The Cascadia Subduction Zone, Vol. 6, 2

The April issue of The Cascadia Subduction Zone is out! The issue opens with Julie Phillips' keynote talk at the Tiptree Symposium (held last December at the University of Oregon) discussing the correspondence between Ursula K. Le Guin and James Tiptree Jr and Joanna Russ and James Tiptree Jr. The issue also includes poetry by Gwynne Garfinkle, Neile Graham, and Sonya Taaffe, a Grandmother Magma column by Daniel Abraham, and reviews of five new books; the issue's featured artist is Betsy James (who is also the author of Roadsouls, a novel Aqueduct has just published, and stories recently published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction). If you're not already a subscriber, you can subscribe or purchase the issue here.

Vol. 6 No. 2 — April  2016

Essay

“I Begin to Meet You at Last”:
On the Tiptree-Russ-Le Guin Correspondence
  by Julie Phillips

Poems

Clear-Cut Spirit Song
The Goddess of the Unseen
The Gods of Tales
   by Neile Graham

Men Who Aren’t Crazy
   by Sonya Taaffe

Poetess Strikes Again
   by Gwynne Garfinkle

Grandmother Magma

Toward a Feminist Masculinity
The Will to Change, bell hooks
   by Daniel Abraham

Reviews

All the Birds in the Sky, by Charlie Jane Anders
   reviewed by S. Qiouyi Lu

The Merril Theory of Lit'ry Criticism, by Judith Merril, edited by Ritch Calvin
   reviewed by Michael Levy

The Winged Histories, by Sofia Samatar
   reviewed by Tansy Rayner Roberts

Lost Trails: Forgotten Tales of the Weird West, edited by Cynthia Ward
  reviewed by Kristin King

Damnificados, by JJ Amaworoso Wilson
  reviewed by Victoria Elisabeth Garcia

Featured Artist

Image to Word: The Morning Series
   by Betsy James

Report on the Tiptree Symposium

I spent last weekend in Eugene, Oregon, attending the Tiptree Symposium, which was hosted by the University of Oregon Libraries in honor of Alice Sheldon's centennial. In case you haven't heard,the University of Oregon Libraries' special collections include the papers of James Tiptree JR/Alice Sheldon, Joanna Russ, Ursula K. Le Guin, Suzy McKee Charnas, Kate Wilhelm, Suzette Haden Elgin, and other feminist writers who are so critically important to our field and its history. I say I attended, but Aqueduct also attended: Kath presided over three tables with generous help from attending Aqueductistas. We sold several dozen books of our own, plus a variety of Tiptree-related books from other publishers and Tiptree Award tee-shirts.

During the welcome speeches made at the opening of the symposium, Senior Vice Provost Doug Blandy quoted from the introduction to Octavia's Brood in order to emphasize the importance of speculation and "visionary thinking" and declared that the symposium "advances our academic mission." This was a particularly nice touch, I thought, especially since none of the programming carried even a whiff of what most non-academics dislike about academic presentations. (As someone at home with academics, I'm always especially happy to find such harmonious blending.)



The first afternoon featured keynote speaker Julie Phillips, who gave a frequently funny and always moving account of two important correspondences, between Tiptree and Le Guin and Tiptree and Russ. These correspondences record, among other things, how Alli Sheldon spent the last ten years of life--following the disclosure that Tiptree was also, somehow, Alice Sheldon--"trying to find out who she was." After the revelation, she often felt that she didn't have any self at all, that she was caught up in "an animated puppet show." The value of the correspondence in these archives, Julie noted, is about refusing splitting things into compartments and labeling them (something Joanna Russ's letters talk about explicitly).

Following Julie's talk, students of Carol Stabile's Feminist Science Fiction course read selections from the correspondence, and Ursula read her letter in response to Tiptree's disclosure of Alice Sheldon. Many of us cried.

Karen Joy Fowler then introduced an audio production of "The Women Men Don't See," complete with sound effects. The actor reading Don Fenton's narration and dialogue was perfect. I've read that story men times, of course, but I found I couldn't bringing myself to leave the auditorium before it was finished. (Two tours of the Titpree Exhibit and Knight Library began as the tape was playing.) I did get to see the exhibit anyway, though, thanks to Julie Phillips doing the honors for me and her family members, who attended the symposium.

That evening, the Tiptree Motherboard hosted a party, full of conversation, with great refreshments and decorated with gorgeous flower arrangements and posters of Tiptree Award winners lining the walls.






Next morning began with a panel that was originally conceived to be on the subject of "feminist sf publishing." (Somewhere along the way, and without my noticing, "feminist" got dropped.) I was on this panel with Jacob Weisman, publisher of Tachyon Publications (who has done a lot of feminist sf publishing, including three Tiptree Award anthologies), Lisa Rogers, assistant editor at The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Gordon van Gelder, the publisher of , who was also Julie Phillips' editor for her life of Alli Sheldon. We were all a bit gobsmacked when moderator Prof. Phil Scher began by asking us about whether the mainstreaming of sf movies had significantly changed the status and fortunes of sf publishing. When my turn came to respond, I noted how vexed an issue sf film is for women: that films representing women well are considered "flukes" when they're successful, because Hollywood assumes "people" want to see stories about white men only. 

We talked about more interesting subjects, though, when the moderator asked us about "aha" moments when reading mss. (I chose to describe my exhilaration when reading the ms of Andrea Hairston's first novel, Mindscape.) And when the audience entered the discussion, it became promiscuously wide-ranging. This is the only way I can account for the introduction of the subject of "transparent" prose. I think it may have stemmed from a thread provoked by Eileen Gunn; I do recall that Eileen noted that some people don't seem to recognize certain styles of writing as styles, and that it takes a good deal of effort to write in such styles. And Ursula Le Guin, seated in the front row, provided a pungent remark that scotched the notion that "transparent prose" is "journalistic." The conversation was moving too fast for me to insert some of my own concerns about the use of the term "transparent prose"; these relate, of course, to my ongoing reflections about intelligibility-- that intelligibility is neither obvious nor "natural," but always a consequence of the stories, labels, words, etc that are generated by dominant, mainstream (dare I say "hegemonic"?) culture. Some stories, some identities, are simply invisible to those who don't venture outside mainstream culture. While any socially marginalized person is intimately acquainted with this problem and it seems to me to be an important issue that belongs in any discussion about "sf publishing" (feminist or otherwise), that's a minority view, I know, and requires connecting dots that are likely to go unnoticed by most people. Toward the end of the panel, though, Carol Stabile asked about whether the internet and social media had had an impact on sf publishing. And here I was able to note that these had made presses like Aqueduct possible--allowing the amplification of voices that are usually inaudible to the mainstream and the telling of stories unfamiliar and therefore otherwise unintelligible to mainstream publishing. 


I thought about the issue of intelligibility of non-mainstream stories again, when on the next panel, moderated by Karen, featuring Ursula, Suzy Charnas, and David Gerrold, Suzy talked about her first sf convention in 1976, in Kansas City, where she discovered "a community of women writers and readers, coalescing and beginning to create the world of feminist sf." The men at the convention, she said, didn't want to discuss sf by women or stories written from a woman's pov--and yet were outraged that women would want to meet separately simply so that they could discuss such sf (without being told how boring and awful it was and being constantly interrupted, as they were whenever they tried to say anything in the presence of men). Suzy said she'd been "taught that a woman's pov is too constricting and boring. But emerging feminist voices challenged that attitude." Ursula noted "It was a man's world. Feminism had been tried and abandoned earlier in [the twentieth] century. I thought literature was written by men, about men, for men." And so she wrote as a man-- "until I started to feel it wasn't right. Vonda [McIntyre] kept pinging me gently on the head." And: "I wanted to learn how to write as a woman. (But I was happy being a woman.)" And here followed a flurry of discussion affirming that writing like a woman had to be learned, and that it took hard work.

