Joanna Russ

Joanna Russ, Who Drew Women to Sci-Fi, Dies at 74

(from the New York Times dated today)

Joanna Russ, a writer who four decades ago helped deliver science fiction into the hands of the most alien creatures the genre had yet seen — women — died on April 29 in Tucson. She was 74.

Her death, from complications of a stroke, was announced on the Web site of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America.

Ms. Russ was best known for her novel “The Female Man,” published in 1975 and considered a landmark. With that book, which told the intertwined stories of four women at different moments in history, she helped inaugurate the now flourishing tradition of feminist science fiction. She also published essays, criticism and short fiction.

Ms. Russ was herself the subject of many critical studies, including those collected in “On Joanna Russ,” edited by Farah Mendlesohn and published in 2009 by Wesleyan University Press .

The science fiction writer has the privilege of remaking the world. Because of this, the genre, especially in the hands of disenfranchised writers, has become a powerful vehicle for political commentary. In the America in which she came of age, Ms. Russ was triply disenfranchised: as a woman, a lesbian and an author of genre fiction who earned her living amid the pomp of university English departments.

Some critics found her too polemical, but many praised her liquid prose style, intellectual ferocity and cheerfully unorthodox approach to constructing her fiction, which could include discursions into history and philosophy and sections of quasitheatrical dialogue. (She was originally trained as a dramatist.)

There was palpable anger in Ms. Russ’s work, but it was leavened by wit and humor. In a scene from “The Female Man,” Janet Evason, who inhabits an idyllic future on Whileaway, a planet without men, visits Earth, where she is promptly hustled onto a television talk show. A dialogue unfolds between Janet and the master of ceremonies:

MC: I — Miss Evason — we — well, we know you form what you call marriages, Miss Evason, that you reckon the descent of your children through both partners. ... I confess you’re way beyond us in the biological sciences. ... But there is more, much, much more — I am talking about sexual love.

JE (enlightened): Oh! You mean copulation.

MC: Yes.

JE: And you say we don’t have that?

MC: Yes.

JE: How foolish of you. Of course we do.

MC: Ah? (He wants to say, “Don’t tell me.”)

JE: With each other. Allow me to explain.

She was cut off instantly by a commercial poetically describing the joys of unsliced bread.

Writing in The New York Times in 1983, Gerald Jonas ranked Ms. Russ “among the small band of accomplished stylists in science fiction.”

She won a Hugo Award in 1983 for “Souls,” a historical fantasy novella about a 12th-century abbess who must defend against invading, sexually brutalizing Norsemen, and a Nebula Award in 1972 for the story “When It Changed,” a precursor of “The Female Man.” The Hugo, presented by members of the World Science Fiction Convention, and the Nebula, presented by the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America, are considered the Pulitzer Prizes of the genre.

Joanna Russ was born in the Bronx on Feb. 22, 1937. In 1957 she earned a bachelor’s in English from Cornell, where she studied with Vladimir Nabokov. In 1960 she received a master’s degree in playwriting and dramatic literature from the Yale Drama School.

But by then she had set her sights on science fiction, having published her first story, “Nor Custom Stale,” the year before in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

The field was such a male stronghold that through the mid-20th century its handful of female writers often used masculine pseudonyms. (Ursula K. Le Guin, today the best-known woman in science fiction, did not begin publishing until the 1960s.)

In midcentury science fiction by men and women, female characters resembled their earthly counterparts: comely, compliant and domestic. “Galactic suburbia,” Ms. Russ derisively called this fictional universe, and she began to push against its confines.

In a series of stories published in the late 1960s, she introduced the heroine Alyx, a quick-witted, not greatly beautiful mercenary, thief and assassin who roams energetically across the centuries from antiquity onward.

Alyx also stars in Ms. Russ’s first novel, “Picnic on Paradise,” published in 1968; the novel was later reissued with the stories in a compilation volume, “The Adventures of Alyx.”

Ms. Russ’s feminism is perhaps nowhere more visible than in “The Female Man.” It features a contemporary woman, Joanna, and three alter egos: Jeannine, who dwells in a dismal past; Jael, a warrior who inhabits a world in which the war between men and women is literal (“The best way to silence an enemy is to bite out his larynx,” she says); and Janet, the utopian.

Ms. Russ, who lived in Tucson, had a brief early marriage that ended in divorce. No known family members survive.

As a scholar, she was known for a study of Willa Cather that invoked Cather’s lesbianism, long a taboo subject. She taught at the State University of New York, Binghamton (now Binghamton University, State University of New York); the University of Colorado; the University of Washington; and elsewhere.

Her other books include the novels “We Who Are About to ...” and “The Two of Them,” and the nonfiction books “How to Suppress Women’s Writing” and “Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans & Perverts,” in which she denounces as censorship the antipornography stance of some feminists.

In her critical work, too, Ms. Russ’s wit came barreling through. Writing in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1969, she had this to say about John Boyd’s novel “The Last Starship From Earth,” published the year before by Berkley Books:

“I forgive Mr. Boyd the anguish his novel caused me and hope he will eventually forgive me the anguish this review may cause him, but for Berkley there is no forgiveness. Only reform. Don’t do it again.”