Back in 2015 I started rereading Joanna Russ after years away, in large part due to her being pretty much done with fiction by the mid-80s, although primarily due to health problems. I realized there were many of her published stories that had never been reprinted or collected in any of her short story collections.
So as a longtime collector, I started hunting them down and found many more gems by her. I started wondering why there were no new Russ books (if only new collections of these stories) since 1988.
Her reputation nowadays is primarily based on The Female Man, When It Changed, and her feminist essays and book reviews. Even Russ noted that she had lots of other stories folks should read, aside from When It Changed. Having read them all now (including her unpublished stories in university archives), I could not agree more.
I’ve been working since then to collect all her fiction for publication with the ok of her estate. So far multiple publishers (big NY ones and small press specialty) and others keep saying “let’s do a new sampler/best of.” If you want that, you can easily get copies of the two main collections The Zanzibar Cat and The Hidden Side of the Moon. Reasons given me have been as nonlogical as “her books don’t sell.” Well, there hasn’t been any new fiction book of hers published in over 30 years, so yes, I expect sales have been zero.
So if you include the above two collections and the Alyx stories and Extra(ordinary) People, there are 53 stories. But I’ve located another 37, for a total of 90.
So anybody want to read these? My goal is publication of all in as close to chronological order of composition as possible. The development of her voice over time is striking. And there are some very interesting connections to her life and biography when read in order.
I’d appreciate any reactions you may have. Thanks! Be well.
So I Joanna Russ as a recommendation for an often overlooked but apparently very important author of the new wave and she sounds interesting. Does anyone have any suggestions what would be a good starting point to get into her work?
This is a book that I read in college for a literature class , it was a large collection of sci fi short stories that featured these specific stories from the authors These are the only four I remember reading
When it changed - Joanna Russ Nine lives - Ursula Le Guin Burning Chrome - William Gibson Reason - Isaac Asimov
I have been looking at majority of the anthologies I see and have not found it in the sci-fi hall of fame or the Hugo awards . Any help is appreciated !
(I’ll be doing a full separate Aurora post when the entire list is online)
The 2019 Aurora Awards shortlist has just been announced, and I'm so happy to find my name once again in the Fan Writing and Publications category!
The Joanna Russ essay was an emotionally exhausting project. Imagine my inboxes across all social media lighting up when I put out the call for stories. And then reading every single one of those stories. It’s a difficult essay to read. It was exhausting to write. It was tough for women to share their career horrors. I am humbled to have been entrusted with so much confidential information. It is personally gratifying that this essay about women’s careers has been recognized by my friends, peers, and readers.
I want to thank the r/fantasy moderation team for consistently supporting my essays. The mod team is comprised of volunteers who have no guarantee how any essay of mine will be received. I am proud to belong to the r/fantasy community and I appreciate the support I received here.
The Aurora Awards are Canada’s National Science Fiction and Fantasy Awards.
The Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association (CSFFA) is a federally-registered society whose role is to give out the Aurora Awards – yearly. The Auroras are a popularity Award, nominated by and voted on by CSFFA members from across Canada. The nominees and the winners of the Awards must all be Canadian, as are all the members of CSFFA
Joanna Russ wrote How to Suppress Women’s Writing in 1983. It is a devastatingly accurate (also, weirdly entertaining and funny) look at how women’s voices have been suppressed throughout history. It is witty and amusing, and heartbreaking, and infuriating.
It’s also 35 years old. A lot has changed in the world. Good. Bad. Debateable. Even feminism itself has changed as we’ve transitioned into a technological daily life where laws and culture haven’t caught up. Terminology that was acceptable last year has morphed and changed and it’s difficult for many of us to keep up. The world of Russ isn’t today’s world. I wondered if one of shockingly honest books written by a SFF author was still accurate today.
I’ve spent a few months on working on this. Reading Russ’ book through a couple of times. Reading other critique pieces from around the same era. I’d organized my thoughts and experiences. I got to work. I knew how I was going to approach this, in terms of somewhere between a review and a discussion essay. I knew I’d be including a FAQ at the end and I’d been prepping the work for the comments. My husband picked me up a bottle of Chablis. I was ready to post.
