Joanna RussBesprekingen

Story: 1 / 10
Characters: 2
Setting: 3
Prose: 2

Literally, the worst book I've ever read [ Sin noticias de Gurb was the previous worst ]. A feminist science fiction book sounded interesting, mostly because the genre is dominated by male leads. However, The Female Man doesn't have a story at all. A lot of books will have no direction, but the story continues on nevertheless. However, Russ simply introduces a few characters and places without creating any events. The characters do not do anything. Compound that with a lot of jumping around and a critically-reflective narrator and the worst book ever written results.
Do not read unless paid...

This is a complex and twisty book, and I got a lot more from it than I did on my first time reading it as a teenager. The sexual politics are fascinating and eerie, both achingly familiar and historically alien. Not for the literal reader.

A woman from a possible future, in which Earth is called Whileaway, comes back to what was the modern day at the time of writing. It doesn't really fit in with her other famous short story set on Whileaway where Whileaway is another planet and has been free of men for centuries with the short story dealing with first contact when some men turn up in a spaceship. This novel is more fantastic than SF and features women who are the same character but from very different alternative realities - at least I think so!

I read this ages ago, but someone reminded me that Jael's world has what are basically trans women living in the "male" space and the book treats them hideously. Like. They're presented as clearly women, and treated as women inside the male-only space, including being subject to abuse for being women, they're literally called "feminine", but they're not "real women". As soon as the main character women see a "half-changed", they get angry and hate them. The "changed and half-changed" are presented as horribly as possible. It's fucking vile. Like. Trans women were not totally unknown when Russ wrote this book. But she talks about them with a hatred that the men don't receive. Being a "half-man" is worse than being a "real man" to her, I guess.

The rest of the book has its moments and some deeply moving parts and it's incredibly personal but also often incredibly confusing because of the weird structure. It's very stereotypically second-wave feminist. Some of the ideas are good but I can't rate a book highly which has such a "Transexual Empire" vision of trans women.

By examining the progression of bad faith arguments used to belittle writing done by women, each progressively more desperate/illogical, Russ shows how flawed and dangerous much critical analysis of women’s work can be. As someone who doesn’t do a lot of academic reading, this was a slough in parts. However, Russ makes excellent points regarding the literary canon, college syllabi, and cultural values- and this was written in ‘83! While much has changed in the publishing industry, there are still gaps in racial diversity and pay rates, as well as in syllabi around the world. Overall, this was an excellent read, if a little dense for me at times, and is, unfortunately, still very relevant.

Joanna Russ: Novels & Stories is an excellent collection of some of Russ's best fiction. You've probably heard the name if you're a science fiction reader but you may not have read a lot of her work. This is a great place to start.

I was pleased to see that A Game of Vlet was included with the other Alyx stories, the copy of The Adventures of Alyx that I have doesn't include it. Admittedly, I don't know if later editions include it.

Russ wasn't just a great science fiction writer, she pioneered feminist science fiction criticism, and her critical works are every bit as interesting as her fiction.

I would highly recommend this to any fans of science fiction, especially speculative science fiction. Whether this serves as an introduction or a handy volume because you might no longer have some of her work, it will be an excellent addition to your library.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.

I confess I couldn't get into this the way I anticipated (and I tried twice), but there were some quotable bits:

…I wept aloud, I wrung my hands, crying: I am a poet! I am Shelley! I am a genius! … Lady, your slip’s showing. …

There is the vanity training, the obedience training, the self-effacement training, the deference training, the dependency training, the passivity training, the rivalry training, the stupidity training, the placation training. How am I to put this together with my human life, my intellectual life, my solitude, my transcendence, my brains, and my fearful, fearful ambition? I failed miserably and thought it was my own fault. You can’t unite woman and human any more than you can unite matter and anti-matter; they are designed to not to be stable together and they make just as big an explosion inside the head of the unfortunate girl who believes in both.

Do you enjoy playing with other people’s children-for ten minutes? Good! This reveals that you have Maternal Instinct and you will be forever wretched if you do not instantly have a baby of your own (or three or four) and take care of that unfortunate victimized object twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, for eighteen years, all by yourself. (Don’t expect much help.)

Are you lonely? Good! This shows that you have Feminine Incompleteness; get married and do all your husband’s personal services, buck him up when he’s low, teach him about sex (if he wants you to), praise his technique (if he doesn’t), have a family if he wants a family, follow him if he changes cities, get a job if he needs you to get a job, and this too goes on seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year forever and ever amen unless you find yourself a divorcee at thirty with (probably two) small children. (Be a shrew and ruin yourself, too, how about it?)

