syrup plot device à la ”different characters who initially don’t like each other learn to work together and conquer the problem and conjure a communication device that rescues them from the clutches of certain death”. The reader knows the end result from the first sentence of the first page.

Similarly to D G Compton’s brilliant Farewell, Earth’s Bliss, Russ’ varied cast is adeptly characterized from the very beginning. {The cast} The women: the narrator (a baroque musicologist, an activist past, neo-Christian leanings, a cornucopia of pharmaceuticals), Mrs Valeria Graham (a middle-aged wealthy woman who purchased her husband and daughter, wears an Indian sari), Nathalie (a soldier trainee who despises civilians), Cassie (an ordinary woman, the only one whom the narrator cares for), and Lori (Valeria’s twelve-year-old daughter, hypochondriac, serial music lover, doted upon). The men: Mr Graham (strong, manly, plastic surgery), Alan (attentive, careful, polite, flatterer, in love with Lori), and John Ude (professor of ideas, evasive, The Smile).

The narrator suffers an acute crisis upon crashing on the planet due to the fact that no one will ever find them and that no one will remember them — the pharmaceuticals are close at hand. Added to that, the planet is alien, the planet isn’t Earth: “To die on a dying Earth — I’d live, if only to weep” (p 27). Is there any point in waiting to die? The others discover her drugs and take them away, or at least some of them.

The others delude themselves with visions of colonization, utopian societies, the innocence of primitives: “Day two. It began. I just couldn’t keep my mouth shut. Everyone running around cheerily into the Upper Paleolithic. We’re going to build huts. We’re going to have a Village Fire that Lori Graham will tend because she is the Fire Virgin or something” (p21). Unfortunately, the gene pool of the survivors is too small to create a society. And, no one besides the narrator is too concerned with introducing children into the eventual horrors of life on the planet when the supplies and medications run out and they are forced to eat the potentially toxic plants. The visions of a proper society, a proper duty to propagate, are too ingrained in their minds — the women, viewed by the men as walking wombs, incubating the future… All the women besides the narrator decide to get impregnated — “John Ude was very tender and careful with his walking womb” (p59).

When it’s her turn, she drugs everyone and runs away… And when they wake up from their stupor they come looking for her. Her womb is prized.

“Next day, don’t know what day it is. Probably five. Who cares. If history were not fantasy, then one could ask to be remembered but history is fake and memories die when you do and only God (don’t believe it) remembers. History always rewritten. Nobody will find this anyway and they’ll have flippers so who cares” (p113)

The most powerful moments of the novel focus in on the painful isolation the narrator feels. Not only is she separated from Earth but her very words, recorded so diligently, will be read by no one. If a rescue party had the smallest chance of finding them long after their deaths then they would at the very least be a shred of history, a minute connection to others, but even that is impossible. The other survivors do not want to accept the inevitable and delude themselves with fantasies about creating a society even if it would doom their children to painful deaths. Their fantasies that do not accept the reality of the situation. The narrator wants to control the inevitable. And she takes matters into her own hands…

Russ’ prose tears into the heart of things.

“Cassie, Cassie, come out to play.

Come over for a chat.

I don’t mind if you’re rotting” (p133)

It is poetic and visceral and often, hilarious: ”Then [Lori, 12] added, without the slightest transition, ‘I like serial music. You know, the late twentieth-century stuff where it goes deedle deedle deedle deedle deedle deedle deedle deedle for half an hour and then it goes doodle just once, and you could die with excitement’” (p52). For anyone who listens regularly to minimalist music… Well, I suspect you are laughing.

We Who Are About To… is the best I’ve read this year.

This review originally appeared on Science Fiction and Other Suspect Ruminations.

Extra(ordinary) People, Joanna Russ

Extra(ordinary) People, Joanna Russ (1984)
Review by Nic Clarke

I don’t think it’s controversial to say that Russ’ fiction is neither comfortable nor accessible reading. I recently started On Joanna Russ (2009), a volume of literary criticism edited by Farah Mendlesohn; three articles in, the word recurring most frequently seems to be ‘fierce’. Russ’ fiction is knotty, prickly, exhilarating, and it sometimes feels as if you need several brains just to take it all in. Every sentence is a challenge to your expectations as a reader. If these stories were striking (and they were) to a 1960s and 1970s audience unfamiliar with, and largely unprepared for, feminist narratives in their fantasy and science fiction, I find myself equally wrongfooted on encountering them in 2009 and 2010, albeit for different reasons. Rarely did these stories follow anything remotely like the course I thought they would.

Russ continually remakes the ground beneath your feet: evoking genre frameworks to play with and comment on them, hitting surprising emotional and thematic notes while skipping over whole chunks of plot and characterisation that, accustomed to a particular set of narrative strategies, I expected to see. Had it come from the pen of almost any other writer of sf/fantasy, the pivotal moment in the Hugo Award-winning ‘Souls’ (originally published 1982, and collected in Extra(Ordinary) People) – in which Viking raiders come to an abbey headed by the remarkable Abbess Radegunde – would have been the sack of the abbey. And, indeed, this is the pivotal moment; but we are not shown it, because the narrator (recalling, years later, his time in the abbey as the nosy but fondly regarded ‘Boy News’) is protected, both physically and emotionally, by Radegunde. Before he has even registered the violence breaking out, she conceals him with her body such that he is “almost suffocated” – and sees nothing.

What he shares with us, instead, is the increasingly tense build-up to the sacking, in which Radegunde – having greeted news of the Vikings’ arrival with the terse observation “‘God protects our souls, not our bodies’” – does her best to avert violence, and the lengthy, difficult aftermath, in which victims and attackers alike struggle to come to terms with what has happened, and Radegunde takes her own particular revenge on the Vikings. Radegunde plays expertly on the raiders’ shared customs and individual weakness, running verbal rings around them in an effort to persuade them to accept loot offered freely, rather than taken as pillage:

“Heed my counsel. Why play butcher when you can have treasure poured into your laps like kings, without work? And after that there will be as much again, when I lead you to the hidden place. An earl’s mountain of treasure. Think of it! And to give all this up for slaves, half of whom will get sick and die before you get them home – and will need to be fed if they are to be any good. Shame on you for bad advice-takers! Imagine what you will say to your wives and families: Here are a few miserable bolts of cloth with blood spots that won’t come out, here are some pearls and jewels smashed to powder in the fighting, here is a torn piece of embroidery which was whole before someone stepped on it in the battle.”

The narrator evidently enjoys the memory of her speeches, even though they are (in the immediate term) ineffective. Even the war band’s leader/spokesman, Thorvald, can only marvel (“‘If I sold you in Constantinople,’ he says, ‘within a year you would become Queen of the place!’”).

One possible reading of the story is that this is a woman who talks too much, and whose cleverness disturbs and alienates the Vikings, so that they eventually lose patience and carry out their attack. But what the narrator cannot quite hide, I think, is that the attack is an inevitability; the raiders are thrown, for a brief while, by the tenacity and quick wits of Radegunde, but ultimately they have come for violence – and they have the weapons. Words are not enough to make them feel the consequences of what they do.