Yet, I also knew my experiences wouldn’t be enough. Generally, whenever I share my experiences, they are met with a barrage of questions in an attempt to turn the blame onto me. (i.e. But what were you doing to have him say that to you? Well, what did you expect? But, where was this? Well, you don’t expect people with social skills to attend that.) Occasionally, I am met with, “you’re exaggerating, right? That didn’t actually happen.” When I say it had, the reply is often, “Well, I’ve never seen anything like that.” Or, the old standby: Krista, shut up, you’re just a [actual list of things I’ve been called due to my r/fantasy activity: professional victim, cunt, fat, lesbian, mentally ill, crazy, talentless, hack, nobody, no name author, garbage writer, cat lady.] As if any many of those things were actually insults or things to be ashamed of.
So, I looked at this essay in the light of the ways people have tried to suppress my own voice, and decided to do something a little different this time. I asked for stories from SFF female authors, (as well as non-binary/genderqueer, and stories from men about things they’ve witnessed), all in relation to one simple question: Have their voices been suppressed?
What followed was an emotionally devastating look at our home, where we gather to escape,
... keep reading on reddit ➡Light spoilers for plot synopsis.
(First review. I'm not great at them; be gentle.)
I started posting on forums when I was 12, way back when vbulletin reigned supreme in the early oughts. Inevitably, at least once a year, someone would post a thread asking which period of time you'd go back and visit if you could. My first reaction to these threads was "Awesome!" and I'd travel to ancient Rome or some other place a tween with a lack of imagination might go. As I got older, I started resenting these threads; I knew more about the world and where my place - the place of a woman - would be. Every time period and geography in which I placed myself, I was devalued and unwanted. I was there as a thing to be used, and would probably die in the midst of that use (childbirth.)
Surely some part of this is a product of an education skewed towards learning about patriarchal - typically white patriarchal - societies, but nevertheless this strand exists throughout history. It's questionable how it rarely shows up in our future, and that's where Russ takes us in We Who Are About To...
The story begins with a group of space travelers mid-crisis. That is, a bad thing has happened; that thing has forced an unplanned landing on an unknown-but-probably-habitable planet; and there's no hope of rescue. We don't know why they're traveling or what went wrong, only that they are on their own. We occupy the shoes of an anonymous protagonist (I think?) who is keeping an audio log of events, and the lack of context provided to the reader forces us to occupy the same unknown as the group.
I didn't like this book at first. I didn't like it because the protagonist is a melancholic defeatist who, upon landing, assumes everyone will die, but only after the men in the group reassert themselves over the women. When the group has the audacity to at least try and survive, she shoots down every goal. It doesn't help that no one with an immediately useful skill-set is present. I assume this was unnecessary in what comes off as a post-scarcity society (oopsie doopsie.) In her mind, she's already cataloguing all the ways the men in particular have swiftly figured out that they are bigger and stronger, and there are no laws, rules or mores stopping them from reestablishing all the patriarchal structures it took society millennia to slowly deconstruct -- at least a little.
It turns out she was correct, because shortly after they land, it is decided that the men need to cycle through havin
... keep reading on reddit ➡
Edit: This querry was inspired by this post in /Documentaries: https://www.reddit.com/r/Documentaries/comments/g89o2f/the_land_of_no_men_inside_kenyas_womenonly/
Women reproducing with eachother, three children, men trying to "fix" the incomplete society etc all sound right (from the short story), but I recall far more detail.
Men start to "fix" things, taking over labor intense work (fixing power lines iirc), taking over diplomacy (between neighboring colonies I think?). Etc.
Spoiler: first "murder" in generations of one woman by another, over jealousy perhaps?, in the end the men (man?) are killed by women.
That's really about all I can recall. I think it was a movie, but could just as easily be a book or "twilight zone" esque short.
Excerpt concerning Le Guin:
>As the symposium was drawing to a close, Ursula K. Le Guin bowed out of the conversation with what she dubbed her “Final Deliberately Irritating Statements.” “It’s time,” she said,
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>we stop whining about what awful things I have done to women and what awful things men have done to me, and then compensating by daydreaming about retaliation and the Perfectly Guiltless Society; it’s time we try to start intelligently and passionately and compassionately considering, proposing, inventing, and acting out alternatives. If even people in science fiction can’t do that, can’t look forward instead of back, it’s bad news for the women’s movement, and everybody else.
