The idea started innocuously enough. In 1975, one Jeff Smith, the publisher of the fanzine Khatru, moderated a symposium in letters on “Women in Science Fiction.” Smith invited some of the foremost women in the field to participate and, alongside them, two men: Samuel R. Delany and James Tiptree, Jr. (Tiptree was not, as it would turn out, a man, but nobody would know that until after the symposium had ended.)
Unsurprisingly, the tone of the exchanges quickly turned combative. Many of the participants took jabs at Smith, who meant well yet was often clueless. (“I did not realize how emotional a subject this could be,” he wrote, at one point.) But the most interesting dispute emerged among the women. 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,
Le Guin was not targeting the symposium at large but two participants in particular: 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.
In her heyday, Russ was known as a raging man-hater. This reputation was not entirely unearned, though it was sometimes overstated. Of one of her short stories, “When It Changed,” which mourns a lost female utopia, the science-fiction novelist Michael Coney wrote, “The hatred, the destructiveness that comes out in the story makes me sick for humanity. . . . I’ve just come from the West Indies, where I spent three years being hated merely because my skin was white. . . . [Now I] find that I am hated for another reason—because Joanna Russ hasn’t got a prick.” To read “When It Changed” after reading this description is to be a bit let down.
But the rift between Russ and Le Guin was a different sort of disagreement. 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?
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. For Russ and Le Guin both, science fiction represented the possibility of telling a genuinely new story. Science fiction, Russ once wrote, was poised to “provide myths for dealing with kinds of experiences we are actually having now, instead of the literary myths we have inherited, which only tell us about the kinds of experiences we think we ought to be having.” The form aspired not to fantasy but to reality.
The search for that reality led Russ and Le Guin in different directions, and, though the latter has become, in the years since, the face of women in speculative fiction, it would be a mistake to regard Russ as overshadowed. Russ entered college at fifteen, sold her first story at twenty-two, came out as a lesbian in a field dominated by men, and, before her death, in 2011, published several science-fiction novels, a handful of story collections, a lesbian romance called “On Strike Against God,” and a stream of sharp-elbowed criticism, becoming an inescapable member of the community. Furthermore, she was brilliant in a way that couldn’t be denied, even by those who hated her. Her writing was at once arch and serious; she issued her judgments with supreme confidence, even when they were issued against herself. She was here to imagine, to invent wildly, and to undo the process, as one of her heroines puts it, of “learning to despise one’s self.” But she was going to have a lot of fun doing it. And, if you were doing anything else, you were not really, to her mind, writing science fiction.
In “Joanna Russ,” a new survey of Russ’s work, the writer and critic Gwyneth Jones provides a helpful window into Russ’s early life. Born to a Jewish family in the Bronx in the late nineteen-thirties, Russ initially had a charmed childhood. Her parents, Bertha and Evarett, were schoolteachers, and they encouraged their daughter in various pursuits. There were trips to the Bronx Zoo and the Museum of Natural History; Russ often spent evenings gazing through a telescope with her father. Afterward, with the help of her parents, she would put together little books about what she’d seen, giving them titles like “Thoughts of a Deluded Scientist.”
But something changed, either when Russ was around eight or when she was in her early teens. Her story, at this point, is not always the same. In the story that Jones quotes, Russ’s father fell ill and, afraid he might die, became a bully. This is a version of the story Russ told, particularly in public. At the Khatru symposium, she recalled Bertha as “a Squashed Woman,” “guilty at being intelligent, guilty at having gone to graduate school (she always explained effusively how much she hated it—she, who knew the Oxford Book of English Verse by heart!) . . . guilty at being competent at anything.”
Yet, in her letters to James Tiptree—who was herself no stranger to mother issues—Russ returned often to the subject of her mother, and in a different tone. She described her mother in one letter as being “nutty as a fruitcake,” writing, “There is something particularly awful about having a crazy mother who also tries to possess you utterly. (And a father who shrinks from interfering—who, in fact, colludes.)” In another letter, she writes that, when she was fifteen, she was “absolutely convinced the cold, starving badness I felt inside me all the time was me. . . . Ever since I’ve been sure that the only people who could like me were vampires like my mother, or fellow-defectives.”
Russ’s stories about her childhood—mother-victim, mother-vampire—represent not contradictory accounts but a process, neither linear nor ever really over, of trying to think herself into having some sort of friendship with her mother. In one of her short stories from the seventies, Russ imagines repeatedly encountering and trying to rescue her mother. “Am I,” Russ asks herself, toward the end of the story, “my mother’s mother?” Feminist utopias, as she wrote in one essay, often concerned themselves with “the rescue of the female child.” Bertha had once been a child, too. Even if Russ could save her only through fiction, it was still worth a try.
Though “The Female Man” is Russ’s most famous book, and deservedly so, the exploration of this particular dynamic—of saving children and wishing to save their mothers, too—emerges most provocatively in “The Two of Them,” from 1978, which follows Ernst and Irene, romantically involved agents from an organization called the Trans-Temporal Authority. The couple are on a mission to Ka’abah, a subterranean society on a desert planet where gender roles are so intensely enforced that any woman who seeks to live otherwise is functionally lobotomized. (Russ borrowed this setting from the writer Suzette Haden Elgin, to whom the novel is dedicated, but later expressed regret at deploying Islamic stereotypes to comment on American ones.) Zubeydeh, a little girl whom the two encounter during their stay, wishes to be a poet; her Aunt Dunya shared the same ambition, “went mad,” and disappeared.