Or at any rate, not the amiable, twinkly-eyed, slightly mocking words of the first half of the story. In the aftermath, surrounded by women left crippled and maddened, Radegunde sheds her folksiness and becomes fierce – especially when one or two of the warriors show signs of wanting absolution. Initially, her anger is expressed in terms of the culture she is in:

“All that child wants is someone more powerful than your Odin god or your Thor god to pull him out of the next scrape he gets into. [...] The Christ does not wipe out our sins only to have us commit them all over again and that is what he wants and what you all want, a God that gives and gives and gives, but God does not give; God takes and takes and takes. He takes away everything that is not God until there is nothing left but God, and none of you will understand that! There is no remission of sins; there is only change and Thorfinn must change before God will have him.”

Gradually, though, she sheds such references, too; and it becomes apparent that this isn’t the historical tale I thought it was, but something science fictional, and the whole meaning shifts. Because Radegunde isn’t the unlikely abbess she appeared to be, either – she has witnessed many, many more violent events than this one – and in her otherness she has an exquisite way of inflicting revenge. “‘I lent him my eyes, that is all’”, she tells the Boy News later: she inflicts upon Thorvald empathy, and thus makes him share her anger.

Of the other stories in the volume – which are (very) loosely linked by snippets of introductory dialogue that frame the stories as lessons presented to an unnamed child – I enjoyed the more lightweight ‘Everyday Depressions’ (original to this collection). It is framed as a series of scatter-brained and faintly unhinged letters from an author to her (surely long-suffering) editor, about a lesbian Gothic romance she is working on. It is, of course, all very meta – and (fiercely) funny – with commentary on structure, plotting, gender politics and sexual morality:

Lady M, having been the innocent instigator of the carnal behaviour, of course feels responsible for Miss B’s death. Sex, you see, is not only unspeakably evil in itself; it leads inevitably to SUICIDE.

‘The Mystery of the Young Gentleman’ (1982), meanwhile, tackles gender even more strongly, focusing on two people – who, like Radegunde in ‘Souls’, seem to be either not human, or post-human – crossing the Atlantic in the late 19th century aboard the SS President Hayes. One (whose diary entries provide the narration) appears to be an adult male, the other a young girl, but from the exchanges between them it becomes apparent that both their ages and their genders are shaped to fit the environment in which they’re travelling, rather than a fixed or fundamental state for them. When a fellow passenger, a doctor, takes a shine to the narrator, farce ensues – but not without a note of sadness, for the limitations that the doctor’s society places on his experience of the world, by making him see only gender binaries, and everything else as a harmful deviation.

This review originally appeared on Eve’s Alexandria.

The Adventures of Alyx, Joanna Russ

The Adventures of Alyx, Joanna Russ (1983)
Review by Nic Clarke

The stories in The Adventures of Alyx are closely linked, although they remain distinct entities. All but one of them feature the same main character: “a neat, level-browed, governessy person called Alyx”, as she is described in the first story, ‘Bluestocking’ (1967); “among the wisest of a sex that is surpassingly wise”. She is – or becomes – a skilled, quick-witted, self-reliant thief and wandering adventurer in a land reminiscent of the late Bronze Age Mediterranean world. This is, in other words, Joanna Russ’ take on sword and sorcery – although, this being Russ, the adventures don’t stay in one genre for long.

Epic heroines were not completely unknown in sword and sorcery before Alyx, but they were hardly common, and Russ takes some care in finding in a place for her in an overwhelmingly male-dominated world. Alyx doesn’t have the preternatural combat prowess of Xena, but she does have many skills:

Now in Ourdh there is a common saying that if you have not strength, there are three things which will serve as well: deceit, surprise and speed. These are women’s natural weapons.

‘Bluestocking’ sets the (laconic) tone for much of what is to come. Alyx comes to the city of Ourdh (“‘this city, this paradise, this – swamp!’”) as part of a group of followers of the god Yp, the sort of faintly ridiculous religion that wouldn’t be out of place among the Discworld pantheon (its tenets include “the venomous hatred of inanimate objects for mankind”). Within two pages she has declared the whole thing nonsensical, and turned to picking pockets instead. Shortly thereafter she takes up with a rich brat of a young woman, Edarra, who wants help to flee both the city and an arranged marriage. The rest of the story follows their travels together downriver, as they get into the inevitable scrapes from which Alyx must save them (some likely, so less so: a brutal fight with some random men, a sea monster, the stove setting fire to their boat) and bicker about who’s going to do the cooking. Edarra even grows up a bit. It’s good fun, and Alyx is an appealingly tough, blunt, resourceful character.

The second piece here, ‘I Thought She Was Afeared Till She Stroked My Beard’ (1967), may or may not come before ‘Bluestocking’. It has the feel of an origin story, and Alyx seems to be younger in it, but precise chronology isn’t really one of the priorities of these tales. Like ‘Bluestocking’, it opens with detached generalities about women and their place in the world:

Many years ago, long before the world got into the state it is in today, young women were supposed to obey their husbands; but nobody knows if they did or not.

…and then spends the rest of the tale deconstructing them, through the person of Alyx, a young farmwife who has an abusive husband and “her head full of pirates”. She murders her husband, cuts off her hair and escapes her old life, finding someone to train her in the skills she’ll need before making her way to Ourdh:

Six weeks later she arrived – alone – at that queen among cities, that moon among stars, that noble, despicable, profound, simple-minded and altogether exasperating capital of the world: Ourdh.

Note the emphasis on “alone”, here; even from the start of her adventures, Alyx is above all self-sufficient, relying only on herself. Even her identity is self-made, and self-claimed: she isn’t named by the narration at any point in ‘I Thought…’ until, at the very end, she names herself (see the passage quoted at the head of this post).

Genre-bending starts in earnest with ‘The Barbarian’ (1968), which starts out as a sword and sorcery tale – Alyx versus an evil (apparent) wizard – but turns science fictional at the end. Alyx has become notorious now (“Alyx, the gray-eyed, the silent woman. Wit, arm, quick-kill for hire”), and has begun to make enemies. Her opponent is, as in the previous story, bigger, stronger and filled with the smug of conviction of his own superiority – as a man, and moreover, here, as a man from the future surrounded by his technology (the title comes from one of his many insults to her). But Alyx, although her physical training remains important to her (“In the dark she felt wolfish, her lips skinned back over her teeth; like another species she made her way with hands and ears”) uses logic and experimentation to find the loophole in a forcefield protecting the time traveller’s tower, and outwits his flashy toys the same way.