Paraíso es el más hermoso de los mundos, un planeta para turistas compuesto exclusivamente de montañas, colinas, arrecifes de coral, desiertos, cascadas, ríos, lagos y un cielo cambiante, sin más recursos que su propia belleza. Pero la guerra ruge a su alrededor. La más increíble de las guerras: sin bombas, sin radiaciones, sin virus... una guerra aterradora, en el seno de una sociedad aberrante.
Y, en medio de este caos, Alyx, una agente especial de la Trastemporal reclutada hace cuatro mil años en la antigua isla de Creta, en un lejano planeta llamado Tierra, recibe la misión de conducir a un grupo de refugiados, extraños híbridos indefensos, al planeta que es un paraíso no sólo de nombre: Raydos el pintor de colores planos; Gavrily, el importante personaje planetario; la problemática Iris; Maudey; y, sobre todo, Máquina, la revolucionaria psiónica, cuya mente está conectada constantemente a Nircana, Estación Nada...

This was a good book but difficult to follow. There are four woman all versions of the same one in different parallel worlds whose names all start with J. As a result I kept confusing them. But that may be because I took a few weeks to read what is a relatively short book. And I do wonder if Joanna Russ intended for the reader to confuse these different characters. What I very much appreciated about this novel was the palpable sense of rage that must be felt by women living in a patriarchal society. I have never before gotten a sense of the injustice and belittlement that must be felt by women as I have reading this book. And from that perspective alone, this book is worth reading.

This book is bizarre, experimental, disturbing, and oddly fun.

Irene Waskiewicz, norteamericana de origen polaco, rebelde ante todo, logra convertirse en agente de Trans-Temporal. Sabe que nunca lo hubiese conseguido sin la ayuda de Ernst Neumann, su amante y compañero en las misiones de Trans-Temp.
Se les encomienda una misión en un planeta que es una réplica, en plástico, del mundo de "Las mil y una noches". En aquel ambiente absurdo, la rebeldía de Irene crece hasta el paroxismo que la llevará a contravenir todas las reglas y, por último, al asesinato. Y de todos los lugares del Universo que había visitado, sólo le quedó uno adonde huir: la Tierra.

4.5 los dos novelas
5 stars Houston, Houston, Do You Read?
4 stars Souls

"Souls," Joanna Russ, 4 stars
Somewhere in England (?) And in time, there is an abby, and an abbess. A Viking ship comes to steal their treasures and rape their nuns and make slaves of their folk.
The abbess is a wise nun, who never panicked when the Vikings came to ravage the Abby. She instead talks to the leader:
" '..you are a very clever man, torvald. I beg your pardon, Thorvald. I keep forgetting. But as to what men want from women, if you ask the young men, they would only wink and dig one another in the ribs, but that is only how they deceive themselves. That is only body calling to body. They themselves want something quite different and they want it so much that it frightens them. So they pretend it is anything and everything else: pleasure, comfort, a servant in the home. Do you know what it is that they want?'
'What?' Said Thorvald.
'The mother,' said Radegunde, 'as women do, too; we all want the mother...' "
I agree.

Inside of the Abbess, there is another being. All these years Radegunde has been playing the Abbess, the mother Superior. When Thorvald and his men attack the Abby, and break their promise not to hurt the inhabitants, it brings forth The hidden Radegunde:
" '...he said, 'out of my way then, old witch!'
She began to cry in sobs and gulps. She said, 'one is here but another will come! One is buried but another will rise! She will come, Thorvalvd!' and then in a low, quick voice, 'do not push open this last door. There is one behind it who is evil and I am afraid' --but one could see that he was angry and disappointed and would not listen. He struck her for a second time and again she fell, but with a desperate cry, covering her face with her hands...
...I could see the Abbess clearly -- at that time I did not wonder how this could be, with the Shadows from the Tallow dip half hiding everything in their drunken dance -- but I saw every line in her face as if it had been full day and in that light I saw Radegunde go away from us at last.
have you ever been at some great King's Court or some Earl's and heard the storytellers? There are those so skilled in the art that they not only speak for you what the person in the tale said and did, but they also make an action with their faces and bodies as if they truly were that man or woman, so that it is a great surprise to you when the tale ceases, for you almost believe that you have seen the tale happen in front of your very eyes and it is as if a real man or woman had suddenly ceased to exist, for you forget that all this was only a teller and a tale.
So it was with the woman who had been Radegunde. She did not change; it was still Radegunde's gray hairs and wrinkled face and old body in the peasant woman's brown dress, and yet at the same time it was a stranger who stepped out of the Abbess Radegunde's as out of a gown dropped to the floor. The stranger was without feeling, though Radegunde's tears still stood on her cheeks, and there was no kindness or joy in her... "