This made me remember how dissatisfied I was with some of the attempts of men writers to write a woman's pov in the 1980s & 1990s & of how Samuel R. Delany has more than once noted that for 19th-century European novelists, being able to write well from a woman's pov was an index of the quality of their art. Since writing from a woman's pov became declasse with modernism, of course both reading and writing stories by women, at least to begin with, takes an effort. And so it is for other marginalized identities. Remember Octavia Butler telling an interviewer that for a long time she thought her protagonist and pov character had to be a hard-drinking, chain-smoking 30-year-old white guy? We write not only from life, but from models. It's something we always have to keep in mind when we're thinkining and talking about gender issues in fiction.

After lunch, Jeff Smith very kindly submitted to questions about his friendship with Alli Sheldon/James Tiptree from Carol Stabile's students and then the audience. This was vivid and often poignant, a very fine reminder of how important oral histories are. And I have to say I'm fascinated to hear that for a while, Sheldon had a living tree growing inside her house. (Surely that's even more remarkable than her feeding a raccoon oatmeal cookies in her kitchen every afternoon?)

Next we had the pleasure of listening to Alli Sheldon's voice, by way of three audio recordings dating from the 1970s. One of these talked about Robert Heinlein's I Will Fear No Evil, another about the play of gender differences in marriage, and the third about pain. 


And finally, the last item on the program was a panel discussion of the James Tiptree Jr Award, moderated by Joan Haran (now a professor at the Center for the Study of Women in Society at the University of Oregon), featuring Jeanne Gomoll, Margaret McBride, Pat Murphy, and Heather Whipple. Pat began by telling one of the "many versions of the birth of the award," in which Pat's GoH speech at WisCon announced the award as a spoof but the audience insisted on taking it literally and making it real. Heather, who is the award's archivist, talked about the materials documenting jury discussions etc. When Joan asked the panelists where the award was going now, I think the response that most interested me was Pat's observation that "what 'exploring or expanding the sense of gender' is different now than when we started the award," and that that meant the award would necessarily always be changing. Oh, & I should also perhaps mention that a request was made that new nominations for the Award not be submitted until after the new website design had been implemented (which will, I gather, be fairly soon).

At the end of the panel, Nisi Shawl, having insisted that music was part of the award's tradition, joined the panel as Pat led the room in a rendition of a song sung at one Tiptree Award Ceremony.

Finally, Carol Stabile made the stunning announcement that more Tiptree Symposia would be held-- next year with a focus on Joanna Russ, and the following year with a focus on Suzy McKee Charnas.

All in all, it was a stimulating weekend. I do have one reservation, though: it is that Nisi Shawl could remark that perhaps only one other black person attended the symposium. Obviously, this strikes me as a blindspot, given that all three Aqueduct authors who have been honored with the Tiptree Award are black women, that Jeff Smith identified Alli as a "social justice warrior," and that the newest Tiptree and Le Guin fellowship awards have gone to black women. 

 

 












 

An interesting speech I somehow missed

I don't know how it happened, but I somehow missed that Donna Haraway won the Science Fiction Research Association's Pilgrim Award in 2011. (This year's winner, as you may recall, was Pamela Sargent.) I realized this today, when I finally got around to opening a triple-issue of the SFRA Review, which arrived in my mailbox months and months ago. This publication printed Haraway's lengthy acceptance speech. It's also available in pdf here-- as well as a 29-minute Vimeo video, which you might want to check out here. To give you an idea of why you might want to read or watch it, here are the last few paragraphs of the speech:

 In this n-dimensional niche space, I am reminded that in her acceptance of the Pilgrim
Award in 2008, Gwyneth Jones defined SF “as a volume, a set (overlapping with many others),
in the vast, contained yet unlimited ocean of information—furnished with the icons of the
genre....Within this volume, every significant writer opens up a new Imagination Space….Maybe
the work of science fiction scholarship…[is] to forge links, build complexity, refine the
details: and rescue the genuine novelty from each writer’s generic contribution.” I like this
approach, but I want to characterize the work of SF scholarship, and SF as a whole, also as a
game of cat’s cradle or string figures, of giving and receiving patterns, dropping threads and so
mostly failing but sometimes finding something that works, something consequential and maybe
even beautiful, that wasn’t there before, of relaying connections that matter, of telling stories in
hand upon hand, digit upon digit, attachment site upon attachment site, to craft conditions for
flourishing in terran worlding. Like me, Jones says that she received her baptism in science
fiction’s sexual politics from The Female Man. I want to end with string figures as SF partly in
homage to Joanna Russ’s Janet Evason, who landed on a desk in front of, to her Whileaway eyes,
oddly dressed men, whom we, in Joanna’s world, know to be in military uniform, and proposes a
game of cat’s cradle to calm them down. They did not understand; they did not pick up the
threads and marvel at the patternmaking. Innocent that she is, Janet reasoned that cat’s cradle is
a universal sign of peace. It is surely one of humanity’s oldest games, but like guman instead of
homo, string figures are not everywhere the same game.

Like all offspring of colonizing and imperial histories, I—we—have to relearn that all
string figures are not exactly the same as English and U.S. American cat’s cradle. In the late 19th
and early 20th centuries, United States and European ethnologists collected string figure games
from all over the world; these discipline-making travelers were surprised that when they showed
the string figure games that they had learned as children at home, their hosts already knew such
games in greater variety. String figure games came late to Europe, probably from Asian trade
routes. All of the epistemological desires and fables of this period of the history of comparative
anthropology were ignited by the similarities and differences, with their undecidably independent
inventions or cultural diffusions, tied together by the threads of hand and brain, making and
thinking, in the relays of patterning in the “Native” and “Western” string figure games.

In the Navajo language, string figure games are called na'atl'o'. They are one form of “continuous weaving,” practices for telling the stories of the constellations, of the emergence of the People, of the Diné. These string figures are thinking as well as making practices, pedagogical practices and cosmological performances. Some Navajo thinkers describe string figures as one kind of patterning for restoring hózhó, a term imperfectly translated into English as harmony, beauty, and right relations of the world, including right relations of humans and nonhumans. Not in the world, but of the world; that is what leads me to include Navajo string figures, na'atl'o', in the web of SF worlding. The worlds of SF are not containers; they are patternings, risky co-makings, speculative fabulations. It matters which ideas we think other ideas with; thinking or making cat’s cradle with string figures with na'atl'o' is not an innocent universal gesture, but a risky proposition in relentless historical relational contingency. Janet Evason refused to hear Jael’s claim that the wonderful world of Whileaway got its start from an act of biological warfare—genocide— that killed off all the human males. Like Joanna, we cannot afford that kind of forgetting. Anyone who recognizes the repeated acts of genocide that undergird that nonetheless precious thing called democracy surely knows this basic fact. How to be response-able is the consequential question in SF worlding.