The ironically-named ‘Picnic on Paradise’ (1968) is full-blown science fiction. Alyx is now even more the alien outsider who makes those around her slightly uncomfortable with her intensity and sharp humour: she is “a soft-spoken, dark-haired, small-boned woman, not even coming up to their shoulders”, ‘their’ being a group of stranded tourists four millennia into Alyx’s future. She has been charged with escorting them from Station A to Station B (Russ having fun with the sketchiness of the premise, there) across a planet made somewhat inhospitable by war. Alyx, we learn, was accidentally scooped up – literally – by a time-travel device beloning to archaeologists from the future:

“One day they were fishing in the Bay of Tyre and they just happened to receive twenty-odd cubic metres of sea-water complete with a small, rather inept Greek thief who had just pinched an expensive chess set from the Prince of Tyre, who between ourselves is no gentleman. They tell me I was attached to a rope attached to knots attached to a rather large boulder…”

The Trans-Temp Agency apparently recognised talent when they saw it, however, and gave Alyx a job. What follows is arguably Alyx’s most trying adventure yet – and the most disconcerting to read, transplanting as it does an unreconstructed epic heroine, whom we earlier saw battling a sea monster, into such an archetypally sfnal setting. On the rare occasion when Alyx lets us in to her state of mind, it is made clear that this is a rather more than disconcerting experience for Alyx herself: being catapulted between such different worlds, but unable to forget the suffering she has left behind (shades, here, of Radegunde in ‘Souls’), carries with it horror.

It’s certainly the story where she displays the most agitation and even emotional involvement (albeit not, by and large, where the other characters can see). Capable and pragmatic almost to a fault, she is brisk to the point of rudeness in her efforts to rally the group and keep them alive, and can barely contain her frustration with their weaknesses and vanities:

“I have,” said Alyx, “just killed a bear. It was eleven feet high and could have eaten the lot of you. If anyone talks loud again, any time, for any reason, I shall ram his unspeakable teeth down his unspeakable throat.”

Maudey began to mutter, sobbing a little.

“Machine,” she said, “make that woman stop,” and she watched, dead tired, while Machine took something from his pack, pressed it to Maudey’s nose, and laid her gently on the floor. “She’ll sleep,” he said.

“That was not kindly done,” remarked one of the nuns.

Alyx bit her own hand; she bit it hard, leaving marks; she told Machine, Raydos, and Gunnar about the watch; she and they brought more snow into the cave to cushion the others.

As the journey wears on, though, the risk of becoming attached looms even larger than the frustration (“The more they liked her, the more they obeyed, the more they talked of “when we get back”, the more frightened she would have to become”). Looking back over this, I’m reminded of the narrator of We Who Are About To…, who similarly struggles to convince her companions of the fatal gravity of their situation – and faces similar challenges to her competence and her assessment of the situation from men certain they know better than a mere woman. Alyx, though, is more able, and more willing, to lead – and the situation, of course, is not quite so hopeless.

The collection is rounded off by ‘The Second Inquisition’ (1970), a beautifully elegiac tale about reading, imagination, escapism and the idealism we project onto our heroes, set – again an incongruous shift – in 1920s small town America. A teenage girl becomes fixated on the exciting life – half-real, half in her head – of a mysterious visitor who is staying in her parents’ house. The stranger is forthright, confident, strong, and has many skills (it’s a theme); she can, she says,

“kill a man barehanded or learn a new language in six weeks or slit a man’s jugular at fifteen yards with nothing but a pocketknife or climb the Greene County National Bank from the first story to the sixth with no equipment.”

She is apt to casually challenge the assumptions the family holds about her, about women, and about the world. She holds long conversations with the girl (our narrator), who is, not surprisingly, smitten – especially when it emerges that the woman is a time-traveller (a relative of Alyx, or a protegee), and a time war erupts into the middle of the quiet family home. The violence comes as both a shock and a liberation to the narrator, who has been reading HG Wells avidly: adventure has found her, and one she can participate in. But then, just as abruptly and unexpectedly as she arrived, the traveller leaves – turning down the narrator’s inevitable plea (“‘My dear, I wished to take you with me. But that’s impossible. I’m very sorry’”).

I found the ending especially poignant, as the narrator puts away the makeshift time-traveller “uniform” she made in a burst of fannish enthusiasm, returns to her more conventional “middy-blouse and skirt”, and resumes, with sadness, her old life:

Nothing came. Nothing good, nothing bad. I heard the lawnmower going on. I would have to face by myself my father’s red face, his heart disease, his temper, his nasty insistencies. I would have to face my mother’s sick smile, looking up from the flowerbed she was weeding, always on her knees somehow, saying before she was ever asked, “Oh the poor woman. Oh the poor woman.”

And quite alone.

No more stories.

In contrast to all the previous Alyx tales, which conclude with the refrain “But that’s another story”, ‘The Second Inquisition’ seems to signal an end. Yet Russ, in a 2007 interview with Samuel Delany, noted that,

I put a lot of autobiographical detail in that story: the town, the backyard, the little sort of couch or swing they sit on, stuff like that. The dance. All comes from stuff I’ve seen or lived through.

…which gives some support for Gary Wolfe’s reading, in his contribution to On Joanna Russ, of ‘The Second Inquisition’ as an origin story for a science fiction writer – the narrator, inspired by this episode in her life, will go on to write the Alyx stories, all that escapism tempered with experimentation and gender-bending. Delightfully recursive.

This review originally appeared on Eve’s Alexandria.

We Who Are About To…, Joanna Russ

We Who Are About To…, Joanna Russ (1977)
Review by Cheryl Morgan

The classic science fiction story of the 1950’s tells how bold space travellers suffer misfortune out in the void but, through application of scientific skills and raw human courage, they triumph over adversity. Joanna Russ, who has built an entire career out of puncturing stupidity, could hardly let a target like that go begging. Thus her novel, We Who Are About To…, newly re-released by Wesleyan University Press. Samuel Delany, in his introduction to the new edition, explains the set-up far better than I could.

When, in the real world, 95 percent of all commercial airline crashes are one hundred percent fatal and we live in a solar system in which presumably only one planet can support any life at all, from the thirties through the fifties science fiction was nevertheless full of spaceship crashes (!) in which everyone gets up and walks away from the wreckage unscathed — and usually out onto a planet with breathable atmosphere, amenable weather, and a high tech civilization in wait near-by to provide twists in subsequent adventures.

The same, of course, could be said of Star Trek, except that the guys in the red suits often didn’t long survive the crash.

Of course there would not be much of a story if Russ’s space travellers had all been killed in the crash, so let us suppose that some sort of lifeboat system was available and that our heroes somehow manage to land safely on an inhabitable planet. Now all they have to do is survive. To do so they have to come to understand their environment, adapt to it, and most importantly conquer that terrible threat to survival, human nature.

Whereas the typical science fiction story will feature a cast made up of military and scientific types, all convinced of the virtues of order, disciple and cooperation, and possessed of exactly the combination of skills required to allow them to thrive in an alien environment, Russ postulates that her shipwrecked travellers are merely passengers. The crew has bravely gone down with the ship, frantically making last minute attempts to save it before something terminal happens to the engines. Those that are left are rather too used to having things done for them.