The little boy who is now an old man, and is relating the talr to us, the reader, was Radegunde's little Foster son. When Radegunde, the Abbess, changed into Radegunde, the spiritual Other, she went away, but not before she left a little fire of contentment inside of her foster son. She knew he would be suffering from the abandonment, so her last gift to him was a lasting contentment in his heart:
"But something troubles me even there, and will not be put to rest by the memory of the Abbess's touch on my hair. As I grow older it troubles me more and more. It was the very last thing she said to me, which I have not told you but will now. When she had given me the gift of contentment, I became so happy that I said, 'Abbess, you said you would be revenged on Thorvald, but all you did was change him into a good man. That is no revenge!'
What this saying did to her astonished me, for all the color went out of her face and left it gray. She looked suddenly old, like a death's head, even standing there among her own true folks with love and joy coming from them so strongly that I myself might feel it. She said 'I did not change him. I lent him my eyes; that is all.' Then she looked beyond me, as if at our village, at the Norsemen loading their boats with weeping slaves, at all the villages of Germany and England and France where the poor folks sweat from dawn to dark so that the great Lords may do battle with one another, at castles under siege with the starving folk within eating mice and rats and sometimes each other, at the women carried off or raped or beaten, at the mother's wailing for their little ones, and beyond this at the Great wide world itself with all its battles which I had used to think so grand, and the misery and greediness and fear and jealousy and hatred of folk one for the other, save -- perhaps - for a few small bands of savages, but they were so far from us that one could scarcely see them."



If you know that James Tiptree, Jr, is the pen name of Alice Sheldon, then you understand more about how the author could write a story like"Houston, Houston, Do You Read?". Her understanding of the male psyche, with its need to control and keep down women, makes reading stories like this one a salve for someone who's been hurt by a man trying to control their life, and come out the other side. Sadly, she suffered so much in her life, that she took her own life.

"Houston, Houston, Do You Read?", 5 stars
A wonderful story, my fantasy come true. An Earth where an epidemic came and made all the men sterile. When they died off, peace reigned.

A group of astronauts, from Earth circa the 1970s, have made a trip around the Sun and are headed back to earth. But something happened to them on the way back, they passed through an anomaly, or a prick of a black hole, it's never explained, but it jumps them into the future. They're in great denial at first, but eventually they have to accept what has happened, that they have jumped 300 plus years into the future.
On their communications line, they begin receiving messages from another spacecraft:
" 'judy?' Luna Central or whoever it is says. 'They don't answer. You want to try? But listen, we've been thinking. If these people really are from the past this must be very traumatic for them. They could be just realizing they'll never see their world again. Myda says these males had children and women they stayed with, they'll miss them terribly. This is exciting for us but it may seem awful to them. They could be too shocked to answer. They could be frightened, maybe they think we're aliens or hallucinations even. See?'
5 seconds later the nearby girl says, 'da, margo, we were into that too. Dinko. Ah, Sunbird? Major Davis of Sunbird, are you there? This is Judy Paris in the ship Gloria, we're only about a million kay from you, we see you on our screen.' She sounds young and excited. 'Luna Central has been trying to reach you, I think you're in trouble and we want to help. Please don't be frightened. We're people just like you. We think you're way off course if you want to reach Earth. Are you in trouble? Can we help? If your radio is out can you make any sort of signal? Do you know Old Morse? You'll be off our screen soon, we're truly worried about you. Please reply somehow if you possibly can, Sunbird, come in!'
Dave sits impassive. Bud glances at him, at the Port window, gazes stolidly at the speaker, his face blank. LoriMer has exhausted surprise, he wants only to reply to the voices. He can manage a rough signal by heterodyning the probe beam. But what then, with them both against him?"

Finally accepting the truth, the astronauts accept help from the women. They will have to travel close enough to be able to go outside of their spaceship and jetpack over to theirs. They have some time, while they travel towards the women's ship:
" 'Earth is making up a history for you, Sunbird,' the Margo voice says. 'We know you don't want to waste power asking, so we thought we'd send you a few main points right now.' She laughs. 'It's much harder than we thought, nobody here does history.'
.. .'Let's see, probably the most important is that there aren't as many people as you had, we're just over 2 million. There was a world epidemic not long after your time. It didn't kill people but it reduced the population. I mean there weren't any babies in most of the world. Ah, sterility. The country called Australia was affected least.' Bud holds up a finger.
'and North Canada wasn't too bad. So the survivors all got together in the South part of the American states where they could grow food and the best communications and factories were. Nobody lives in the rest of the world but we travel there sometimes. We have five main activities, was industries the word? Food, that's farming and fishing. Communications, transport, and space -- that's us. And the factories they need. We live a lot simpler than you did, I think. We see your things all over, we're very grateful to you. Oh, you'll be interested to know we use zeppelins just like you did, we have six big ones. And our fifth thing is the children. Babies. Does that help? I'm using a children's book we have here.'
The men had Frozen during this recital: LoriMer is holding a cooling bag of hash. Bud starts chewing again and chokes."