String figure games are practices of scholarship, relaying, thinking with, becoming with in material-semiotic makings. Like SF, cat’s cradle is a game of relaying patterns, of one hand, or pair of hands, or mouths and feet, or other sorts of tentacular things, holding still to receive something from another, and then relaying by adding something new, by proposing another knot, another web. Or better, it is not the hands that give and receive exactly, but the patterns, the patterning. Cat’s cradle, string figures, na'atl'o' can be played by many, on all sorts of limbs, as long as the rhythm of accepting and giving is sustained. Scholarship is like that too; it is passing on in twists and skeins that require passion and action, holding still and moving, anchoring and launching.

So I end with renewed thanks to the SFRA and ongoing astonishment at receiving the Pilgrim Award. I hope that with others I can contribute to weaving this honor into the multicolored skeins and twists of SF worlding.

Joanna Russ Issue of the CSZ

I'm pleased to announce that the Cascadia Subduction Zone has just published a special issue on Joanna Russ. "This issue of The Cascadia Subduction Zone is supplemental, published without regard for our usual schedule and distributed free of charge to subscribers. For the editors, it’s an exceptionally special issue we began planning shortly after Joanna Russ’s death last year. When I think about Joanna Russ’s relationship to feminism and feminist science fiction in general and to the work the CSZ aims to nurture and provoke in particular, Christine de Pizan’s brilliant conceit of the City of Ladies comes to my mind. The medieval thinker constructed her “City” of every powerful, accomplished woman she knew of. Russ’s work, always powerful and challenging, is more than a brick in the wall of our city, though; it is a substantial element of its foundation. Foundations are tricky things, especially in the seismic times in which we live. They are invisible to those paying only casual attention to the buildings they support.
But for the inhabitants of any building, the foundation matters tremendously." (Quotation from my introductory essay)
 
Non-subscribers can purchase an electronic version for $4 or both the print & electronic version for $5 here. 

Current Issue
Vol. 2 Supplement
August 2012 

Essays

Outsider, Creative Contrarian,
Lesbian and Feminist Theorist
    by L. Timmel Duchamp

Antagonisms
   by Farah Mendlesohn

Feminist Futures Out of Time: Reading Joanna Russ’s
What Are We Fighting For?
    by Alexis Lothian

Alienation and “the Other”
in the Short Fiction of Joanna Russ
    by Brit Mandelo

Reviews

On Joanna Russ
    edited by Farah Mendlesohn
    reviewed by Candra K. Gill

Heiresses of Russ 2011:
The Year’s Best Lesbian Speculative Fiction
    edited by JoSelle Vanderhooft and Steve Berman
    reviewed by Cynthia Ward

Featured Artist

Monte Rogers

Brit Mandelo's We Wuz Pushed: Joanna Russ and Radical Truth-Telling

It's my pleasure to announce that Aqueduct Press has just released a new volume in the Conversation Pieces Series, We Wuz Pushed: Joanna Russ and Radical Truth-Telling, by Brit Mandelo. "To speak radical truths—unapologetically, ferociously, rudely when necessary—is the central purpose of Joanna Russ's influential body of work," declares Mandelo in her essay on Russ's radical, groundbreaking literary and critical work. Mandelo’s essay traces Russ's evolving efforts to speak truth throughout her literary career—examining both Russ's successes and failures in doing so. She insists that Russ problematized and individualized her ultimate understanding of truth without rejecting its possibility. Rather, Mandelo argues, the trajectory of change in Russ's work and her revision of prior truths itself constitutes a valuable part of the truth-telling project. Russ emerges in Mandelo's essay as a heroic though all-too-human intellectual and artist, one whose angry, brilliant work we cannot afford to ignore or forget.

To tell you the truth, when this arrived in Aqueduct's mail, I snatched it from the pile to read first, rather than let it go to Kath, as mss sent to us usually do--and I devoured it one sitting. I suspect that a lot of Aqueduct readers will be as riveted as I by this essay.

You can buy the volume here for $9, or the e-book for $5.95. I'll be interested to hear what its readers might have to say about it. 

Quote of the day

All oppressed people must be controlled. Since open force and economic coercion are practical only part of the time, ideology-- that is, internalized oppression, the voice in the head-- is brought in to fill the gap. When people discover their own power, governments tremble.--- Joanna Russ, ""Power and Helplessness in the Women's Movement"

Stuff of Interest

--Wendy N. Wagner interviews Nisi Shawl for Fantasy Magazine.

--Nnedi Okorafor offers her personal definition of feminism.

--Brit Mandelo reviews Joanna Russ's We Who Are About to..., of which she says:

Books rarely ask so much of the reader, true, but perhaps they should. We Who Are About to… is brutal, unforgiving, and also supremely, astoundingly beautiful, not simply because of Russ’s phenomenal, unmatched prose but because of the journey it takes the reader through. In fact, I might go further than Delany—I might be willing to call this book perfect, not just pristine, in the sense that it does exactly what it was intended to do, on every level it was intended to do it on, at the same time.

--Karyn Huenemann reviews Ursula K. Le Guin's Cheek by Jowl for the International Research Society for Children's Literature.

--Jo Walton reviews C.J. Cherry's Cyteen, about which she notes

I’ve probably read Cyteen forty times, but it always grabs me and won’t let go, and I always see more in it.

--After reading Patricia Anthony's The Happy Policeman, Gord Sellar wonders

why she is one of those authors I feel like we don’t remember in SF, and I think this fact in itself indicates something problematic in SF circles. Authors who have impressed me less (or at least less consistently — Harlan Ellison and Norman Spinrad, among others) are far better-remembered, and I think there are perhaps a few reasons for this.

This is the sort of question for which one explanation will not suffice as the definitive answer. Back when Anthony was still writing and publishing, she was on my sight-unseen must-buy list. In his list of possible explanations, Sellar misses at least one that occurred to me when I read that Anthony had decided to leave the genre and found myself wondering the same thing.

Here, by the way, is Anthony herself, speaking to to Sara Martin, on her career difficulties:

Your work is habitually labeled as science fiction or speculative fiction. How does labeling affect you as a writer?

To be frank, it destroyed my career. For the first few years I'd not seen myself as a science fiction writer, but instead as something of a thriller writer whose books just happened to include aliens. Well, my fault - what can a bookstore do with an alien except sell it as science fiction? But I'm afraid that I disappointed many s.f. readers who came to my books seeking a "worlds of wonder" adventure, a high concept cerebral story, an escape from the day-to-day troubles in their lives. Hah! My books are not concept-driven, but character- and story-driven. They deal with very real, very mundane tragedies, more the fodder of mainstream readers. But because the books contained aliens, a very small number of mainstream readers would read them. Neither were they accepted by the s.f. audience. By the way, I caution new writers to try not to make the mistake I made. I don't know the solution to this dilemma, since how else can bookstores make sense of their inventory? And yet slotting a writer kills a lot of creativity. Many of the books available out there tend to look and sound the same.