The majority of Russ’s characters start out exactly as you would expect from a traditional SF story. They make plans, they talk grandly of colonizing the planet on which they find themselves. They dream of rescue. Only the narrator of the story actually understands just how little they know, and how much trouble they are in. Her attempts to explain the hopelessness of their predicament to her fellow castaways merely get her marked down as a troublemaker who needs to be disciplined by the rapidly developing community.

Then the men sit down and decide that what the colony really needs is more hands. The only way to get that is for the women to have babies, and therefore the women must all agree to allow themselves to be made pregnant as quickly as possible, regardless of the potential risks in the absence of medical facilities, and whether they like it or not. Things go rapidly downhill from there.

No matter how you dress it up, We Who Are About To… is not a pleasant book. The narrator is not at all a nice person, and she very clearly cracks up under the strain of understanding the reality of her situation. Most of the other characters are fairly unpleasant too. And everyone comes to a bad but believable end. There is no happy ending, nor should there be one. It is a book that needed to be written, and Russ did a fine job of producing it. What is more she managed to say what needed to be said in a little over 100 pages. This is, I think, a book that all science fiction fans should read, just to encourage them to ask questions about other books. Once again, well done to Wesleyan for helping it stay in print.

This review originally appeared on Emerald City.

The Two of Them, Joanna Russ

The Two of Them, Joanna Russ (1978)
Review by Cheryl Morgan

Some books get to stay in print because they are huge commercial successes. Others because they won awards. But some books ought to say in print simply because of the light they throw on the history of science fiction. That, I suspect, is an important role of the academic press. And if is probably why Wesleyan University Press is re-issuing novels by Joanna Russ.

Why is it so important that Russ stays in print? Because she is a pivotal figure in the development of feminist science fiction, and indeed of feminism. We can learn a lot about history simply by reading Russ.

The interesting question, however, is whether what she wrote is still relevant today. Are her novels simply a product of the 1970s sex war, or do they have something to say to young women today? Bearing in mind, of course, that many young women today claim that feminism has outlived its usefulness.

The Two of Them is very much about the position of women in society. The two characters of the title are Irene Waskiewicz and Ernst Neumann. She is a rebellious tomboy teenager living in 1950s America who decides to run away from home with her family’s mysterious and handsome friend. He turns out to be an agent of the Trans-Temporal Authority, and he offers he a job in the agency.

Ernst’s surname is almost certainly deliberate. He is a “new man”, someone sympathetic to the female cause. And the point of the story, I suspect, is to show that even he has limits.

The bulk of the book is taken up by an operation that takes Irene and Ernst to Ka’abah, a fundamentalist Muslim community. I suspect Russ would have got into a lot of trouble had she written the book today. Ka’abah is an obvious caricature, emphasizing all of the patriarchal aspects of Islam at the expense of anything else. It is the sort of society that Sheri Tepper would create as a source of bad guys. Russ does occasionally point out that it is something of a mockery of true Islam, but I still think the book would cause a big fuss if it were published new now.

That aside, we are in familiar Tepper territory. The men of Ka’abah treat their women abominably, and essentially keep them as pets. Many of the women go along with this because a) they have been brainwashed from birth to believe that this is the way society is supposed to be, and b) because apart from getting slapped around a lot they think that having nothing to do all day except beautify themselves, shop, and watch soap operas is a pretty cushy number. Irene finds a little girl who wants to be a poet, and determines to rescue her.

So far the book is very much over the top. The men of Ka’abah are cartoon villains. But they are not the point of the story. Certainly the complicity of the Ka’abah women in their own suppression is important. But the real meat of the story comes when Irene analyses Ernst’s reaction to the whole affair. Because, the book seems to suggest, when it comes down to it, all men are the same.

So yes, Ernst might be a Neumann. But while he might support Irene’s right to have a job and to not marry and not have kids, his basic attitude to her can be summed up as, “I’m happy to support you, but you have to understand that women are fundamentally irrational and intellectually inferior, so they can’t be let loose on their own.” Of course he never comes out and says that. The genius of the book is that Russ makes Ernst’s attitude clear while doing nothing more than describe ordinary man-woman interaction. Many women readers will recognize aspects of their male partners in Ernst.

So what is Irene to do about Ernst? She kills him.

This review originally appeared on Emerald City.

The Female Man, Joanna Russ

The Female Man, Joanna Russ (1975)
Review by Larry Nolen

When Janet Evason returned to the New Forest and the experimenters at the Pole Station were laughing their heads off (for it was not a dream) I sat in a cocktail party in mid-Manhattan. I had just changed into a man, me, Joanna. I mean a female man, of course; my body and soul were exactly the same.

So there’s me also.

Joanna Russ’ 1975 novel, The Female Man, still contains the power to provoke reflective thoughts and, in many cases, strong emotional responses thirty-six years after its initial release. Even today, many of the gender issues which she raises in this highly influential novel spark debates (as witnessed in last year’s round of debates over the role of female authors in SF and the perceived need for greater visibility; one such response leading to the creation of the “Russ Pledge” to discuss female SF writers more frequently) over female participation in fields that may formerly (or currently?) be seen as male domains. It is a touchy topic for some to approach the discussion of second-wave feminist critiques, particularly if the reviewer is male, but it is much worse for anyone, regardless of gender, to shy away from exploring a work that explodes discriminatory myths in a complex, wide-ranging narrative.

The Female Man fragments its narrative among four female narrators from parallel worlds: Janet, who comes from the all-female world of Whileaway (a portentous name) where men died from a plague 800 years prior to the events of the novel; Jeannie, a librarian who lives in an alt-US society where the Great Depression has never ended and where women are defined by their marriageability rather than by their talents; Joanna, a 1970s feminist who emulates certain “masculine” qualities in order to succeed in a chauvinist world as the titular “female man”; and Jael, a warrior in a world where men and women openly war with one another. As the story expands from Janet’s initial visit to Jeannine’s world and then Joanna’s, there begins to emerge a mosaic representation of the struggles that women have had to endure: from the catcalls to ingrained views of “feminine” and “masculine” roles to subconscious reactions to certain triggers found in quotidian life. Each character gives voice to these issues, sometimes in a direct fashion, such as the one Joanna gives in Part Six:

I live between worlds. Half the time I like doing housework. I care a lot about how I look, I warm up to men and flirt beautifully (I mean I really admire them, though I’d die before I took the initiative; that’s men’s business), I don’t press my point in conversations, and I enjoy cooking. I like to do things for other people, especially male people. I sleep well, wake up on the dot, and don’t dream. There’s only one thing wrong with me.

I’m frigid.