The men find out that the epidemic made men sterile.
" 'is it still dangerous, Doc?' Dave asks. 'What happens to us when we get back home?'
'they can't say. The birth rate is normal now, about 2% and rising. But the present population may be resistant. They never achieved a vaccine.'
'only one way to tell,' Bud says gravely. 'I volunteer.'
Dave merely glances at him. Extraordinary how he still commands. Not submission, for Pete's sake. A team.
The history also mentions the riots and fighting which swept the world when humanity found itself sterile. Cities bombed, and burned, massacres, panics, mass rapes and kidnapping of women, marauding armies of biologically desperate men, bloody cults. The crazies. But it is all so briefly told, so long ago. List of honored names. 'We must always be grateful to the brave people who held the Denver Medical Laboratories -' and then on to the drama of building up the helium supply for the dirigibles.
In three centuries it's all dust, he thinks. What do I know of the hideous 30 Years War that was three centuries back for me? Fighting devastated Europe for two generations. Not even names."

Lorimer tries to defend the mess that men had made of the world in the past:
"...'I'm a man. By God yes, I'm angry. I have a right. We gave you all this, we made it all. We built your precious civilization and your knowledge and comfort and medicines and your dreams. All of it. We protected you, we worked our balls off keeping you and your kids. It was hard. It was a fight, a bloody fight all the way. We're tough. We had to be, can't you understand? Can't you for Christ's sake understand that?'
another silence.
'We're trying,' Lady Blue says. "'We are trying, Dr Lorimer. Of course we enjoy your inventions and we do appreciate your evolutionary role. But you must see there's a problem. As I understand it, what you protected people from was largely other males, wasn't it? We've just had an extraordinary demonstration in that. [Bud tries to rape one of the Judys.] You have brought history to life for us.' Her wrinkled brown eyes smile at him; a small tea-colored matron holding an obsolete artifact.
'but the fighting is long over. It ended when you did, I believe. We can hardly turn you loose on earth, and we simply have no facilities for people with your emotional problems.'
'besides, we don't think you'd be very happy,' Judy Dakar adds earnestly.
'We could clone them,' says Connie. 'I know there's people who would volunteer to mother. The young ones might be all right, we could try.' "

The reader can figure out what happens to the antique spacemen.

The book, 2 stars, the story "The Extraordinary Voyages of Amèlie Bertrand," 3 stars.

Classic science fiction portraying the difference society makes to gender presentation.

review of
Joanna Russ's And Chaos Died
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - October 17-20, 2020

For the complete review go here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/1305947-joanna-russ?chapter=1

Long before I started reviewing the bks I read I'd read Joanna Russ's The Female Man (1975) b/c I was interested in gender issues. I also read her Picnic on Paradise (1968). I remember thinking they were ok but, basically, they didn't do much for me. It took And Chaos Died (1970) for me to finally be impressed.

The 1st epigraph puts the title in context.

"They had noticed that, whereas everyone else had seven apertures, for sight, hearing, eating, breathing and so on, Chaos had none. So they decided to make the experiment of boring holes in him. Every day they bored a hole, and on the seventh day, Chaos died.
— Chuang Tzu" - p 5

I'd 1st come across that story in John Cage's "Indeterminacy", text 27:

The Four Mists of Chaos,
the North, the East,
the West,
and the South,
went to visit
Chaos himself.
He treated them all very
kindly and when they were
thinking of leaving,
they consulted among
themselves how they might repay
his hospitality.
Since they had noticed
that he had no holes
in his body,
as they each had (eyes,
nose, mouth, ears, etc.),
they decided
each day to provide
him with an opening.
At the
end of seven days,
Kwang-tse tells us,
Chaos died.

Notice that in this telling the holes are provided rather than bored. That gives quite a different impression, doesn't it? It's not so aggressive.

The gist of the book concerns how people change under telepathic conditions. It's excellent for that. Two humans have crash-landed on a planet where the human occupants are ordinarily telepathic & have other abilities that the unwilling guests are uncomfortable w/.

""I am not going any."

"Jai saw fingers flashing among cards, for some reason, someone picking out words, lips moving, looking over her shoulder and laughing: yes, that's it—

""I am not going any where," corrected the woman. She shook hands abruptly with the Captain. She said "Galactica, yes?" Again the words were perfect, slightly seperated. "Ja?" she said, then shook her head. "Sorry. I am not used." She made a face. She stepped toward Jai, twitching down the skirt of her short, sleeveless shift, brown. (Russet, he thought professionally. Spice, chocolate, sand, taupe, Morocco. What nonsense.) She sat down abruptly on the grass, crossing her knees. "I'm not used to talking this at all," she finally said, rather quickly. "My hobby. You fit well, yes?"" - p 13

The main male character is gay, a probably somewhat unusual characterization in SF in 1970, hence manifesting Russ's gender-bending tendencies.

""I don't like women," said Jai Vedh suddenly and dryly. "I never have. I'm a homosexual."

""Oh?" said the Captain, taken aback for a moment" - p 17

The shipwrecked pair try to puzzle out what's happening around them.

""What in the name of Everything is going on?" said the Captain. "What? Do you know?"

