Joanna Russ “was brilliant in a way that couldn’t be denied, even by those who hated her,” B. D. McClay writes.
, 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.
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 “,” which features both an all-women planet, on which women engage in duels, and a sex-segregated planet in a state of permanent war.
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.
that, when she was fifteen, she was “absolutely convinced the cold, starving badness I felt inside me all the time was. . . . Ever since I’ve been sure that the only people who could like me were vampires like my mother, or fellow-defectives.” 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.
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.
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