In my other incarnation I live out such a plethora of conflict that you wouldn’t think I’d survive, would you, but I do; I wake up enraged, go to sleep in numbed despair, face what I know perfectly well is condescension and abstract contempt, get into quarrels, shout, fret about people I don’t even know, live as if I were the only woman in the world trying to buck it all, work like a pig, strew my whole apartment with notes, articles, manuscripts, books, get frowsty, don’t care, become stridently contentious, sometimes laugh and weep within five minutes together out of pure frustration. It takes me two hours to get to sleep and an hour to wake up. I dream at my desk. I dream all over the place. I’m very badly dressed.

But O how I relish my victuals! And O how I fuck!

This quote, along with the first one, represents much of the conflict found within the novel. The Female Man works not only as an excellent SF novel of exploring female identity, but also it serves as an influential work of social commentary that takes as its base a fundamentally Marxist view of society, replete with superstructures and class conflict, and fuses it with second-wave feminist concerns about representation and social equality. It is not a cheery novel; fights rarely are graceful or polite. No, The Female Man stridently argues its points in short, sharp, angry bursts that shake readers’ preconceptions of gender roles.

This can generate confusion and awkwardness, as each gender group struggles to reconfigure their group views on what is “proper”. A male holding a door open for a woman might not be polite (unless he does this for fellow males, perhaps), but instead someone who is subconsciously reinforcing social views that hold women in an inferior, “delicate” role in which the males are to be the chivalrous protectors of feminine dignity. As the four narrators traverse their worlds and see the insidiousness of sexism in a variety of guides, a commonality begins to emerge that links their disparate roles and actions into a thematic whole.

The Female Man is not without its weak points, however. The stridency that makes its points vividly can also be construed as being too full of anger to reflect fully the range of social interactions between males and females and female responses to the world around them. Many readers, male and female alike, may find Russ’ approach to be too stark, too black-and-white for the early 21st century (indeed, third-wave feminism has moved away from several of the approaches championed by second-wave activists). This is said not to gainsay what Russ has created, but rather to note that powerful works often do create reactions against the work as well as those in favor of it. If anything, this is a greater testimony to the influence that The Female Man still possesses over people, female and male alike, and this makes The Female Man one of the most essential fictions ever produced in the late 20th century.

This review originally appeared on SF and Fantasy Masterworks Reading Project.

The Adventures of Alyx, Joanna Russ

The Adventures of Alyx, Joanna Russ (1968)
Review by Niall Harrison

If, like me before I read it, the only things you know about The Adventures of Alyx (originally published as Picnic on Paradise) are that it’s Joanna Russ’s response to heroic fantasy, and one of the canonical examples (along with CL Moore’s Jirel of Joiry) of introducing a female character into a role perceived (or at least assumed to be perceived) as basically male, what do you expect? I think I expected Xena, or Kitiara; what I found is conspicuously different, and rather elegantly set up. Although the world in which Alyx operates is still, in many ways, hostile to women, the world’s creation myth, in which women were created before men, and men were created from an extraneous body part, creates a space for a hero like Alyx to exist. But more than that, it seems to me that thinking about Alyx as a woman is a red herring. What really differentiates Alyx from the other protagonists I’ve been talking about — at least when reading these stories in 2008 — is not her sex, but her character. Unlike Fafhrd, Alyx is not callow; unlike Elric, there is no doubt Alyx is a hero: tough, smart, practical, competent, brave. (And, notably, explicitly not conventionally beautiful, unlike most contemporary tough, smart, etc, female leads.) And unlike Scafloc, her heroism is not doomed; she wins, convincingly, every time. Nor does she suffer much internal anguish in these tales. In short, unlike her male counterparts, Alyx is not only someone you can root for, but someone you might actually be able to stand being.

The Adventures of Alyx collects four short stories and one short novel, all but one of which revolve around Alyx in the way that the Elric stories revolve around Elric — though it’s worth noting that they are tidily-structured short stories, rather than the overstuffed mini-epics of the thin white duke – and none of which are as memorable as the character they showcase. The first tale (published in 1967; originally ‘The Adventuress’, and here ‘Bluestocking’), establishes Alyx as a “pick-lock” and general adventurer-for-hire, although — again, a difference to the men — not an heir to a kingdom, or a noble line. The descriptions of her are in many ways simply descriptions of an average 30-year-old working woman. She is short, with gray eyes, black hair, and freckles. She has an intellectual bent, but has found that her chosen profession “gratified her sense of subtlety” (p 9). Not that she’s unambitious; she has visions of becoming a Destiny, although what that means is never completely clear. The plot that Russ constructs for her seems inadequate. Ostensibly, it involves Alyx recruited to escort a young lady (never referred to as a girl, though she is only 17 and acts, at least to start with, like a spoiled brat) who wishes to run away from an arranged marriage to a rich boor whose previous wives, the narrator heavily insinuates, died in dubious circumstances; in practice, it’s a story that exists primarily to provide a series of trials which Alyx can overcome, demonstrating her toughness, smarts, practicality, competence and bravery in the process. It is not, in other words, a particularly high-stakes story — a distinguishing factor that persists throughout the book; the fate of the world is never in the balance — and nor is it particularly spectacular. An encounter with a sea-monster is typical:

Then she saw the sea monster.

Opinion concerning sea monsters varies in Ourdh and the surrounding hills, the citizens holding monsters to be the souls of the wicked dead forever ranging the pastureless waves of the ocean to waylay the living and force them into watery graves, and the hill people scouting this blasphemous view and maintaining that sea monsters are legitimate creations of the great god Yp, sent to murder travelers as an illustration of the majesty, the might, and the unpredictability of that most inexplicable of deities. But the end result is the same. Alyx had seen the bulbous face and coarse whiskers of the creature in a drawing hanging in the Silver Eel on the waterfront of Ourdh (the original — stuffed — had been stolen in some prehistoric time, according to the proprietor), and she had shuddered. She had thought, Perhaps it is just an animal, but even so it was not pleasant. Now in the moonlight that turned the ocean to a ball of silver waters in the midst of which bobbed the tiny ship, very very far from anyone or anything, she saw the surface part in a rain of sparkling drops and the huge, wicked, twisted face of the creature, so like and unlike a man’s, rise like a shadowy demon from the dark, bright water. It held its baby to its breast, a nauseating parody of human-kind. (p 16-7)

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think this is bad, even if some of the tricks used (an extremely long sentence followed directly by a short, abrupt one, for instance) crop up a bit too frequently throughout the book. But it’s not exciting. First, the forward action of the scene is paused to tell us some stuff about what is believed about sea monsters; and most of the description is vague generalities — “huge, wicked, twisted”. Although we’re told that final image, of a distorted tableau of motherhood, is “nauseating”, the emotion isn’t evoked in us, particularly, and it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the image is more important for its symbolic qualities, particularly when Alyx goes on to kill it in short order.