""Everything," said Jai Vedh.

""Huh?"

""I don't mean I know everything; I know nothing. I don't know." And he sat and buried his face in his hands.

""Books!" said the Captain, somewhat more steadily. "Books, not tapes. There can't be three dozen in the library, they're that rare. And here they are. Who the devil puts real books in an escape capsule?"

""The same person who put you and me in it together," said Jai Vedh." - p 21

Fortunately, the door-latch started talking to them.

"My apologies, squeaked the door-latch. The woman clung to the doorway like a fish.

"Frontal attack . . . too much stress . . . inconvenience for you . . . try in morning . . . next week . . . next month . . . times cures all things . . . you'll forget." - p 28

THEN they came down in the landing capsule.

"They came down in the escape capsule the next morning: Jai Vedh safely strapped in and trying to control his air-sickness. Outside the round porthole, the cloud strata streamed by; the ship bucked like a freight elevator. They blasted a crater in the woods and around that a good, flat, rock rim—fused rock and mud with the steam driven out of it. Not even the ashes of the burnt grass remained. They stepped out on to the orange grass under the yellow-leaved trees—it was autumn. The Captain shook hands unaffectedly with the young woman in the simple brown dress who had been delegated to welcome them." - p 33

""I know, I know," she interrupted, suddenly ducking round the doorway into the sun. "You must go back to your ship and cannibalize the motor for a radio. That's what one always does, isn't it? You have such trite ideas." She was swinging by one hand, into visibility and out of it; she added, "If you wait, you know, we'll bring you the equipment we came down with."

""Your what?" said the Captain.

""Our equipment," she said. "If you work hard, you can make your ship over in six months and not wait the rest of your life for a rescue. You would find that dull, I think."

""And you never rescued yourselves!" said Jai Vedh suddenly. "Because you didn't want to. Am I right?"

""You would guess eggs if you saw the shells," said the woman; "That's a compliment. Come on,"" - p 35

""By the way," she said in a low voice, "I know what it means to cannibalize; it means to eat something. I heard about that." She seemed to hesitate in the half-dark.

""But tell me, please," she said, "what does it mean exactly—radio?"" - p 36

It's Russ's wonderful way of making speech confusing in a way accounted for by telepathy that makes this novel as great as it is. Note that the woman says "cannibalize the motor for a radio" but then shows that she doesn't quite understand "cannibalize" & doesn't understand "radio" at all. So where did she get the words from & how did she succeed in stringing them together in a way that makes sense?

The Captain, at least, is inclined to think that the planet they've crashed on is primitive — &, yet, they have a one syllable word for a specific large prime number. That doesn't compute.

""Eleven thousand, nine hundred and seventy-seven is Ftun. I give you my own, improper, accented version. One syllable.["]" - p 47

We're not talking one, many here.

The children aren't telepaths yet.

""I can talk," said the little girl. There was a moment's silence.

""Actually," she continued with sudden fluency, "it's because they're grown-ups. Grown-ups are horrid. They say 'Oh, he'll be all right.' They haven't the slightest compassion. This is because they can whatchamacallit. I can't whatchamacallit because I'm nine. I can talk, however, as you see. Now you say something."

""Telepath," said Jai Vedh automatically.

""No," said the little girl. "Talk, not telepath. Say 'how do you do.'["]" - p 59

Another nice detail, eh? Imagining the dilemma of children surrounded by telepaths who barely talk.

""My name," said Jai solemnly, "is Jai Vedh. Then we do what's called 'shaking hands.' " He put his out. She held out hers.

""Up and down?" she said. "How very interesting. I am Evne's daughter, my name is Evniki, that means little Evne and I am parthenogenetic.["]"

[..]

""I'm nine," she went on pedantically, "but actually I'm fifteen. I've slowed myself down. That's called 'dragging your feet.' Mother keeps telling me 'Evniki, don't drag your feet,' but catch me hurrying into it!["]" - p 60

"["]It develops in adolescence. It allows you to know where everyone is, what everyone is thinking and feeling. Everyone else knows what you are thinking and feeling. You can transport yourself from place to place instantaneously, you can levitate, you can perceive and manipulate objects at a distance, from what size I don't know but it goes down to the microscopic—no, the sub-microscopic—size. And I think you can perceive everything directly: mass, charge, anything. And you play with them. You play with the wavelength of light.

"". . . and with gravity . . ." he added." - p 64

Russ's treatment of these incredible abilities is another thing that makes this novel great. Instead of completely weaponizing them into a reductionist us-vs-them scenario, she humanizes these abilities & shows those w/ them as playful. It's fun. A character explains.