In praise of clarity

It's a clear, shiny day here in Edmonton, blessed, even, with my favorite range of daytime temperatures-- in the sixties, F., that is. I'm particularly happy today because I just spent a couple of hours here, at a coffee shop called Transcend (that makes a first-class latte), working on a story I started in early May. I'm probably going to move on to the public library next, where I spent a few hours yesterday, mostly editing and composing yesterday's post. I've decided the striking birds I mentioned in that post may be related to the Belted Kingfisher, which I occasionally see at the Fill in Seattle. It's call is a sort of rattling chatter, which reminds me of the Belted Kingfisher, though the shape of its head definitely nor its comfortableness around humans does not. I should probably hunt down a bird book (the ideal subtitle of which would be "A Definitive Guide to the Birds of Alberta") while I'm at the library.

I see, on the Feminist SF blog, that Naamen G. Tilahun has been diving deep into the work of Joanna Russ. I'd like to boost the signal on his first post on the subject, Remembering Joanna Russ--Part I. His discussion begins with the powerful, always disturbing We Who Are About To... I'm particularly pleased to see that unlike so many critics and reviewers, he doesn't claim that the narrator murders everyone else in the book, wholesale. For me, that characterization, which is so common, must be taken as an indication that the critic was unable to process what actually happens in the story, such that their affective response so clouds their perceptions that they can't rationally grasp the facts conveyed by the narrator (who is less unreliable than most). One could argue that the distinction, in itself, isn't that important, but I'd argue that as index of reading clarity, it's absolutely telling. In any case, Naamen's reading is clear-minded and expansive rather than foreclosing. Do go read it if you haven't already.

Galactic Suburbia Reads Joanna Russ

Check out the latest Galactic Suburbia podcast, wherein Alisa, Alex , and Tansy serve up a delightful discussion of Joanna Russ's How To Suppress Women's Writing, The Female Man, and "When It Changed." I highly recommend it.

Commemorating Joanna Russ at WisCon 35

As I mentioned in one of my early posts about WisCon 35, in addition to honoring Nisi Shawl, who was Guest of Honor, and celebrating Carol Emshwiller's life and work, this WisCon offered a special tribute to her, organized at the very last moment.

At the reception Thursday evening at Room of One's Own, Candra Gill gave a thrilling reading of "When It Changed."

On Saturday afternoon there was a panel on her work (which I couldn't attend, because it conflicted with the panel on Carol Emshwiller, to which I contributed).

And on Sunday evening, preceding Nisi's Guest of Honor speech, a statement about Russ's importance, sent by Farah Mendlesohn, who could not attend, was read, and Eileen Gunn, Amy Thomson, Geoff Ryman, Jeanne Gomoll, and I spoke about Joanna. I led off with the speech you can find below. Just as I arrived on the podium, Kate Schaefer handed me a vase of iris that had been culled from the yard of Joanna's house when she lived in Ballard, a neighborhood of Seattle. This strangely undid me, and left me so choked up I could hardly deliver my speech. I didn't actually break down, but I was in such an emotional state when I left the podium that I forgot to introduce Eileen, who followed me. Eileen stressed Joanna's geekiness. Amy recounted the time when Joanna stood up in the audience at a panel on "Future Crime" at Norwescon, "tearing Afie Bester a new one" for "declaring that for every criminal who wanted to commit a crime, there would be someone who wanted to be a victim. If you wanted to commit a murder, they'd pair you up with a suicidal person. For every rapist, they'd find someone who wanted to be raped." Jeanne described her astonishment at discovering, as she was publicly reading her "Open Letter to Joanna Russ" to find Joanna in the audience, and her intense pleasure in spending hours talking with Joanna afterwards. Geoff spoke of the brilliance of We Who Are About To... and its compassionate exploration of its narrator's thoughts as she approaches death.

WisCon's tribute to Joanna mattered tremendously to me. I am so glad the folks at WisCon brought it about.

Here is my speech, which is an only slightly altered version of the appreciation I wrote for Locus (published, along with appreciations from Eileen and Amy, in the June issue).

When I first met Joanna Russ, she was younger than I am now, though she had already written all the novels she would publish in her lifetime. Because, at the time, she had a novel of which she had written 75 pages on hold (storing it in her freezer for safekeeping, which is what one did with typescripts), I expected that when she had finished the nonfiction book she was working on—what would eventually be published as What Are We Fighting For?—she would go on to finish that novel.

When I first met Joanna Russ, I regarded her as a goddess of wit and perspicacity whose feminist theorizing always seemed to articulate perfectly problems I'd been grappling with myself, a revered member of the pantheon of creative feminist writers who had made possible the person I was and would become. Reading her shapely, scathing litany—“She wrote it, but...”—I at once recognized its kinship with other canonical feminist work. In my heart, Joanna Russ was the Virginia Woolf of our day.

Joanna was a goddess, but all too human. A great advocate for consciousness-raising, she was the first person to raise my consciousness about ableism. When I first met Joanna Russ, she had recently recovered from a back injury that had immobilized her for months. To write, she stood at a tall table in her workroom. While sitting at her kitchen table, where we talked, she always occupied an ergonomic kneeling stool. She also suffered from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. But it was depression that kept her from writing. She continually tried new drugs, each of which had horrible side-effects, including memory wipes that would result in her not remembering some of our conversations. One terrible December she spent two weeks in the psych ward of a hospital two blocks from my house. There's not much light in Seattle in December; when Joanna left the hospital, her talk about moving to the desert grew serious.

What I remember most vividly about Joanna was her powerful physical presence—her great height, her piercing gaze that maintained an extraordinary degree of eye-contact, her gleeful laughter and screeches of pleasure—and her particular personal qualities: lightning understanding and compassion and the sizzling power of her intellect—yes, even during her hospitalization for depression.

Though she had for several years declared herself “retired,” in her final letter to me, this last December, after alluding to the "long list of illnesses that've been getting in my way," she writes "But medicine has finally caught up with most of them and by the time I get back on to orthopedic OKness and fix a torn tendon in my left hand letter-writing will be much easier." The penultimate sentence was "In a few months I hope to be more ambulatory and type-competent." The tone of her letter was strikingly cheerful and energetic. It made me hope that she would begin writing again.

Joanna is gone, but her work remains, every bit of it still important and powerful. And we are all the richer for it.

ETA: Since seeing Amy Thomson's obituary in Locus, I've corrected the portion of my summary of her tribute characterizing Bester's declaration about murder and rape victims.

Delivering sf into the hands of alien creatures

The New York Times has published an obituary of Joanna Russ, by Margalit Fox. Fox characterizes Russ as " a writer who four decades ago helped deliver science fiction into the hands of the most alien creatures the genre had yet seen — women." Here's a taste of her article:

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....

Fox includes a quote from The Female Man to demonstrate Russ's wit. You can read the whole article here.

"If it doesn't affect you, then why read it?"

Thanks to a link at Sweet Freedom, I've just read a recently published interview with Joanna Russ by Consuela Francis and Alison Piepmeir on slash fiction and related subjects. The interview was conducted four years ago-- in May 2007, which is a year after Samuel R. Delany did a phone interview with her at WisCon 30. The Journal of Popular Romance Studies offers a transcript in both html and pdf. The pdf is definitely preferrable. Here are a few tastes, to pique your interest:

JR I remember when I first got a phone call from a friend. She told me about slash, and I didn’t get mildly interested, my hair stood up on end! I said “What? Can I get that?” “Yes,” she said, “you can,” and I began collecting them, and finally when the collection began to get utterly unwieldy and huge, I sent them to Bowling Green University, the Popular Culture Institute there. I wanted them to go somewhere they would last and not just be thrown out or whatever.