This is not to say that Anderson and Moorcock’s stories were lacking in symbolism — hardly — but that I think Russ’s goals are somewhat different than theirs. What The Adventures of Alyx has going for it, largely, is voice. I’ve already mentioned the alternate mythology, and the narrator of ‘Bluestocking’ clearly takes some fun in poking at conventional roles, such as the (I presume) heavily ironic comments that Alyx is “among the wisest of a sex that is surpassingly wise”, and that women’s “natural weapons” are “deceit, surprise and speed” (p 19). But there is also a laconic, even mocking element to the voice — and the story construction; although lip service is paid to the idea of Alyx’s charge, Edarra, growing up during their journey together, in fact what happens is that the major part of the journey is elided, and Edarra is suddenly and magically grown up, almost between paragraphs — and a sense that the tone has been chosen not to create a world out of whole cloth, but to subvert one (ours). It’s at odds with the innocent expectation of belief that marks The Broken Sword and the Elric stories, and makes for businesslike, even brusque storytelling.

Russ is also far more impatient even than Moorcock with the boundaries of the type of story she is telling. ‘Bluestocking’, with its nod to Fritz Leiber and all, is actually the only story in the book that could be called straightforward heroic fantasy. Tale two, ‘I Thought She Was Afeard Till She Stroked My Beard’ (also 1967, original title ‘I Gave Her Sack and Sherry’), is an origin story for Alyx that doesn’t mention her by name until the final page — or looked at another way, until Alyx chooses to claim her name. Before then, she is an oppressed wife who escapes from (and, not incidentally, kills) her abusive husband before going out to make her way in the world and train as a fighter. Although she travels for a while with a captain called Blackbeard, and learns some things from him, the narrative is careful to insist that at no time does she need him. ‘The Barbarian’ (1968) looks at first like a return to the format of ‘Bluestocking’. Alyx is approached by a fat man who patronisingly claims to know a lot about her — “‘And now,’ (he pronounced the ‘now’ with peculiar relish) ‘you are getting old [...] You’re thinking of settling down’” (p 50) — and who wishes to recruit her to assist him with a series of break-ins. We can tell he’s a bad guy because he’s stupid (the defects of those Russ wishes us to dislike are usually framed as a kind of stupidity, and in this case we are explicitly told his stupidity offends Alyx) and sure enough, on one break-in he tells Alyx to kill a baby, on the grounds that he claims to know she will grow up to be a cruel queen. Alyx refuses — although as much on the grounds that the man should do his own dirty work as anything else; her first reaction is not “no!” but “What on earth for?” — and subsequently tracks the man to his lair, where it is revealed, for anyone who doubted it, that he is a time-traveller, given to tinkering with history. “My hobby is world-making” (p 63), he says to Alyx, who kills him, and then smashes his machines.

And ‘Picnic on Paradise’, originally published in 1968 as Russ’s first novel, appears to be even more straightforwardly science-fictional. It picks up on the time-travel theme, revealing that Alyx has been brought forward 4,000 years in a sort of temporal archaeology accident, and recruited as an Agent. As the novel opens she’s been dispatched to the planet Paradise, a popular tourist destination caught in a “commercial war”. In an echo of the plot of ‘Bluestocking’, she’s recruited to escort a group of civilians, of varying degrees of uselessness, from A to B — quite literally, from station A to station B, in an example of Russ’s dry humour. Of course, B turns out to have been destroyed when they get there, necessitating a longer and increasingly dangerous journey through cold, mountainous, treacherous terrain to the next-nearest station, at the planet’s pole. In other words, it’s the sort of story that could comfortably be told in a fantasy setting (indeed, the level of sfnal invention on display, with humans having interbred sufficiently so that everyone is a pleasing shade of light brown, and treatments such as “Re-Juve” on offer, is in all honesty not far above what you’ll get in a middling episode of Doctor Who), which perhaps is intended as a comment on the separability (or not) of the two genres. You could even argue that the imposition of the mission on Alyx from higher up the chain of command is The Adventure of Alyx‘s equivalent of the sort of godgames that make Scafloc and Elric’s lives so miserable.

In some ways, ‘Picnic on Paradise’ is not actually very good. For an adventure story it’s baggy, featuring a crowded party of sketchily-differentiated characters, and perhaps a little too much commitment to conveying the mind-numbing tedium that polar expeditions probably come with in real life. Predictably, members of Alyx’s group start falling by the wayside one by one, and equally predictably Alyx grows from being more than a little frustrated with her charges, thinking of herself as a teacher saddled with a class of small children, to considering them to be “her people”. Somewhat to my surprise, I found the most interesting element of the novel to be the relationship that develops between Alyx and one of the male civilians, known as “Machine” and initially introduced as “an idiotic adolescent rebel” (p 74) – and not just for the contrast it presents to the relationships in the other books. ‘Bluestocking’ (very weirdly) ends with Alyx and Edarra finding some men, and the one that Alyx pairs off with may be the new husband we get a glimpse of at the end of ‘The Barbarian’; but of the nuts and bolts of Alyx in a relationship, this is our only sight. Like Scafloc and Elric, she is older than her partner; unlike them, thankfully, there is no suggestion that her attraction to Machine stems from his youth per se, although they do start calling each other “dear” and “darling” with alarming speed, and it’s not actually entirely clear what the attraction does stem from, other than, perhaps, the fact that he’s the only not-entirely-obnoxious, vaguely competent man within several hundred miles. But the scenes of them together are largely thorny and convincing. This is particularly true when Russ is dealing with the collision between Machine’s serious attitude to sex — who has what can only be described as a mechanical dedication to making sure his partner enjoys herself — and Alyx’s rather more passion-led approach. Interestingly, in this Russ positions Alyx as the child: “When you do something, you do it right, don’t you?” asks Machine, trying to explain his approach, to which Alyx promptly says “No,” before explaining that the only reason to do it is “because you want to”, as “any five-year-old child” should know. It’s an interesting exchange, because Alyx’s temper frequently gets the best of her elsewhere in these stories — not always, in fact rarely, for the worst, but not entirely admirably, either.

The collection’s final story, ‘The Second Inquisition’ (1970) changes setting, tone and style yet again — in the process making clear exactly how much control Russ has over those elements of her writing — relocating to 1925, and the narrative of a young woman still living with her parents. She describes an unusually confident visitor who is staying with them, who seems fairly clearly to be one of the tall, indefinably mixed-race people of ‘Picnic on Paradise’s time, and who sure enough turns out to be a time traveller, one of a number of agents trained by Alyx and engaged in a temporal conflict. It’s a story that picks up on one of the most moving exchanges in ‘Picnic in Paradise’, when Alyx is trying to convey to one of the civilians what the world she comes from is like, and what time travel feels like to her:

“Think of that, you thirty-three-year-old adolescent! Twenty-six and dead at fifty. Dead! There’s a whole world of people who live like that. We don’t eat the way you do, we don’t have whatever it is the doctors give you, we work like hell, we get sick, we lose arms or legs or eyes and nobody gives us new ones, we die in the plague, one-third of our babies die before they’re a year old and one time out of five the mother dies, too, in giving them birth.”