"["]Chuang Tzu speaks of ming, generalized internal perception; this is ming. You and I are like the ivy plant and the squirrel, this is an old fable, the squirrel on the branch runs down to where the branches join and up again, but the ivy plant, which is bound to the branch, cannot see where the squirrel went and says: 'How did you get from here to there instantaneously? How did you get a nutshell from here to there instantaneously?' The squirrel explains. The ivy plant says 'Branch? What are you talking about, "branch"? There is no "branch"; there is no "down"; there is only this.'" - p 66

Fascinating, eh? I wonder, though, whether the old fable fails to take into account the root network.

""Hold your breath!" (shaking her) "And talk! Talk! Talk!"

""No!" screamed Evne. "Can't! Forgot!" and she flung herself away into the bushes and the heather, rolling over and over, then tearing things up and hitting her knees with her fists, and finally—with a kind of return to sanity—deliberately and vehemently beating her head against the ground. Jai felt pain in his temples until his head rang." - p 75

It's easy to forget how to speak when you're telepathic, esp if you're experiencing emotional upheaval.

Jai discovers what books are like on this planet.

"The ninth book appeared to be a collection of anatomical sketches and cross-sections; the binding cracked loudly as he opened the book, and the open page said to him in a whisper:

"Everyone understands a picture.

"He gave it to know that this was not entirely true.

"But take you, for instance, said the page in a soft flattering voice. You—

"He shut the book. Opened again to the same page, it at once began, softly, Everyone understands a picture, and he shut it again and put it under his arm. It was a machine. It had not, of course, spoken in words." - p 79

A search party arrives that's been looking for the crashed people. That doesn't bode well for the people already there.

"Some information,emphatic but inexplicable, about the relation of a (complex) to a (complex) to a (complex) shot at him out of the Northwest, crossed the sky, and disappeared below the Southeastern horizon.

"She said:

""It's your radio. They've come."" - p 86

Things have been rolling along pretty rough & tumble & then this?

""I'm thinking," replies Evne in the voice of a golem. "I love you," she croaks. She wheels about, heads in another direction; one arm (alive) tremblingly pleads with him, walks itself up his arm into his armpit and nests there in great fear of the world outside, cozily snoozing, singing We two, We two. They went into new country, gullies choked with scrub, elderberry bushes, things that whipped back into their bodies and faces. Evne talked to herself in a series of unitelligible nasalities like those of the drowned, bubbles like a corpse's voice. "Don't be alarmed," she says in a voice of scraped lead and walks into a bees' nest; no one was stung." - p 87

I, personally, find that to be a scene of great emotional power. Alas, the landing search party has some ideas for exploitation that, um, the sympathetic reader just. can't. agree. w/.

"officers discussed with a sober Captain the military uses of the think-folk, to study, to duplicate. to betray." - p 94

Jai & Evne are taken aboard. They're in a guest room, the guest is coming.

"She had milk-blue eyes, cropped straw hair, a butcher's smock, and spiked sandals. She had enormous breasts, two wells of silicone jelly, enormous buttocks, a faked, crowded waist, dyed eyes, dyed hair, and no uterus. Jai forced himself to concentrate on the unaltered parts that interlaced with the rest, the pearly organs that budded around her lungs and in her abdomen, lacy strips of flesh marking repeated surgical scars, some normal circulation left; you could, after all, think of her as the victim of a bad accident." - pp 98-99

Hi. Lar. I. Ous.

The attempts to militarily exploit our heroes backfire far more dramatically than was expected because their abilities are far beyond the military's imaginings.

"There were people running along the corridor outside, new people with souls so bad, so murderously professional, that it stood the hair up on his head. There were things whose purpose he did not even want to guess at. He bellowed again.

"God will provide, said the wisp, playfully or prudishly.

"So he jumped.


"He came down in a park, at night. There was nobody near." - p 114

Jai Vedh has developed abilities thanks to Evne that enable him to teleport from the spaceship where the military was thinking they had him captive to Earth. Nice. Earth is quite a place.

"The girl had thrown her arms around another passer-by and was saying, "You have disappointing eyes. I don't like you. Do you want to fuck?["]" - p 119

The Earth is overpopulated w/ humans.

For the complete review go here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/1305947-joanna-russ?chapter=1

Swift, stylized, fun. All the world building is done via dialogue. I was never quite sure what to expect. Look forward to reading more Russ.

Swift, stylized, fun. All the world building is done via dialogue. I was never quite sure what to expect. Look forward to reading more Russ.

Even at 120 pages, the novel felt long--much of it is the starving narrator's stream-of-conscious ramblings. I appreciate it for its caustic take on the Star Trek, triumph-of-the-human-spirit optimism. But fun to read? No.

This was very much a breakthrough book when it was first published in 1975.

First, it was written by a woman writer, using her real (and recognizably female) name; second there's nary a rocket ship in sight; third, it deals with feminism at its 70s-era angriest; and fourth, it tosses most narrative traditions right out the window.

Obviously, it's not everyone's cup of tea. Some of it is dated. Some of it remains insightful and bitterly funny. And some of it attempts to shock with its frank sexuality -- and in these days of just-about-anything-goes, that may be where it shows its age the most.