AP Does that mean that you don’t have your slash anymore?

JR I don’t have them with me, no. I have the few stories I wrote, copies of those, but that’s it. I’ve found that because they’re so erotic, after I finished one of them I would have this terrible thud as I came back to reality, and I decided I just didn’t like that. So, sorrowfully, I sent them away, where they would be loved. I might think they are.

[. . . ]

AP Well, we brought you some Smallville slash, just in case you want to see it but you don’t have to take it if it feels like that would be too much.

JR Most of it is sort of pornography.

AP Well, we definitely want to talk about that.

JR If it doesn’t turn you on, it’s kind of indifferent.

AP And that was one of the great points that you made in your essay about slash, the fact that people who don’t get it, who are not turned on by it, are not the right people to criticize it because they’re missing some crucial elements, and I thought that was exactly right.

JR I think that applies to all kinds of fiction and all kinds of drama. If it doesn’t affect you, then why read it?

AP And are you going to be able to have really useful insights about how it does or doesn’t work if it doesn’t work on you? So were your slash stories sexy? I mean, your regular novels are sexy, did the slash allow you to be more explicit?

JR Yes, and make my scenes longer. Yeah, it did I think. And yet there’s a good deal of slash where that doesn’t happen, but even there it’s full of emotion and emotional intensity.

[. . . ]

AP Conseula and I have been talking a lot about female desire and the fact that it seems to us that the lessons that we have been taught as girls and women about what desire was, what it meant, what it felt like, what shapes it took, that those lessons were all profoundly, profoundly wrong. In ways that as a thirty-four year old woman who has been a feminist for years and years, who teaches Women’s Studies, I’m surprised at how surprising this is to me, because I should know this by now, but it’s like, it’s even more wrong than I thought. So I just think that our culture, that we don’t know anything about female desire.

CF And yet, here’s this world of slash where this is all these women are doing, talking about it and asking questions.

JR But they’re in disguise. They’re disguised as a man. I once noticed that in slash there are so many references to these characters’ penises that it’s like a little label that says “Hello, I am” and the name. “I have a penis and I’m therefore male,” but clearly that’s not what’s happening.

CF Why do you think that women can’t have these conversations about their own desire through female characters?

JR I think it’s something like this. As I said, the characters are not exactly male. They’re disguises of some sort, kind of like “I have the proper genitals so I am male, please remember that.” I have written a couple of stories myself in which women are disguised, literally disguised as men. You try to write about women and you don’t have the cultural tropes that you could use, there’s very little there. It’s kind of like disguising yourself as an upper-class person, as an aristocrat. It counts, it matters that they’re male. It makes what they do serious. Apparently the real message does get through, because you said a lot of the fans hate it. They don’t think it’s about men, they know better. [Writing about male characters] kind of frees your imagination or your memory or something. This had happened in the nineteenth century, quite a few women who were novelists would write stories about women who were disguised as men or they would write them from a male point of view, and that is saying “if I were only a man, I could do this or that, or be this or that.” Some were not like that, there’s an early detective novel, 1890 or something like that in which a young woman is a detective, and there’s a lovely illustration from the first publications of this thing in a magazine then, and there she is with her skirts and her parasol and her hands are teeny. A drunken lout is about to hit a woman, and she is saying, “stop, sir,” and she doesn’t look as if she could hit a cream puff, but that’s her. That did happen. But in many of them, no, it didn’t.

I think [writing about male characters] has something to do with one’s sense of oneself as an active person, as free. I mean, we have sense, we look around and we see those guys who are doing all sorts of stuff, even if they can’t do it right, they’re thinking about it. They’re making fantasies about it, there are movies about it. So this becomes not only “we will show you the personal life of these people, which is left out of the mass media, but we will write about them as we know people on the inside, and they will ring true to us, to the writers and readers in a way they would not if they were women.”

AP And I guess that’s the part that interests me and that I have not found an adequate explanation for. That reading the stories about Clark and Lex for instance, in the Smallville slash, is really sexy, I mean, that stuff is hot, and works for me in a way that the stories about the female characters in Smallville don’t work at all. Is that some sort of compensatory thing, because my identity as a woman is not solid enough?

JR No, I think that nobody’s social identity as a woman is solid enough. And when you’re doing this, you’re inventing, you’re fantasizing. It’s still very much a different world for men and women. I remember somebody, a feminist at Cornell, once said to me, “I was talking to this audience and they were looking rather unconvinced, especially the guys, and then I said, how many people here put only their initials in the telephone listing in the telephone book?” And the women’s hands all went up, and the men went, you do? They didn’t know. They hadn’t noticed. Yeah, they do. And that makes a big difference. It’s like gay friends of mine who went to the March on Washington, and said we were all over the place, we got into a subway and it was nine tenths gay people. And she said you don’t realize what a burden you carry until it’s gone. Everything just went, it was wonderful, and I think that’s true whatever the burden is. Whatever the minority burden or the sex burden, whatever it is, when it’s gone you go, oh my god.

AP The social identity of a woman is such that sexual stories with women are not . . .

JR It’s not real unless men do it, something like that, I think.

The interview is really more of a conversation than a straightfoward interview, I think. Russ here ends up asking some of the questions, and her interviewers answering, and she picking up from there.

Remembering Joanna

The impact Joanna Russ's work has had on two overlapping fields of interest--feminism and science fiction-- is incalculable. Despite the brilliance of her work, she has received a relatively modest degree of recognition for it in the way of awards: in 1973 she was awarded the Nebula for "When It Changed" (a story that burst onto the scene at around the same time that science fiction began to change for a significant segment of sf writers and fans); the Hugo, Locus, and SF Chronicles Reader Awards in 1982 for "Souls"; two retrospective Tiptree Awards in the 1990s; a Gaylactic Spectrum Hall of Fame Award for The Female Man; the SFRA's Pilgrim Award for lifetime achievement; and the Florence Howe Award of the women's caucus of the MLA.

In fact, Joanna Russ was a powerhouse. People who read this blog will be most familiar with her fiction and the importance of her work for feminist sf. But in the 1980s, at least, Joanna Russ was a significant presence in the larger world of feminism. Her essays in various feminist publications (Thirteenth Moon, Sinister Wisdom, and Quest, to name just a few) articulated important arguments much needed at a time of passionate, even angry ferment as sex, class, and race issues arose during the last phases of what we now call "Second Wave" feminism. Her famous How to Suppress Women's Writing arrived on the scene in 1983, streaking like a bolt of lightning through the winter sky, making us see clearly what had previously been only dimly visible. I can still remember sitting on my bed in a mildewed New Orleans apartment, reading it cover to cover the November afternoon it arrived in the mail from the University of Texas Press. Yes, I had read much of the work she takes off from-- Tillie Olsen's Silences, Virginia Woolf's Room of One's Own and The Three Guineas, Ellen Moers' Literary Women, and so on-- but I had not been able, by myself, to get from those texts to where Russ took us in her magnificently polemical book. Reading it, I was both enraged and enthralled at the same time (a state of mind I always find myself in whenever I read anything, fiction or nonfiction, she wrote). She made the connections, distilled the insights. She showed me the way.

