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4 unusual facts about Joanna Russ


Gary Westfahl

Westfahl is a prominent science fiction critic along with Damien Broderick, John Clute, Thomas M. Disch, Carl Freedman, Stanislaw Lem, Eric Rabkin, Joanna Russ, and Brian Stableford.

Joanna Russ

The late 1960s and 1970s marked the beginnings of feminist SF scholarship—a field of inquiry that was all but created single-handedly by Russ, who contributed many essays on feminism and science fiction that appeared in journals such as College English and Science Fiction Studies.

Russ was a self-described socialist feminist, expressing particular admiration for the work and theories of Clara Fraser and her Freedom Socialist Party.

The English Assassin: A Romance of Entropy

Joanna Russ described the novel as "less vividly raw" but "sadder, stranger, more crafted, sometimes more beautiful, and far more complex" than the series' opening volume.


Lesbian utopia

More contemporary examples of lesbian utopian fiction include John Wyndham's Consider Her Ways (1956); Poul Anderson's Virgin Planet (1959); Cordwainer Smith's story "The Crime and Glory of Commander Suzdal"; Joanna Russ's The Female Man (1975); Nicola Griffith's Ammonite (1993); and John Varley's story "The Manikins".

Mari Kotani

During this period, Kotani and Maki Honda's translation of Joanna Russ' How to Suppress Women's Writing received by major feminist critics in Japan including Chizuko Ueno, Fukuko Kobayashi, Yuko Matsumoto, and Kazuko Takemura.

Women in speculative fiction

Additionally, movement among writers concerned with feminism and gender roles sprang up, leading to a genre of "feminist science fiction including Joanna Russ' 1975 The Female Man, Samuel R. Delany's 1976 Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia, and Marge Piercy's 1976 Woman on the Edge of Time.


see also

Nobody's Home

"Nobody's Home", a short story from The Zanzibar Cat, a 1983 collection of short stories by Joanna Russ