“But it’s so long ago!” wailed little Iris.

“Oh not it’s not,” said Alyx. “It’s right now. It’s going on right now. I lived in it and I came here. It’s in the next room. I was in that room and now I’m in this one. There are people still in that other room. They are living now. They are suffering now. And they always live and always suffer because everything keeps on happening. (p 127-8)

This works on several levels: it conveys the shock of transition which Alyx experienced, moving between times; it is metafictionally true, in that just before and just after this exchange we are indeed reading about the people in those other rooms; and of course it’s a reminder that geographical inequality in the real world, today, is as significant as the temporal inequality Alyx is describing. This last is, I think, reinforced by the collection’s overall trajectory from stories about a world that is remote and separate from ours, to stories about a world that is directly and intimately linked to us.

The first four Alyx stories all end with the same line, or a variation on it: “But that’s another story.” ‘The Second Inquisition’ ends with the narrator isolated, having witnessed extraordinary events and a glimpse of a world from which she is excluded, in favour of having to live in reality. “No more stories,” she says, echoing the finality of Stormbringer rather than the ongoing tapestry of The Broken Sword. The sadness of it contrasts with the upbeat expansiveness of all the other endings, but it works better. And there is a sense, too, that the stories say all that Russ wanted them to say. Others — Mary Gentle, Samuel Delany – may have found other routes into the same seams of ore, but I think Russ got the gold she wanted from this mine, and was ready to move on to others.

This review originally appeared on Torque Control.

The Female Man, Joanna Russ

The Female Man, Joanna Russ (1975)
Review by Ian J Simpson

Nature versus nature. An age old debate. Hugh Everett’s Many World Interpretation of quantum mechanics makes it a modern debate. Place the same person with the same genes and the same potentials in different environments with different societies and histories, and see how they develop.

In principle, a wonderful concept for a science fiction novel.

The Female Man is renowned for being a classic feminist work of science fiction. In the interest of disclosure, I am male. However, I wish to discuss this novel not as a feminist tract, but as a science fiction novel.

The plot synopsis is somewhat indescribable. Briefly, there are 4 protagonists; Joanne, Janet, Jeannine and Jael, and they all exist in various alternate histories.

Jeannine is a romantic librarian from a place where the Great Depression continued for many years. She exists for marriage; it will make her complete. Joanna’s home is the most similar to our home. It is the 1970s and she is a funny and intelligent feminist. She has chosen a male gender role in society; hence referring to herself as a female man. Janet is from the world of Whileaway, where men died out from a gender plague centuries ago. She is a peace keeper, other world emissary wife and mother of two. Alice Jael is a radical living in a world where the genders are at war and has brought the women together.

Given this, one might expect a radical piece of science fiction adventure, where women across the different realities join together in search of truth, harmony, justice and equality. What we get instead are a series of set pieces where the women move to a variety of situations where they show each other how they live and more importantly, how women live (and how they are treated by men when men are available). As with all good fiction, the characters are flawed and have motivations in diverse shades of ambiguity. They grow and learn and ultimately become better, or at least better informed, individuals. However, in contrast to most good science fiction, the plot is a side-show. The science fiction within this fiction is negligible at best. I don’t expect detailed information about how and why characters move across realities, or detailed back stories about how the plague affects only one gender, but if you are science fiction, then be science fiction. I read The Female Man in the hope of a great science fiction story, but I what I got was a lecture.

Which brings me nicely to the actual plot. I have nothing against the concept of plot-less fiction; indeed, I have a fondness for meta-fiction, the surreal or streams of consciousness. Naked Lunch is one of my favourite reads. I would compare this novel closely to the latter in terms of style. There are passages of opinion, imagined conversations, style changes and so on. Again, I have no issue with this. In fact, I welcome it. Some of the imagery and prose was very readable. Sometimes, unfortunately, it was unclear who was speaking, as perspectives regularly changed. Reading this book, however, felt like I was in a sermon, not a story. I felt disappointed at that. Sure, the characters move from situation to situation and overcome difficulties and there is coherence in the message as they learn more about each other and how they live. However, I just wasn’t entertained. Whatever the message or agenda, science fiction should be about good stories. And this isn’t one of them.

And Chaos Died, Joanna Russ

And Chaos Died, Joanna Russ (1970)
Review by Joachim Boaz

Joanna Russ, famous for her feminist sci-fi novel The Female Man, weaves together a bizarre (and difficult) novel filled with strange images, peculiar characters, and a fragmented/layered/bewildering narrative structure. And Chaos Died is a startlingly original take on the staple sci-fi themes of telepathy and overpopulation.

This novel deserves be read (and re-read)! A lost classic.

But be warned And Chaos Died is a challenging (and occasionally baffling) experience/trip/stream of conscious hallucination. I echo Fritz Leiber’s praise, And Chaos Died “explores more fully than I have ever seen done what telepathy and clairvoyance would actually feel like”. If that is possible to gauge…

The plot pops up its little head every now and then in a few moments of straightforward prose. Pay special attention to the few pages before Jai Vedh gains his telepathic abilities and one hundred pages (pg 105-107) later to Evne’s interrogation on the spaceship which summarizes a few salient points.

The last third, when Jai Vedh arrives on the overpopulated Earth, is also much more straightforward. However, getting from the first point to the second point will require a dedicated reader — and most likely, a reread. And a peek at Samuel R. Delany’s review available online…

Jai Vedh, an intensely troubled individual, crashes (along with the captain of the the spaceship) on a planet with a lost colony of humans who have developed extraordinary skills including telepathy, telekinesis, teleportation. Their social system and stages of human development are highly unusual — children talk like adults, adults refrain from verbal communication, they have no families/professions/or ranks, and wander around telepathically “communing” with rocks and birds and leaves and each other…

In short, humanity has completely reorganized its goals and entered a vaguely transcendent state — a “spiritual” state? Here Jai Vedh meets a woman by the name Evne who “teaches” him her people’s ways — a section characterized by long passages of cryptic/beautiful images.

Eventually Jai Vedh is “rescued” by a spaceship which returns him to the diametrically opposed society of the overpopulated Earth. Evne, after interrogation by the ship’s officers, flees/teleports from the spaceship to Earth. Jai follows after her. Russ at her most straightforward:

“… the human race slipped more and more under the sea along the continental shelf of the Atlantic; thickly settled three hundred, four hundred, even five hundred feet down, and further out the “floating cities,” though few of these, and a prodigal scattering all the way across of ore-sweeps, floating refineries, and food manufactories. To the computers on the Moon the dawn-line revealed only more of the same and the sunset-line concealed more of the same; up to the altitude of twenty thousand feet people lived, died, bred, and analyzed themselves…” (p123)

Humans living in this overpopulated world have lost their individuality and live in a state of oppression (mental, physical, governmental) — meaning is gained (somewhat) by unusual acts of violence — vending machines dispense weapons.