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>Le Guin was not targeting the symposium at large but two participants in particular: [Samuel] Delany and the science-fiction author Joanna Russ. When Le Guin asked, elsewhere in her statement, if the idea was that women “write John Wayne’s wet dreams with the sexes reversed,” she was probably thinking of Russ’s just-published novel “The Female Man,” which features both an all-women planet, on which women engage in duels, and a sex-segregated planet in a state of permanent war.
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>[...]
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>Even before the symposium, the two writers had begun to distinguish themselves from each other, though Russ seems to have been more invested in these differences than Le Guin was. In public, Russ had written a harsh review of Le Guin’s “The Dispossessed,” characterizing some of the book’s central conceits as “a fancy way of disguising what we already know” and its anarchist society as poorly realized. Privately, to mutual friends, Russ accused Le Guin of being accommodating to men, of refusing to write as a woman. In some ways, Le Guin conceded the argument—she claimed to write under the influence of her male “animus”—but in other ways she resisted. After all, wasn’t her freedom not to write “as a woman” precisely the point?
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>At stake in this disagreement was not simply the sorts of struggles that feminists have always had with one another. There was also a question of what science fiction was for and what it should ultimately do.
The symposium, "Wom
... keep reading on reddit ➡
http://www.webcitation.org/6YtQOaEub Cleaned up PDF Copyt and archived from Original available at Google newspaper archives
>Gee, isn't it awful for women to hate men? > >Of course lots of men despise women, but that's different; woman-hating isn't serious -- at worst it's eccentric, at best sort of cute. Woman-haters (many of whom are women) can express themselves all over the place, as the latest cartoon about women drivers reminds me, but man-haters have fewer opportunities. Man-hating takes self-control. Besides, man-haters are in the minority; for every Valerie Solanas, how many rapists, how many male murderers are there? What male reviewer found Hitchcock's "Frenzy" one-20th as revolting as Solanas's "Scum Manifesto?" Of course Solanas went out and did it, but then so do many men -- in the small town I live in there were several incidents of rape last year, and a common response to them was laughter. > >Alas, it's nothing new for the oppressed to be solemnly told that their entry to Heaven depends on not hating the oppressor; labor is supposed not to hate management and black is not supposed to hate white because hatred is bad. It's a fine case of double-think. Watch: (1) You do something nasty to me. (2) I hate you. (3) You find it uncomfortable to be hated. (4) You think how nice it would be if I didn't hate you. (5) You decide I ought not to hate you because hate is bad. (6) Good people don't hate. (7) Because I hate I am a bad person. (8) It is not what you did to me that makes me hate you, it is my own bad nature. I -- not you -- am the cause of my hating you. > >For some reason misandry (a fancy word for man-hating) is a very loaded topic. People even talk as if hating men meant murdering all of them right away -- as if there were no difference between feelings and acts. Man-haters are people who feel a certain way (not even all the time, believe it or not); they aren't Instant Murderesses. If misandrists were the uncontrolled, ravening wild beasts they are supposed to be, they would've been strangled in their cradles. Surely very few of us are seriously afraid that battalions of ardent feminist misandrists will come marching out of the sunrise to castrate every man
... keep reading on reddit ➡
A lot of authors go back to use the same ideas, or variations on it multiple times over their writing careers. For example:
Isaac Asimov: The use of computers and mathematical projections to run society in a more "rational" technocratic fashion.
Robert Heinlein: Abandonment of social taboos particularly including the ones against incest, public nudity, polygamy, and cannibalism. Also abandoning conventional incarceration in favour of corporal punishment, exile or executution.
Richard Matheson: Total isolation. As in being the last surviving human in the world, or being totally separated from from human society by some circumstance.
Jack Chalker: Physical transformation, and mental reprogramming.
John Norman: Slave chicks.
Larry Niven: Big Dumb Objects. Also worlds where only a small part of it is habitable.
Piers Anthony: Rule by an oligarchy chosen for their special abilities. Expulsion of those who fail to measure up from society.
