Growing up, science fiction became a refuge for me. I was (probably still am, though I’ve learned some tricks) one of those kids who simply did not grok the world around me. My peers were alien to me, culture was a mystery, the adults around me cryptic to point of useless, and for whatever reason I felt it was my fault.
I had always read SF and many of the movies I thought were great were, but until Star Trek it was not an exclusive, obsessional interest. Right around age 12, my consciousness became flooded with science fiction. There are many reasons for this, but at the time I would have said the chief one was aesthetic. In retrospect…
Point being, SF pretty much provided me a foundation for navigating the world. I think it fair to say a great deal of who and what I am today was initially informed by all that crazy kid stuff. I could not wait for the Future.
(Not all of them, obviously. Star Trek being the upfront model, obviously I didn’t want Orwell’s future.)
I moved through adolescence taking it all in. And when puberty hit a whole different set of lessons came into play. Concerning girls.
I had read a few of Joanna Russ’s short stories and her Ace Special And Chaos Died. I have to be careful when assessing influences and impact because I was 20 or 21 when her most famous work, The Female Man, was published. With the proviso that in certain instances, male adolescence can extend all the way to age 25 (or even 30), such a work can still have a crucial formative effect.
Somewhere along that whole stretch of time, I became an amateur feminist. By that I mean that I was largely in sympathy with the women’s rights movement, I had developed an intolerance for the kind of thoughtless discrimination that passed for “maturity” with too many men, but I wasn’t reading a lot of feminist theory or actively engaging it philosophically. So when I say “amateur” I mean in the best sense of one who loves something but does not pursue it in any professional sense.
Joanna Russ was the hard pill many of us swallowed to come to terms with the complaints of the women around us. It remains a puzzle to me to this day that her arguments met with such oblivious resistance by so many of my peers, even in the SF community.
Gwyneth Jones has written a biography of Russ for the Modern Masters of Science Fiction series published by the University of Illinois Press. (It’s an excellent series.) It is brief but thorough, plenty of notes, and a loving explication of Russ’s work. One of the take-aways I found most interesting, as it connects to one of my experiences reading Russ, is the picture of a person of considerable intellectual gifts trying to address problems within a society (and a community) that would seem amenable to modification if not complete solution and finding them obstinately intractable, so much so that as engagement continues, the frustration becomes more evident in the work. I concluded from Jones’ study that Russ thought better of us (the SF community) than we deserved and with great patience tried to bring us to a place of better understanding of our own best qualities. That her good opinion eroded reluctantly over time, in the face of baffling resistance.
She wrote science fiction, first because she loved it, but secondly because it was a mode offering the best possibility of conveying her ideas. This is not unusual. I suspect most of us who write SF do so because our ideas, the viewpoints, the philosophies, if you will, simply work better (or even at all) in science fiction than in any other mode. What seems striking is how even among avid readers, the feminist assertions from writers like Russ are treated as exceptions—often unwelcome—to the basic framework of thought experiment essential to SF.
Conveying this disconnect is perhaps one of the most difficult things to accomplish—in any genre, but even in science fiction—and one Russ managed to do in her novel The Two Of Them. In that novel, the two “heroes” are Trans Temp Agents, an older man and his female apprentice, who endeavor, at her instigation, to rescue a young girl from her oppressive situation. The two agents have worked well together for a long time, there is a comfortable relationship, they are lovers, it is a team…and yet, we come upon a scene where the woman is trying to explain to him how, among other things, he is condescending to her and that the fiction of equality between them is just that—fiction. And she cannot make him see it. It is an elegant demonstration of “talking past each other” that is the case in almost all unequal relationships. Her words simply do not mean to him what they mean to her and in the end she realizes that this is untenable in the kind of relationship she wants. The one they have seems perfectly fine to him and he cannot “hear” her critique.
(This, if anything, underscores the ludicrous dismissal of her work by those who insist she was “just” an angry lesbian and therefore what she said has no real value. Clearly, those critics “just” can’t “hear” her.)
Of the many things of value in Russ, that scene had a profound impact on me. Reading Gwyneth Jones’ biography of Russ, I suspect that scene was a distillation of the years of frustration Russ must have felt trying to elevate a dynamic.
Reading Russ is a master class in subverting assumptions. If read honestly, i.e, without the automatic filters that would recategorize every argument into convenient files where they will do no real damage to one’s assumptions, one comes away seeing things a bit differently. Even when she used a hammer, it was a precise blow, the kind a skilled diamond-cutter might strike. By the time my adolescence ended (if it has) I had taken from Russ the lesson that in certain situations I will never understand everything that is going on, perhaps not even most, and that I have to assume I do not and never will know enough.
The one book of Russ’s that did not receive much attention was her polemic, How To Suppress Women’s Writing, which is an elegant primer on oppression of any marginalized group. Russ, however she may have felt about the society around her, understood the mechanisms. Her science fiction was all about those mechanisms and their impact on the individual.