Her next major work of nonfiction, What Are We Fighting For? Sex, Race, Class and the Future of Feminism was equally powerful, but failed to get the reception it deserved. Timing, alas, is everything when it comes to trenchant political analysis. She wrote most of the book between 1988 and 1990, and then for various reasons I won't go into now took years to finish a chapter needed to complete the ms. And so it wasn't published until 1998. Despite its voluminous documentation, the fact that she drew most of her data from the late 1980s allowed people to dismiss it as irrelevant (though much of the data, had it been updated, would have made her case even more strongly). The desire of so many people to dismiss the book probably stemmed from the abysmal attitude toward feminism current at the time of the book's release. The ability to make feminist connections does seem to wax and wane with more general cultural currents.

Since I heard, late Wednesday afternoon, that Joanna was dying, I've managed to sleep about six hours total. My insomnia hasn't resulted merely from my sadness at the loss of such an intellectual powerhouse, but more because my personal memories of her and the few active years of our friendship suddenly began pouring into my thoughts, and once begun, could not be halted. (And it was also, I will admit, a special pain I felt because a letter I'd received from her last December had raised my hopes about her being close to well enough to be able to write again.) Last night at 4 a.m. I got out of bed to begin the process I'd been putting off-- namely, hunting for all those personal documents that would clarify my memories, memories which were, I'm afraid, a sad jumble. I easily located letters I'd written about my first meeting with her and journal entries describing or referencing many, many conversations. I even found my own letters to her on the hard drive of my computer (in files written in Wordstar 4.0, which had to be converted). I don't, however, know what I've done with her letters to me. I'd forgotten that I even had old letters from her. But in one of my journal entries, I quote from a letter she wrote me about the draft of a political essay I'd been working on: "Joanna's letter provided me with [...] a little pep-talk on fighting tactics in nonfiction writing. This is war, she reminded me-- & advised me to avoid as much as possible making myself a target in political nonfiction essays (but not, she said, in my fiction)." At the moment, I'd very much like to read that letter. My office filing cabinets are crammed with old correspondence, and none of my filing drawers are alphabetized. It's there somewhere, I know, for I never threw out so much as a postcard or even Solstice card from her.

Along with experiencing a flood of memories, I find myself wishing to talk about her, as a person, with other people who knew her. This is a departure from my years of near-silence about the fact that a couple of decades ago we had a very intense relationship. I never thought much about why I've seldom mentioned it to anyone. I suppose, if I'd thought about it, I'd have concluded that it somehow felt too private to discuss whenever the subject of Joanna Russ came up, since discussions were always of her public persona-- the writer and critic-- rather than the private individual. And as you might imagine, for an acquaintanceship to bloom into friendship requires being able to see and focus on the private individual in all their particularities and idiosyncrasies. When I began reading the traces of that old friendship, I realized it was more complicated than that-- or rather, I should say, our relationship was too complicated to be neatly summarized.

I vividly recall my first meeting with her. Here's an excerpt from a letter I wrote to a friend, about that meeting:

I, too, was properly intimidated about meeting her. (I've heard plenty (first hand) accounts of the snubs suffered by those who've had the audacity to introduce themselves to her.) […] Impersonal, is how I'd characterize her manner with me. She talked intensely, & frankly, & never took her eyes off mine for a good forty-five minutes. The conversation flowed easily, without awkwardness. But there was a sort of wall there, too, which strange to say didn't make me feel in the least bit uncomfortable. (Maybe it's how I might imagine Margaret A. being? That kind of impersonal. It will be interesting to see if her manner is different when next we meet. Judging by her letter to me, I rather think it will be.) Despite the wall, though, I had the impression that she considered me competent, intelligent, knowledgeable about the subject of our conversation... She never once patronized me or tried to put me at my ease (the way a woman professor, say, might do with a graduate student). & I never found myself worrying about what she might be thinking of me. Granted, I had some time to warm up (i.e., get rid of my nervousness) by chatting with Cynthia, who was sharp-witted but also easy & friendly.

Joanna was sleeping when I arrived (a little after 8 p.m.). She's put on a bit of weight since I last saw her (at the 1983 writers conference, by the bye), & reminded me a little of a large shambling bear. She has tremendous authority & competence. (It was only afterward that I started remembering how unique most of her books are, each of them groundbreaking in its own way.) [...] [She] had a sinus headache. Spent several minutes fussing about the wattage of light bulbs (taking them in & out) of the light fixture over her head. (We were sitting at her kitchen table.) In the meantime Cynthia fixed her English muffins, & then went out to do some grocery shopping. (JR, I think, keeps late hours-- dinner was to be eaten after I'd gone.)

Once settled, we got down to it with great intensity & liveliness. (She really has a wonderfully authoritative speaking style-- I don't mean arrogant or pontifical, but assured & widely referential & complete-- in the way that only women can be-- dipping back into past events the way male "experts" only ever do in a one-upping self-conscious, self-packaging way.) […] She told me she stopped work on a novel she was 75pp into three years ago, because of back problems. When she finally recovered enough to begin work again, she started a nonfiction project. The novel's now cold, the nonfiction book in full swing. She doesn't know if she'll be able to get back to the novel when she's finished the nonfiction book or not. Teaching, unfortunately, takes most of her time & energy, & of course novels demand great quantities of both. So of course teaching is one of the main reasons she hasn't done as much writing as she might have. (She stated unequivocally that writers cannot make a living from their writing & at the same time escape corruption by censorship: the professionalization of the sf writer, she says, is a recent phenomenon, & a disaster.) I remember feeling as I walked & bused my way home a great grief at the thought of that unfinished book. It seemed totally inappropriate for me to express any opinions about her work to her-- so I didn't. (& anyway there's something in her manner that forbids gratuitous comments, & would make a compliment seem presumptuous.) It's depressing to think we're to be deprived of the fiction she could be writing, all because she has so much teaching to do. (It surprised me to learn that she's teaching summer school-- thus losing her the one bit of free time for such work that full-time university teaching ever allows.)

That unfinished novel, by the way (the ms of which she said she kept in the freezer, for safekeeping), she once characterized as a story of lesbian lagniappe, free of anxiety, of a beautiful, lesbian life... Because of the back problems that she spoke of, she had a tall worktable in her work room at which she stood while she wrote, on an electric typewriter. She would never use a computer, she told me, because it would make the work go too quickly. Speed and fluidity, she assured me, were the enemies of the serious writer. Several times during our late-night phone conversations she told me more about her writing process. For fiction, she said, she always knew the exact shape on the page that her sentences would take before she would put anything down on paper. Since Joanna was a perfectionist when it came to her prose, I imagine that the sapping of her energy through CFS must have made writing even harder for her than it would have been for writers with an easier, more multi-draft process.

Anyone who knew Joanna could tell you that her great joy and necessity was conversation. I notice that most of my letters to her reference a conversation we've had and look forward to the next one we'll be having. Here's an example:

Dear Joanna,

Here's the article reviewing research on CFS I mentioned to you. Looking it over again, I thought of how differently it would have been written had it been addressed to people suffering from CFS. There's a certain style & focus for all Science news articles. In practical terms, that means allotting more than two columns to discussing a researcher's not following the standard form of peer-review, & none on possible drug treatments of the disease!

I've been mulling over what you said about envy-- & realized that your envy is my ressentiment-- which I've tended to think about more as a problem for the person feeling it, causing her/him to self-destruct & distort the reality of her/his world. But of course, in the process, it twists personal relations, naturally. Nietzsche talks about this quite a lot (& directly ties it to the lumpenproletariat, too), which is how I got onto it in my early 20s (when I did most of my reading of Nietzsche). & I recently heard a Russian on the radio describing what she called "the Gulag Mentality," (she thought it came from too many people doing time in prison), which was essentially a culture of envy taken to an extreme...