Irene and Ernst have an ideal partnership—respectful, sexually appreciative, and full of the gentle inside jokes and shared knowledge that come with time. As a teen-ager, Irene ran away with Ernst, in part to escape the suffocating world of her childhood on Earth, a decision that has paid off. Ernst has a confusing relationship to Irene’s difficult mother, presenting himself as her “friend” even though they don’t really seem to know each other. (It’s not impossible that Irene’s mother, too, once travelled with Ernst.) In Ka’abah, Irene discovers an intensified version of what she left behind and decides to rescue Zubeydeh—who displays no great talent for poetry—over the objections of Ernst.
Once the couple have taken Zubeydeh and begun their journey back to headquarters, they start, increasingly, to quarrel. Irene notices little things about how she and Ernst talk to each other: his habit of condescending to her, her habit of appealing to his authority. She apologizes too much. She has, perhaps, not left her childhood at all: she has made “a big loop—even into the stars—and all for nothing.” She plans to flee with the child back to Earth. When Ernst tries to stop her, she shoots and kills him. And, when offered the chance to save another child, a boy, she refuses. “This is Irene’s life-work,” the narrator coolly tells us, “to collect women and little girls from the far corners of the Universe. But not little boys.” That the little boy in question seems as if he might be abused by men, too, is not Irene’s problem.
“The Two of Them” was Russ’s last great sci-fi novel, part of a streak of increasingly bleak books that began with “The Female Man” and continued with “We Who Are About to . . .,” a story of shipwrecked space travellers. Within the novel, killing Ernst and refusing to save the other child are both genuinely shocking acts. They are so shocking that the narrator entertains, for a moment, the possibility that they didn’t happen. But, instead, Russ makes a more interesting decision: she crafts a world in which patriarchy is inescapable, and then she suggests that within that world her heroine is still capable of evil. The “good” man gives to his female partner only the kind of power he knows he can take back. But, within these structures, people also make choices, and they are still responsible for the evil they do, even if they did it to survive, because the imperative of survival is itself dubious. After all, that’s what drives the men in these stories, too.
This is a dynamic that shows up in much of Russ’s fiction. In “We Who Are About to . . .,” a group of stranded colonists on a newly discovered planet try to perpetuate themselves through enforced breeding of the female passengers. When one, Elaine, peacefully opts out, the others pursue her; she kills all of them, including a child. The colonists’ delusional need to feel as if they can rebuild civilization, even if through rape, is inexcusable; yet it is not clear that murdering all of them is excusable, either. Dying alone, Elaine hallucinates the ghosts of those she killed. “I had the muscles of an ox, which always embarrassed me,” one says to her. “I was not beautiful, I was stupid, and I knew nothing. . . . But still, you killed me.”
Rescuing or not rescuing the girl in distress, rebelling or choosing not to, shooting or not shooting the man in your way: these are all choices that must be made in desperate circumstances, but they are not choices that should escape judgment. In “The Two of Them,” Irene also wants to rescue Zubeydeh’s mother and aunt, but the mother doesn’t wish to leave. Though she spends all her time drugged into submission, and though she’s complicit in the destruction of her sister, she would rather sacrifice her child and her sister than resist her husband. She has dreams of being a cat, dreams in which she appears to achieve some kind of happiness. Next to this, a freedom she cannot be sure she’ll even enjoy holds few attractions. That she is undoubtedly a victim does not make her any less of a coward.
Russ’s alternatives, to return to Le Guin’s term, came down not to looking backward or to mulling over grievances but to saying no. Maybe it wasn’t enough to reject the world, but without that rejection nothing else could begin. One had to say no and go on saying it. The title of “The Female Man” refers to the moment when one of its protagonists, Joanna, rejects her own social role; toward the end of the book, she tells us that “I love my body dearly and yet I would copulate with a rhinoceros if I could become not-a-woman”:
Just as Russ’s reproach to science fiction seemed to be that it was uninterested in embracing what it really could be, so her feminism, in her novels, involved a frustration at having so much to unlearn before being able to see clearly her own situation. For Russ, what was maddening about Le Guin was not that she prioritized the business of being an individual over that of being a woman; it was that she didn’t acknowledge the break with the world that had to take place before either project could begin.
Feminism has always had a fraught relationship with its own permanence. As Russ wrote, “the logic of feminism is to expand inexorably into generalized radicalism. . . . The feminism which doesn’t understand this will inevitably decay into careers-for-well-to-do white ladies.” In the course of her life, she would go from telling Tiptree, “I am not for human liberation; I am for liberating women” to complaining of gender separatists. Feminism gives birth to daughters whose impulses might lead them elsewhere. Often, of course, the daughters come back. There is a kind of incurable disappointment in this back-and-forth—in the fact that women, no matter how much they love one another, no matter how great their genius, often seem to fail to communicate, leaving each other behind.
But feminism is as much a struggle for individuation as it is for solidarity, and these goals are not easy to balance. Mothers and daughters regard each other skeptically; so, too, conflicts within feminism tend to be framed generationally (even when, as is often the case, the disagreements are actually philosophical). In Russ’s story about trying to rescue her own mother, she imagines the two of them having a real friendship, girl to girl, “sharing secrets, giggling at the dinner table, going to the movies together.” But this, she knows, is “something that will never happen.” That Russ had to bridge this rift through science fiction, not realist novels, seems inevitable. It took constructing whole other worlds for her to show us ours.
