The Adventures of Alyx

There are three short stories in this book featuring Alyx, little more than active character sketches really, and a much longer narrative, then a final short story that, as far as I can tell, doesn’t have anything to do with Alyx.

Alyx the adventuress from ancient Tyre is a marvellous character, so the sketches – in which Alyx respectively helps a young noblewoman escape a potentially lethal marriage, escapes her own marriage to take up with a pirate, and deals with a gross man who claims to have created the world – are engaging. The first two happen entirely in a version of earthly antiquity. So does the third, though the nasty patriarchal figure has the language and paraphernalia of a time traveller rather than those of a show more demigod. In the fourth and longest piece, ‘Picnic in Paradise’, Alyx is transported by the Polysyllabic Agency for Temporal Gobbledygook (or something like that) to a future where her skills – and her lack of knowledge of technology – equip her perfectly to shepherd a group of tourists out of a war zone. In this piece the book well and truly transcends the ‘of historical interest’ niche. It’s funny, touching, and sexy in an over the top way. It points vicious satire at the Prozac generation before the name. Then, just as one is thinking of Alyx as a kind of moral touchstone, one who keeps her head when all around are losing theirs, a role model even, she confounds all expectations by going so far off the rails it’s hard to understand how the story manages to keep us sympathising with her. She’s a real hero, and the story brilliantly refuses to be neat.

Then the last, short story, as far as I can tell, is not an Alyx story at all. A teenage girl in rural USA in 1925 is visited by a strange woman who turns out to be her descendant from the distant future. The young heroine (and we with her) understands only a fraction of what her strange visitor is up to. She helps her to kill another visitor from the future, but we’re left with only glimpses the relationship between the two visitors. And there’s more. It’s a tantalising narrative in which all the huge world-changing events happen offstage and/or in a language we don’t understand. Yet it’s also a satisfying coming of age story. After all, what teenager understands the world s/he finds him/herself part of. show less

The Adventures of Alyx is a collection of four short stories and a novella. The first three short stories follow a small-time tough named Alyx on a series of typical fantasy adventures. Alyx is an engaging character who fights and battles with her wits against sea monsters and pirates. The third story, "The Barbarian," shows a bit of a turn, as Russ has Alyx do battle against a sort of Faustian figure. At this point, Alyx as a character seems to have sparked Russ' creative interest, as the stories now go beyond the standard fantasy fare.

The most ambitious of the items in this collection is the novella "Picnic on Paradise." Russ puts Alyx into a future where a "commercial war" is being fought, and her job is to transport a group to a show more port on a planet called Paradise. When they arrive at the location of the port, they find it has been destroyed. They then trek for two months across Paradise to find a safe haven. Through that journey, Alyx battles monsters and human attackers, feels love, and experiences loss, as Paradise dishes out as much hell as possible. While the story wanders a bit during this trek, it shows Russ growing in her abilities as a writer.

The final story, "The Second Inquisition," is a bit of a departure. The narrator is not named, and she does not act or seem like Alyx in many ways. However, we are clearly meant to see her as such, not only because of the story's inclusion in this volume, but also because the tag-line that ends all the stories takes on a variation in this story. The story here is an inter-textual sci-fi story that relies as much on H.G. Wells as it does on standard sci-fi conventions. Russ is also at her most feminist in this story--thus pointing toward her future writing--and her prose is crisp and quick moving. While "The Second Inquisition" is an odd end to this collection, it is the strongest entry in this uneven collection. show less

She was a soft-spoken, dark-haired, small-boned woman, not even coming up to their shoulders, like a kind of dwarf or miniature—but that was normal enough for a Mediterranean Greek of nearly four millennia ago, before super-diets and hybridization from seventy colonized planets had turned all humanity (so she had been told) into Scandinavian giants. The young lieutenant, who was two meters and a third tall, or three heads more than herself, very handsome and ebony-skinned, said ‘I'm sorry, ma'am, but I cannot believe you're the proper Trans-Temporal Agent; I think—‘ and he finished his thought on the floor, his head under one of his ankles and this slight young woman (or was she young? Trans-Temp did such strange things show more sometimes!) somehow holding him down in a position he could not get out of without hurting himself to excruciation.

The first two stories are about an assassin and thief called Alyx who lives in a city in the ancient world, while the third story, if it is about the same woman, may be set earlier in her life although this is not clear. The Alyx of the fourth story is a Trans-Temporal Agent who is sent through a portal to rescue a group of future tourists trapped when war breaks out on a tourist planet. The final story told from the point of view of a teenage girl in prohibition era America whose family has a exceptionally tall paying guest staying with them while she is hiding out in the past. The links between the stories in this book become a lot clearer when the visitor tells her hosts' daughter that her great-grandmother became the first ever Trans-Temporal Agent after being accidentally scooped up in Ancient Greece during a time travel experiment.

My favourites were "I Thought She Was Afeard Till She Stroked My Beard" and "The Second Inquisition". show less

Alyx is the hero of these five tales. She is fearless, determined, amoral, a complex character. No man can detain her. In the earlier stories she is Alyx the Pickpocket or Alyx the Murderer; later she is just Alyx of the Trans-Temporal Authority. All of the stories are excellently written.

In 'Bluestocking' Alyx lives in the city of Ourdh, which may be a reference to Fritz Leiber's Lankhmar since he also wrote Alyx the Pickpocket into several of his tales there. Russ also references Leiber's hero Fafhrd, hinting that he and Alyx were briefly lovers.

My favourite of the stories was 'Picnic in Paradise' in which Alyx has been spirited away from ancient Tyre by the Trans-Temporal Authority and must use her low-tech survival skills to guide show more several pampered future dwellers who have never known war across a cold but beautiful planet. The journey tests all of them to breaking point. show less

These are early stories by Joanna Russ following her departure from writing traditional patriarchal fiction. They all feature the character of Alyx, a renaissance woman often toeing the line of the law, alternating between roles of thief, mercenary, adventurer-for-hire, etc. The first few lean toward the swashbuckling space pirate type of tale, with various Russ flourishes. She is beginning to challenge gender roles here, but has not gone totally radical yet (though at the time these were published [late 60s] they probably would've been radical enough for some). The first story, at least, was written before Russ said she began identifying as a feminist. 'Picnic on Paradise' approaches novella length and concerns Alyx's time as a agent show more sent to lead a group of vacationers to safety through harsh conditions on a planet under war. The last story includes Alyx only as a relative of one of the characters and might fall under the genre of 'slipstream' these days. None of the stories are hard sci-fi, though, and the focus is always on the interaction between characters rather than the 'otherworldliness' of the surroundings. Definitely recommended for existing Russ fans, as well as to those newly curious about her legacy as a feminist science fiction writer. show less

one of the all-time great story cycles in sf. fascinating coming back to this ten years later, realising how big an influence it was on some of my favourites.

Alyx is hands-down the BEST female character in science fiction, heck, maybe in all of fiction, except for perhaps Smilla of Dutch author Peter Hoeg's _Smilla's Sense of Snow_. She also has a rival in Kage Baker's time-traveling genetically-enhanced female character, Mendoza, in the Company series.
"Picnic in Paradise" by Russ is the jewel in this collection, although "The Second Inquisition" garnered more awards and attention.