Joanna Russ (1937–2011)

[I need to preface this review by saying that it violates my rule not to review any book I haven't read from beginning to end. I've read only "The Alyx Stories" portion, which includes all of what has been published as a standalone book, plus more; but I want to review the Library of America volume, instead of one of the variant publications of the Alyx cycle, because my comments are more about Russ, especially as she is presented in this volume, than about the Alyx stories considered as show more stories.]

Joanna Russ was a fierce and engaging writer, a great theoretician of story telling, and of course, an important feminist artist — the last of which, although mostly incidental to my perspective in this review, was in no way incidental to her or any of her mature work. In reintroducing myself to her, I read the Alyx stories, all of the biographical information in this volume, and many of the notes: not only the notes to the stories, but also to the other books, which I dipped into here and there as my interest was piqued.

As a young man, I was a devotee of the work of Russ's friend and colleague Samuel R. Delany. I read Delany's Dhalgren at age 15 and read it twice more in ensuing years, while keeping up with Delany's other work until his Neverÿona series petered out in the late '80s. (The non-Neverÿona novel Stars in my Pocket Like Grains of Sand, the first half of what would have been a monumental diptych, was the last Delany I read.) I studied the way Delany wrote and it had immense influence on how I read, how technique and especially the deliberate withholding of certain information can more powerfully engage the reader. What I didn't realize until I read Russ's work was how powerfully she apparently influenced Delany. It surprises me not to be aware of anyone else who's noticed, which is one reason I'm making the point here.

There is a particular scene in Russ's Picnic on Paradise (a 1968 novella that Delany repeatedly championed, as I recall) in which a character falls into a pit, which has major emotional repercussions for the other characters following an attempted rescue. And in Dhalgren (1975), a major set piece, about 20 pages in all if I recall correctly, a character falls into an elevator shaft, and likewise has to be retrieved. For me, it's the most memorable extended scene in that book, and having read Russ, it's impossible to suppose that Delany was not directly inspired by the similar scene in Paradise.

This was interesting to notice, considering how much I've thought about Delany's elevator shaft scene in my life, but it was more interesting to read Russ's work with a couple of generations' worth of reading experience behind me. The Alyx stories (for example) work great as entertainment: they can be read quickly, even carelessly, and still be enjoyed in the same way you enjoy a more straightforwardly told tale by Isaac Asimov or George R.R. Martin. But the way they are told is actually more complex, and clever. Most obviously (to me), emotion is rarely portrayed directly. Instead, it's implied in dialog which could support multiple emotional interpretations, as in reading a play. It's also portrayed by means of action, but usually only cinematically, in broad strokes. Dashiell Hammett writes this way, but in his work emotion is secondary to the cool, foggy vibe of noir. In Russ's stories, emotion is everywhere and arguably crucial to the reader's engagement: yet the reader must supply that emotion herself. She herself must figure out who this confusing, contradictory, wry, tough, defensive, ironic, vulnerable, frightening character Alyx is, and what Alyx might be actually feeling at any point in time.

She must also do this while figuring out the physical setting, as well as the natures of the characters and their relationships, from important but almost offhandedly delivered clues, in dialog and in very spare descriptive passages. This is a very adult way of writing, and very respectful of the reader's intelligence. It's astonishing that Russ used it successfully in work that was published in pulp magazines and drugstore paperbacks. show less

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1649823.html

A passionate, fairly concise polemic about the way in which women as writers are marginalised by academics, though also about the experience of minority erasure generally. Although towards the end it veered closer to micro-critiques of college course reading lists from over thirty years ago (I would be interested to know how much things have changed since), it's mostly full of wisdom and rage simultaneously. Numerous very good lines, including:

'The show more social invisibility of women's experience is not "a failure of human communication". It is a socially arranged bias persisted in long after the information about women's experience is available (sometimes even publicly insisted on).'

In other words, a book at least as much about society as a whole as it is about literature studies, its ostensible subject. Excellent. show less

I don’t think I ever doubted that Russ was an extremely clever writer, although it was more evident in some stories than others – some of her short fiction, in fact, was so much of its time, it was hard to see see past how emblematic of their period of writing they were. But it wasn’t until I read The Hidden Side of the Moon that I realised how consistently clever a writer was Russ. This is not a specially curated collection, but it’s so much more intelligent a collection than her show more The Zanzibar Cat. Perhaps it’s because not every story in it is genre, and it was not put together to showcase her genre credentials. Perhaps it’s because every story in it is fiercely feminist. I don’t know. I do know a collected works of Russ is long past overdue – not just the short fiction, but also the non-fiction, like the essays in Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans & Perverts, or her criticism. She is, like Samuel R Delany, one of the most important writers American science fiction has produced. And yet who is it who remains in print and has countless stories and novels adapted by Hollywood? Philip K Dick. A drug-addled hack. We are, I suppose, fortunate that Asimov, one of the most graceless prose stylists of his generation, has not been so enthusiastically adopted by Hollywood. And while I still have a soft spot for some of Heinlein’s works, he’s pretty much science fiction’s embarrassingly outspoken old uncle with all the offensive opinions at the family barbecue, who’s pretty harmless until he starts touching up his young nieces. It’s long past time science fiction stopped venerating skeevy old hacks like Asimov and Heinlein and Dick, and started lauding the real grand masters, like Delany, Russ, Tiptree and Le Guin. show less

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.