Simple. Ruthless. Brutally effective. Depressing. ( )

I have trouble with Russ's longer fiction, so for me this is her best work, showing what wormen could be if they were just people. ( )

Memorable and paradigm shifting. ( )

This is the short story that led to The Female Man, the one in which we meet Janet and Janet meets men. As a succinct statement of what is wrong with patriarchal attitudes, it's very good.

It also could have been quite good at something else: examining men being inconsistent with their stereotypical role. With males walking into a society that had centuries of preconceptions about something it had never seen or experienced, there was the opportunity for those men to struggle with being seen through a lens of social blindness, also. It would have been an interesting, and I'm sure humorous, culture clash in Russ' hands.

But, it didn't go there; the men were just idiotic, archetypical apes as expected. Oh well. She had other fish to fry. Recommended, though I liked the longer novel better. ( )