The story, such as it is, wanders between three characters (and an occasional ephemeral, unnamed fourth) -- Jeannine, whose Earth never emerged from the Great Depression but which also never underwent WWII; Joanna, whose world is very much like our own; and Janet, whose world is not only vastly different than ours, but is also several millennia ahead of "our" timeline. There's a slight nod to the notion of diverging realities, in which each action splits off an entirely new future and which therefore allows the story to sneak in under the edges of the science fiction tent -- a tent which had been considerably enlarged in the preceding decade.

There is a vague plotline of sorts that emerges almost at the end of the novel, without which the entire book would be but a thin veneer over a feminist polemic pointing out how repressed, exploited, and psychologically abused women were at the hands of those beastly males.

At this remove, the novel verges on becoming an historical oddity -- angry and literate but flawed by its over-reliance on style over substance.

Pretty much all I knew about this going in was that it was expanded from Russ's equally famous short story "When It Changed" (or at least, the story was published first; as I understand it, she may have either written them more or less at the same time or adapted the story out of a piece of the in-progress book). If you've read the story, which you should, it in no way prepares you for what this book is. "When It Changed" is a pretty short, straightforward, and vividly written piece that openly mocks the old-school SF idea that the inhabitants of an all-female world would be thrilled to meet male visitors and would learn from them how to have a fuller human existence; in the story, the women of the planet Whileaway are instantly suspicious of these Earth dudes, don't think they're at all essential, and correctly guess that Earth can't be trusted to let Whileaway keep its own way of life. But the story would work as a response to that kind of sexist genre cliché even if the astronauts had never shown up, because of how Russ in a casual realist style uses the narrator's daily life, and her interactions with family and colleagues and enemies, to quickly sketch for us a world that clearly still has the full range of human concerns and behavior and hasn't had any reason to sort them into gendered categories.

Janet Evason, one of the three and a half main characters in The Female Man, is a visitor from Whileaway—which now is a future version of Earth rather than a different planet, but otherwise it's a pretty similar place to the one in "When It Changed", and Russ goes into a little more detail about their society in what at first seems like a fairly familiar utopian-novel style. It's not a perfect utopia, people can be discontent with their social roles or just dislike each other and there's a certain amount of small-scale violent conflict, but they've put a lot of scientific effort into making life easy enough that there isn't really any more drama and strife than people want. Janet comes to our world via some kind of technology that doesn't matter, and if you've read either the short story or any number of other things with a similar setup, you might expect the book to be about Whileaway and our world critiquing and/or disrupting each other. Instead, Whileaway stays exactly as it was, Earth shows only brief interest in Janet, she does a few interviews and she almost immediately settles into a low-key existence as a very minor celebrity with no particular agenda except to meet people—often in the company of someone who seems to be more or less Joanna Russ.

Joanna doesn't particularly like Janet, and has no patience for the occasional trouble Janet causes. She's even more annoyed with the other alternate-Earth visitor who's shown up for no apparent reason: Jeannine, a timid person who comes from a sort of permanently-1930s USA and aspires to be a housewife. Very late in the book, something like a plot develops—about going to a place that's much worse than any of those worlds, with more science-fiction thriller elements and general awfulness that feels like a much harsher kind of New Wave SF novel—but until then it's basically a free-form social satire on a small scale, requiring these three people to deal with each other, or with various other difficult people, or just with themselves. Those categories aren't always clearly divided, either: within a scene or a paragraph, the point of view might shift without warning so Janet is finishing Jeannine's thought in her own style. As in the other novel of hers that I've read, Russ's attitude to these people (including her own alter-ego) is both compassionate and merciless, except for a few people who are just assholes so she's just merciless. There's some strikingly tender writing delivered in a steely-eyed tone, including a sex scene that feels a lot more explicit than it is because it's so emotionally raw and awkward and honest; the fact that the narrator strongly disapproves of what's going on in that scene somehow doesn't detract from those qualities at all.

The science-fictional setup isn't very important (until the end) except in how it gives each of the characters different preconceptions about what's possible for them, and while Janet and Jeannine are sort of polar opposites in that way—Janet feels entitled to everything, Jeannine to nothing—they're both individual enough that neither one is just embodying an argument about gender roles. The "female man" of the title doesn't exactly refer to Janet (or to the transgender characters who briefly show up in the dystopian fourth world, a really weird and unfortunate depiction that Russ came to regret); it's a term used by Joanna, referring to just a state of mind, her own will to be seen as a first-class representative of "mankind" in the same sense that everyone on Whileaway is. And even on Whileaway—and here it's impossible not to see parallels with Le Guin's almost contemporaneous The Dispossessed, much as Russ found fault with Le Guin—liberty and equality can still leave you with hard questions about how you want to engage with other people and society; one of the book's most haunting passages is about how Janet once chose to work as an enforcer of social convention to a disturbing degree.

