The Female Man by Joanna Russ
“I was born on a farm in Whileaway.” I was thinking how funny it would be for someone to write a book called “The Male Man”. I have no idea what it would be about, but it would make me laugh. This book also makes me laugh because at times it’s downright hilarious. It’s hard to exactly capture the structure of this book, and a plot description sort of oversells how much “happens” in this book. Instead the book is a lot of other science […]
To Write Like a Woman by Joanna Russ
This is a mishmash collection of essays from the scholar, critic, and science fiction writer Joanna Russ, most famous for her novels, especially The Female Man. This collection was published in 1995, and mostly essays from professional and academic journals from the 1970s. There’s a more or less common drift to many of these essays usually falling on the lines of considerations on critical readings of science fiction as a subject and the women’s writing (women writers) and the confluence of both of these. Some […]
How to Suppress Women's Writing by Joanna Russ
Silver on the Road by Laura Anne Gilman
The last two-book review I wrote was compare and contrast, because the material in each book related to the other book. This time, not so much: one is non-fiction, and one is fiction, and without performing some mental calisthenics at a level I’m not willing to do right now I don’t think I could write a unified review.
For those of you interested, there’s five new digital releases of Joanna Russ science fiction novels available. All are on Scribd, and if you haven’t check that out or her out you should. She’s weird and wonderful in a lot of ways. There’s a lot of James Tiptree/Alice Sheldon in her work and she’s adjacent in good ways to Samuel Delany. Here’s some sci-fi, horror, and fantasy tropes or subgenres I can’t handle: Body Horror New Civilizations and their subsequent culture Unintended Colonies All three […]
This one would probably be a favorite among the Cannonball Read crowd. Published in 1980ish by sci-fi writer and professor Joanna Russ, this short treatise tackles the general ethos concerned in suppressing (as opposed to repressing and definitely oppressing) women’s writing in general, and acts as a kind of primer in how to deal with continued efforts. Russ is not dealing in an overtly authoritarian cultural war against women’s writers ala The Handmaid’s Tale. She is beginning with the actual act of writing and the […]