I could go on for pages! But I didn't want to write a letter, just send you this article! 'Til the weekend, then.

Even when she was ill, even during a December 1992 hospitalization for severe depression, she would talk, intensely, for as long as her interlocutor had the stamina to go on. I recall one night Joanna called me (often she'd call at 11 or 12 or even later) and announced, gleefully, that she'd acquired a speaker-phone, which meant that she could lie comfortably in bed and chat, without her arm or ear getting tired (unlike mine). She was accordingly highly sociable (unlike me), and loved getting people together. Our one-on-one conversations ranged all over the map, skipping about from highly personal matters (masturbation, her long-ago marriage, her relations with her mother) to dissection of television shows and anecdotes about people in the field. As I mention in a journal entry written about my hospital visits, "one hour talking with her at any time is so intense & provocative that the impact is always considerable." That same entry is deeply anxious: "We talk about such painful things that I wonder if she'll want to wipe me from her memory once she recovers from this. [...] I only wish I could believe she is going to be fine once she gets past this depression. How to find a way to get her to feel hope? [...] God knows I'm no prophet of hope. The irony, of course, is that her work is responsible for giving lots of us-- me included-- hope. & here she is, utterly hopeless. (Which is, of course, her depression talking. But that's her reality right now.)" The next entry, a week later, notes: "Joanna's improving rapidly" & talks about her reading of books of feminist criticism & theory that I'd taken her. & mentions our talking about "literature, films, & feminism," specifically remarking that she had read Angelika Bammer's book "in one long gulp this morning & loved it."

Joanna did recover from that depression, but finally decided that because her depression was exacerbated by Seasonal Affective Disorder her best hope was to move to the desert. She loved the light in Tucson, and so it was the perfect place for her to live. In her last letter to me, this last December, after alluding to the "long list of illnesses that've been getting in my way" she writes "But medicine has finally caught up with most of them and by the time I get back on to orthopedic OKness and fix a torn tendon in my left hand letter-writing will be much easier." Her penultimate sentence is "In a few months I hope to be more ambulatory and type-competent."

If you have memories of Joanna you'd like to share, please send them to me to post. In one of my journal entries I note that Joanna had said (as she'd done on other occasions) that she wanted me to know the things she was telling me about herself because she wanted other people to know them, too. (My discretion, that is to say, was not at her request.)

Joanna Russ (1937-2011)

I'm feeling too emotional to write more at this time, but I felt the need to acknowledge Joanna's death here at once. Her importance to me personally and as a writer, and for feminist sf as a whole, cannot be overstated. I know I'm not alone in feeling this way. Condolences to us all.

More about Joanna and her work later, I promise.

February 1983 Seattle Women Writers Festival

I've been going through boxes of old papers, notes, & ephemera saved & then just packed away (i.e., pack-rat stuff) in order to excavate the oldest versions of the Marq'ssan Cycle & the notes used in writing it, so that I can send all of it to the institution that will be maintaining an archive of materials related to my work. The day I began doing this I made a wildly surprising discovery, coming upon the traces of writing that had vanished from my memory: an aborted attempt at writing a short story called "The Night Patrol," meant to have been set in 2004, that I worked on for a few weeks almost exactly a year before I began the Marq'ssan Cycle. The details in my notes gesture at several elements built into the world of the Marq'ssan Cycle. (I haven't yet actually found any of the mss pages for this unfinished story-- which would have been typewritten, since I worked on it while we were seeking a loan to buy our first "word processor" (as they were called, before the notion of "personal computers" emerged), but I expect I will, since I seem to have kept all sorts of other previous failed attempts to write science fiction.

The stuff I've been wading through include flyers for events I attended. One of them that caught my eye is for the Seattle Women Writers Festival, held February 23-26, 1983, which I vividly recall attending from start to finish (excepting the two poetry workshops and one of the poetry readings), and which had, I believe, a major impact on me. A highlight of the conference was seeing-- in the flesh-- Joanna Russ and Vonda McIntyre. Other highlights include Maya Angelou's electrifying reading/performance, Carolyn Forche's poetry and comments about what she had witnessed in El Salvador (including her description of sitting at a colonel's dinner table and having a paper sack of ears emptied before her, as his gesture of defiance and contempt for her concern about human rights), and a panel discussion that featured both Joanna Russ and Toni Cade Bambara.

I don't suppose the schedule will give you much of an idea what it was like, spending three days soaking in so much concentrated (non-male!) talent. But I'll offer it to you, anyway:

Wednesday 7:30 p.m. Fiction & Poetry reading: Barbara Wilson and Judy Grahn

Thursday 12:30 p.m. Science Fiction Reading: Joanna Russ and Vonda McIntyre
Thursday 2:00 p.m. Fiction Panel moderated by Irene Wanner: Lois Hudson, Colleen McElroy, Vonda McIntyre
Thursday 7:30 p.m. Poetry Reading: Linda Bierds and Carolyn Forche

Friday 9:30 a.m. Poetry Workshop: Carolyn Forche
Friday 12: 30 p.m. Poetry Reading: Cladys Cardiff and Ai
Friday 2:00 p.m. Poetry Panel moderated by Julianne Seeman: Ai, Carolyn Forche, Jody Grahn, Denise Levertov
Friday 7:30 p.m. Poetry Reading: Beth Bentley, Denise Levertov

Saturday 9:30 a.m. Poetry Workshops: Denise Levertov and Toni Cade Bambara
Saturday 12:30 p.m. Fiction Reading: Colleen McElroy and Tony Cade Bambara
Saturday 2:00 p.m. Panel Discussion moderated by Sibyl James: Tony Cade Bambara, Beth Bentley, Joanna Russ, Emily Warn
Saturday 4:00 p.m. Poetry Reading Audrey Wright
Saturday 7:30 p.m. Reading: Maya Angelou

It all started in an elevator at Readercon...

Check this out: Farah Mendlesohn on Joanna Russ, Interviewed by Graham Sleight.

This is how the interview begins:

Graham Sleight for Amazon.com: How did it come about that you decided to compile a book on Joanna Russ's work?

Farah Mendlesohn:I was sharing an elevator at Readercon with Samuel R. Delany and he asked me what I thought of Russ's work. By the time we'd drifted to breakfast, eaten breakfast, and embarked on coffee, I appeared to be editing a collection on Russ.

And it gets even more interesting. Just fyi.

Links for a Monday

---For those interested in the WFC steampunk panel, Frederic S. Durbin has just reported on it at length. This bit rather leaped out at me:

The panel said that steampunk is much like the Society of (for?) Creative Anachronism (SCA) in that it tries to recreate an era as it should have been, not as it actually turned out.