There are some fairly long stretches of this where you might wonder whether Russ really needs the fictional frame at all—self-contained passages that are less about the story on either a literal or thematic level and more just straight-up polemics (including a long and probably totally accurate list of all the dismissive things she thought people would say about this novel). But I can't really imagine any piece of it working the same without the rest. There's not much else I've read that has so little apparent form or design, and expresses so much anger and impatience toward almost everything it touches on (including itself), that still felt so clear and complete after I put it down.

Knowing that Joanna Russ is generally considered part of science fiction's New Wave movement, it might seem odd that the setup of this 1977 novel uses only ingredients that could be found in earlier space adventure stories: colonization ships, surprisingly hospitable planets, a super-competent individualist narrator, and a group of castaways that includes a nuclear family and an athlete and a government agent and a professor and a showgirl. The difference is just in the plot, the characterizations, the philosophy, the prose style, and everything else.

The word that follows the title is of course "die", and right away our narrator (I'll call her ON, she never says her name) figures out that their situation is totally hopeless, and tells everyone so. She can't stop them from trying to carry on Robinson Crusoe projects anyway, but there's no chance that they'll be rescued, and their idea of populating the planet with their descendants (another classic SF notion) almost certainly won't work—if it's even desirable. So she just wants to be left in peace. That's basically the entire plot. If you think this sounds like kind of a bummer scenario, you are correct.

You may expect some kind of power struggle to develop, and it does, but not necessarily in the way you'd think. You may also expect, given ON's immediate hostility to everyone and her high level of general crankiness, that eventually she'll soften up and come to see their point of view, since that's a familiar kind of character arc; that doesn't exactly happen (although we do find out some interesting things about the other people), and Russ plays with our sympathies quite a bit, making all of ON's harsh judgments seem right so you can't just say "this person is too angry", but then letting her second-guess herself in ways that also seem possibly right. The flashbacks we eventually get to her past don't exactly explain things, but they're very moving. The point of view is strongly feminist in a way that lets no one off the hook; the first time there's violence between a man and a woman, the way they each deal with it is both disturbing and totally believable for those characters.

At one point something happens that may make you think "Wow, holy shit... well, if that’s where this was going, I guess the book must be almost over"—when in fact you're only a little past the halfway mark; Russ is gambling that if you've made it this far, you'll stick around for what follows, if only to see what more she could possibly do with the premise. The way the last section unfolds sometimes feels a little arbitrary, various things just come and go, but I suspect there's more shape to it than I noticed because I was still really engrossed. The actual end hit me like a brick wall.

There are many difficult things about the book, but the only one that slightly bothered me and felt like it wasn't on purpose was the prose style: it's supposed to be spoken dictation but it doesn't read like that at all, and the dialogue is compressed and choppy in a way that I found a little hard to follow at times (although that may not be specific to Russ; I've noticed it with other writers of that period too). Anyway, it's worth sticking with it even though you will need a hug afterward.

(PS: I'm looking at the 1977 Dell paperback edition and—while I usually don't bother complaining about SF book covers because they're so often terrible, and I sure don't blame publishers for having no idea how to market such a merciless and experimental novel—this has one of the least appropriate covers I've ever seen. There's a little open-top vehicle flying through interplanetary space, piloted by a grey-faced kind of goblin person with glowing red eyes. Needless to say this is not a thing from the book. However, the person who designed the cover so as to make it seem like some other kind of story clearly wasn't talking to the person who designed everything else, because immediately inside the front cover is an excerpt that contains not just a spoiler, but the single most shocking sentence in the book. I'm picturing a bunch of unsuspecting SF fans in 1977 picking this up and going "Oh cool, space! I wonder what it's—[opens cover] AIEEE!")

Difficult to rate... I think if it was any longer I would have found it unbearable. As it is, it's quite difficult. Sort of a more depressing version of Russ' Picnic on Paradise in tone. This all sounds really negative, but I thought it was a genius and well-crafted story. Written in an incredibly distinct voice, it really turns the "spaceship crashed on an alien planet" plot inside out.

I need to keep reading more Joanna Russ!

essays on women in literature, esp. sci fi

Thanks to technology that allows travel between different alternative realities, four versions of the same woman meet. One is from more or less our reality, one is from a reality in which WWII didn't happen because Hitler died, one is from a reality where males died out in a plague centuries ago, and one is from a reality where there is quite literally a war between the sexes.

It's an intriguing premise, but unfortunately the result is a mess. It's told in a mixture of third person and first person but the first person keeps changing with it frequently being totally unclear who the narrator is or which of the alternative realities we are in.½

Well, I have to admit that I am not understanding this book. Multiple characters hang out together, thinking about and discussing the role of woman, with some of them from this world and others from a world where women run everything. Sometimes we get a moment of conflict. Sometimes we get stream of consciousness. I hope others have better luck with this book.