Jai Vedh wanders aimlessly with a young man named Ivat across this disturbed/drugged landscape inhabited by humanity drained of sensation:

“[Jai] wondered why the crowd-mind is so flat, drug-bound, silence, individuality is all lost, found he could not tune out either the silence or the blast of sound, an unpleasant business of tearing his brain to pieces, falls over a couple in continuous orgasm, a drug thing, lasts hours and hours until the nervous system is used up (he’s heard about it,) clutches at his groin, and thinks…” (p162)

A world consumed by violent desires…

“In the nearest house a young lady, taking off her clothes, steps with a wink into boiling sulphur and lasciviously dies; this is a fantasy and what is really happening is that some dozen people are pulling down the walls and feeding them to a fire; when they finish they’ll have nothing else to do.” (p162).

And Chaos Died is by far not only stylistically but also thematically the most challenging science fiction work I’ve ever read. It takes a while to figure out the tenants of Russ’ utopia let alone the actual sequence of events of the “plot” or the exact meaning of the “actions.” Everything starts to come together in the last third when the Earth sequence can be compared with the utopian society.

The persistent reader will be deeply rewarded… And Chaos Died explores the social ramifications of overpopulation, loss of individuality, de-sensitivity towards violence, etc. I’m still peeling away the layers.

This is social science fiction close to its best.

What an experience!

This review originally appeared on Science Fiction and Other Suspect Ruminations.

The Female Man, Joanna Russ

The Female Man, Joanna Russ (1975)
Review by Martin Wisse

The Female Man is the third book in my list of works by female sf authors I’ve set myself as a challenge to read this year. Of the books on the list it is the most explicitely feminist one, a cri de coeur of “second wave feminism”, a science fictional equivalent of The Feminine Mystique. Written in 1970 but only published five years later it was somewhat controversial, science fiction never having been the most enlightened genre in the first place. Reading it some thirty-five years later it’s tempting to view it as just a historical artefact, its anger safely muted as “we know better now” and accept the equality of men and women matter of factly, its message spent as sexism is no longer an issue, with history having moved on from the bad old days in which The Female Man was written.

Rubbish, of course, but seductive rubbish. The reality is that for all the progress made since The Female Man was published, its anger is not quite obsolete yet, or we wouldn’t have had the current debate about the lack of female science fiction writers in the first place. What’s more, The Female Man ill-fits in this anodyne, whiggish view of history anyway. Russ is much more angry than that. She’s utterly scathing in her view of men in this novel, reducing them to one-dimensional bit players: thick, macho assholes her much more intelligent heroines have to cope with. You might think this “hysterical”, “shrill”, “a not very appealing aggressiveness” but Russ is ahead of you and has included this criticism in her novel already, on page 141: “we would gladly have listened to her (they said) if only she had spoken like a lady. But they are liars and the truth is not in them”. Russ was too smart not to understand that no matter how non-threatening and “rational” The Female Man might have been written, (male) critics would still call it emotional and not worth engaging. But Russ uses her anger as a weapon and tempers it with humour and some of the angriest, bitterest scenes are also grimly witty.

The Female Man is about four women, or four versions of what could be the same woman. There’s Janet Evanston Berlin, from the all-female world of Whileaway, ten centuries in the future, but not our future, who is sent on a crosstime reconnaissance of other Earths. There’s Jeaninne Dadier, a librarian in a WPA library in New York in 1969, on an Earth in which WWII never happened and the Great Depression kept grinding on, lost between her own desire grab the brass ring of marriage and children and her own knowledge/fear that this won’t make her happy either. There’s Johanna, also from 1969 but more like our own and not coincidently sharing a name with her author. And finally there’s Alice Reasoner aka Jael, from an Earth in which men and women live completely separated from each other, in a state of Cold War. It’s Jael who had brought the other three together, to recruit them and their world for the war between the sexes.

Quite obviously, each of the main characters is in a different stage of this war. Janet’s Whileaway is the dream, the utopia, where the struggle has been won for so long it has been forgotten, while Jeannine’s world is one where it still has to start and Jael’s own world is where it has come out in the open. Remains Johanna and her world, which I think we can take to be our own, where this struggle is ongoing but largely unrecognised. One example of this struggle – and of Russ’ sharp wit and sense of humor – is the party Johanna takes Janet to incognito so she gets to witness the mating rituals of the North American male in action– boorishness, aggression, wounded pride.

Despite their symbolic value, the four Js are no cyphers, but fully realised characters and Russ spends most of the book writing their back stories, in their own voices. At the same time these four women are all clearly in essence the same woman, in different circumstances and the way Russ tells her story underscores that. Sometimes she uses the third person to talk objectively about a character and her feelings, sometimes her story is told in the first person, with viewpoints shifting quickly between characters and worlds, where every now and then it becomes impossible to figure out which “I” is actually telling a story. Frequent cutting between stories and short chapters help with this confusion and it takes effort to keep track of who is talking when – you just have to let go in the end and go with the flow.

The Female Man is a tough book, but not a hard book to read. Joanna Russ is a brilliant writer and everything in here sparkles; at times you can only sit there open mouthed with awe. It’s a tough book because of the raw anger Russ has put in it, the anguish and frustration of Jeaninne, Jael and Johanna (he character and the author both). None of these women is happy or able to do anything about their happiness, unlike the well adjusted Janet, who never had to deal with men until she started jumping worlds.

Janet is also the only one with a proper fulfilling sex life without hang-ups, in contrast to the patriarchy-ridden other three. She’s the only one who gets to have sex in the book, with a young woman who until then was continually frustrated with the expectations her family and society expect of her to be satisfied with pretty dresses and babies. “The usual boring obligatory references to Lesbianism”, as Russ again anticipates her critics. Though there is only one overt sex scene in the novel, sexuality is an important current in the book, with Janet and her healthy sexuality a rebuke to the phallocentric assumptions continuously echoed by any male character, unable to understand how anybody could have sex without a penis involved somehow. This is as much a queer book as a feminist book.

This is also a book where there are no important male characters; they’re bit players, caricatures, stereotypes but never important other than as objects for the main characters to have to work around or manipulate. As such it’s a mirror image of about ninety percent of science fiction written up till then and a fair chunk written after it as well. It’s easy not to notice this gender imbalance in ordinary novels: it’s only because it is unusual to have an all-female or largely female cast that you notice.

The Female Man itself is Johanna (Russ) who could only be taken seriously as a human when she turned herself in a man, “one of the boys” having to turn male in her thoughts and attitude to be able to exist on the same level as man are priviledged to do naturally, but at the loss of her female identity.

The Female Man is excellent if not free of flaws – Russ’s descriptions of the “changed” and “half changed” feminised men of Manland in Jael’s world is transphobic in effect if not perhaps in intent – but despite this, this is a classic science fiction novel anybody interested in the genre should read.

This review originally appeared on Cloggie.