Joanna Russ. Modern Masters of Science Fiction

Extract

Joanna Russ is best known for her feminist science fiction, particularly The Female Man (1975), yet her legacy reaches far beyond this novel and remains underexplored. In her multilayered survey, Gwyneth Jones – herself a science fiction writer – speaks in many interlacing voices that give us a broad view of Russ as a storyteller, critic, and political thinker who grounded her artistic experimentation in materialist political philosophy. Joanna Russ is a delightful book, and one of its charms lies in the challenge it hands to us: much too short for what it contains, it opens multiple avenues for further attention to this “Modern Master of Science Fiction” – exactly what one wants in a book like this.

Jones moves through Russ’s career as a writer from the 1960s to the 1980s in seven steps, punctuated by her most significant contributions to science fiction and supplemented by references to her personal life: (1) the proto-feminist Alyx stories (late 1970s), (2) New Wave science fiction and her second novel And Chaos Died (1970), (3) the explicitly feminist The Female Man (1975), (4) the debate around women and science fiction in the Khatru Symposium (1975), (5) We Who Are About To… (1977), (6) The Two of Them (1978), and finally (7) the short story cycle Extra(Ordinary)People (1984), a critique of her own previous approaches to feminism. Each of the chapters deftly switches perspectives from critical readings of Russ’s fiction to snippets of Russ’s own critical voice in her book reviews and critical essays.