Marion Zimmer Bradley: Sexual segregation. Some kind of rutting season for intelligent beings.
Joanna Russ: Dispensing with the male sex.
Ursula Le Guin: Anarchist societies.
Can you think of some others for me?
I have seen on many occasions, on this and other boards, people making lists of the best SF titles. They usually tend to be very selective, because of their personal reading habits and types of SF they like. So I decided to make my own list, using as impartial selection methods as I could.
I decided to rely on Goodreads for its huge number of raters. However, you cannot simply look at the average rating, because many authors have grossly high ratings because their fans give all their titles the maximum rating. So you have to be a little more clever to get an accurate rating of a given title.
I looked at the number of times a title has been shelved as science fiction on Goodread, compared to how many ratings it got. People tend not to shelve a title unless they actually think it's good, regardless of what rating they give it. I also included the average rating as part of my formula, because this does still have some value . Because my formula relies on ratios rater than absolute numbers, it works on less well-known titles as well.
I also only included titles that have been shelved as science fiction at least 100 times, otherwise I would be faced with many thousands or tens of thousand of titles, which would be completely unworkable to process by hand.
I ended up creating two lists, one for titles with publication dates up to 2010, and the other for publication dates after 2010. The post-2010 titles had ratings that were all inflated about two points, no doubt due to recency bias. My theory is that the majority of ratings in more recent titles were given by people who were not familiar with the older SF, and hence had no external standard of reference to grade the titles. So they end up giving the title a higher rating that it deserves, compared to older but equal-quality titles. And since the number of their ratings make up the majority of the totals for recent titles, the average ratings are inflated.
I also made a general rule of only one title per series, with a very small number of exceptions, otherwise this list would be much longer. That single title is usually the first book in the series, unless a later title is both greatly superior, and does not need the first book to be read first for understanding. If you like a given book, you are of course welcome to read more titles in that series.
A combined list of 200 "must-read" titles (basically, the top 200 titles according to the formula, that are eligible under the above rule)
... keep reading on reddit ➡For those who may not be aware, Powell’s “City of Books” in Portland Oregon is absolutely incredible. It takes up a full city block, has over 3500 various sections, and some thing like 70,000 sq ft. of space.
I found the following list on a bookmark that was in the Sci-Fi and Fantasy section, and I thought to transcribe it for all of us here, just in case some of these are new to some of us. :) Some are marked as “Young Adult” as well.
Image of one side (Bonus: Jericho looking annoyed I disturbed his nap. 😆)
The list doesn’t give blurbs or any indication of what the stories are about or what sort of LGBTQIA+ representation there is, but it’s at least a starting point, and I loved seeing it prominently displayed in one of the main walkways where people could see it.
I make no guarantees about any of the novels listed here, I just wanted to transcribe them for sharing. :) Many of these are new to me, so i’m also putting them on my TBR list :D
Babel 17 Samuel R. Delany
The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet Becky Chambers
Karen Memory Elizabeth Bear
Necrotech KC Alexander
The Stars Are Legion Kameron Hurley
Bone Dance Emma Bull
Every Heart a Doorway Seaman McGuire
Mirror Empire Kameron Hurley
The Female Man Joanna Russ
River of Teeth Sarah Grailey
Blackfish City Sam J Miller
The Left Hand of Darkness Ursula K Le Guin
Ammonite Nicola Griffith
All the Birds in the Sky Charlie Jane Anders
The Prey of the Gods Nicky Drayden
Ancillary Justice Anne Leckie
The Wrong Stars Tim Pratt
An Unkindness of Ghosts River Solomon
THE FOLLOWING ARE MARKED YOUNG ADULT:
Proxy Alex Young
Coda Emma Trevayne
Adaptation Malinda Lo
Not Your Sidekick CB Lee
A Darkly Beating Heart Lindsay Smith
Stranger Rachel Manila Brown
Does anyone know where I might find a collection of Joanna Russ's science fiction reviews? Online or in print are fine.
Thanks!
"If you were a beast you could not break God's law, and if you were a man you would not, but you are neither, and that makes you a kind of monster that spoils everything it touches and never knows the reason, and that is why I will never forgive you until you become a man, a true man with a soul."