---Over at Salon.com, Laura Miller reviews Ben Yagoda's Memoir: A History. According to Miller, Yagoda not only looks at the history of the memoir, but also claims that the memoir is replacing fiction. (Yes, once again, the novel is dead!) Here is Miller's own view of the matter:

It's precisely when we are conscious of fictional characters as the invention of a literary author that they seem inert and fixed -- solipsistic -- to many readers, who usually don't feel entitled to quibble with the exalted creator about his choices. By contrast, the characters and events in memoirs are often, like real people and events, the subjects of energetic controversy, which makes them seem more alive. Who was to blame for the author's divorce? Was he justified in his rejection of 12-step programs? Was her mother bipolar, and how might her life have been different if she had been medicated? People who have read the same memoir can talk about this stuff for hours. The real world, after all, is available for an infinite range of interpretations, while we tend to see the products of the literary novelist's imagination as admitting only a few, and most of those are likely to be detached and aesthetic rather than moral and immediate.

Both of these notions are illusions, of course. It's not the made-up aspect of literary fiction that makes it seem marmoreal and remote -- otherwise, millions of people wouldn't be discussing the entirely fictional characters on "Lost" or "Mad Men" around the water cooler or in online forums. Children and adults would not have massed in bookstores at midnight to buy the latest Harry Potter installment. Those fictions -- TV shows and children's books -- have, like the memoir, not yet acquired the official status of Art. As long as they remain at least a little disreputable, they are our size, and lovable. But make the memoir respectable, clear it of all the charges against it -- of vulgarity and commercialism and calling too much attention to itself, as well as of fraud -- and chances are that sooner or later we'll get bored of it, too.

---At the SF Site, Paul Kincaid reviews On Joanna Russ. Although his review agrees with mine on some points (particularly my wish that the book had spent some time looking at Russ's influence on the field), overall, our reviews have sharply different takes on the book. Big surprise, hunh? (My review for Strange Horizons ran on August 3, 2009; it's here.)

After reading the first part of the book, Kincaid comes away thinking that Russ "was prickly, difficult, not an easy person to like, which perhaps explains the intensity of the reaction against her from some sections of the sf community [i.e., rather than her feminist advocacy]"-- and actually somewhat diffident in her feminism:

The three succeeding essays, by Lisa Yaszek, Helen Merrick, and Newell and Tallentire, examine Russ in relation to the burgeoning feminist movement in science fiction. These three all stress her importance in the movement, her implacable advocacy, but all three also tell tales of her attacking other women writers who might be her rivals, including a devastating demolition of Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, and a rather cruel rivalry with Judith Merrill, whose place she would occasionally take as a reviewer at F&SF. From the three, therefore, we get a sense of her turning against "the girls." Alongside this, we should note also that Delany, in his essay, points out how much of the violence in her stories is by women directed at women.

This makes for an interesting parallax view: the radical trailblazer in the experimental fiction that marked the upsurge of feminist sf who was also a devotee and advocate of the most conservative forms of the genre; the leading feminist advocate who went out of her way to dismiss the writing of other women in the genre. It suggests that Russ was prickly, difficult, not an easy person to like, which perhaps explains the intensity of the reaction against her from some sections of the sf community. It also suggests someone caught at a particular moment in history, dragged in one direction by her instincts and in another by her beliefs. This divided nature goes some way towards contextualising the intense power of key works like The Female Man (1975).

Rather than seeing the pre-feminist Russ as in conflict with the Fully Feminist Russ, I, naturally, read an historically-anchored story of personal change, and as I noted in my review, that story of personal change struck me as visible in some of the essays that appeared in the second part of the book. But perhaps I read such a story because the story of such a change is common for women of Russ's (as well as my own) generation. I think we might even say that the story of a full personal conversion that changes one's relations with the world in every way imaginable functions as a trope for many feminists: which would explain why, once the trope was invoked, I had no trouble reading a story of change and personal development rather than a core personality at odds with the times. If Kincaid is actually not familiar with the story of the Click! complete with consciousness-raising (a political praxis Russ sets great store by), it probably went right over his head. I also think that Kincaid might not have picked up on some of the feminist theory Newell and Tallentire draw on their absolutely crucial discussion of the social psychology of rivalry among women battling for the single place in the male clubhouse. Horizontal violence (as activist Flo Kennedy once named it) usually has more to do with social and political dynamics than inherent nastiness in one's personality.

Also striking, for me, was Kincaid's reading one of the key themes of the book in what I can only call a really peculiar way, which I suspect, again may simply be because he has little familiarity with the feminist trope of anger:

Some [of the authors of the essays in the book], perhaps taking their cue from Russ herself, seem to sanitise this by talking about anger, but in fact anger almost always manifests itself in violence.

I think there are a legion of feminists (especially those hailing from consciousness-raising days) who would be astonished to hear that "anger" is a euphemism for violence. (Well no, to be honest, they wouldn't be astonished: this would simply be yet another example of someone Who Just Doesn't Get It.) It might also be worth noting that Pat Wheeler's essay in the volume talks explicitly about the relation of Russ's feminist anger to the violence in Russ's work.

On another point, I'm scratching my head: Kincaid complains that the book did not give due attention to the humor in Russ's work. As I recall, many of the book's contributors take appreciative note of it.

I do agree, though, with Kincaid's complaint that "Delany notes that her feminism was informed by Marxism, and there is an awful lot of class conflict running alongside the gender conflict in her work. But this isn't picked up by any of the critics here, not even by Delany." There's nothing new in critics' ignoring class.The sad fact is, few critics are able to discuss the intersectionality of class, race, and gender in the same text, which is what would have been required to treat Russ's feminist-socialist politics. Faced with discussing either her feminist politics or her class politics (which I daresay Russ herself, as a socialist- or materialist-feminist, would say, are not separable), the authors not surprisingly chose to concentrate on the former.

---One last link (this one thanks to the Mumspimus): Crooks and Liars' Teabaggers punk'd by anti-racists who get them to cheer rant against European American immigrants gave me a laugh this morning (which I needed after reading about the implications of the Stupak amendment). They've got a YouTube video of an activist who masqueraded as an anti-immigration nut job and was allowed to give a speech to some cheering anti-immigration fanatics who only gradually realized was a satire-- of them. Here's an excerpt from his speech:

It's no secret that with an invasion of immigrants comes waves of crime. We see them involved in massive theft, in murder, and bringing diseases like smallpox, which is responsible for the death of millions of Americans. These aren't new problems, though -- they have been going on for hundreds of years, and continue to this day.

I say it's time for us to say enough is enough! Are you with me? Are you with me? Let's send these European immigrants back where they came from! I don't care if they are Polish, Irish, English, Italian, or Norwegian! European immigrants are responsible for the most violent and heinous crimes in the history of the world, including genocide and slavery! It's time to restore the sovereignty of people native to this land!

I want more workplace raids, starting with the big banks downtown. There are thousands of illegals working in those buildings, hiding in their offices, and taking Dakota jobs. Let's round them up and ship them out. Then we need to hit them at home where they sleep. I don’t care if we separate families, they should have known better when they came here illegally!

If we aren't able to stand up to these European immigrants, who can we stand up to? We need to send every one of them back home, right now.

Thank you very much, and we'll see you in the streets!

Columbus Go Home! Columbus Go Home! Columbus Go Home!

Not so nice was that some of the middle-aged men in his audience physically attacked him once they caught on to what they were cheering for.

Different Drummers? But see, Sousa's just noise to some of us

Yesterday at Seattle's Anarchist Bookfair, I participated in a panel on Anarchism and Science Fiction. Understandably, our discussion barely scratched the surface, but I was fascinated to note that I came away from it filled with a sense of just how important the topos of anarchism has been for feminist sf. I have an urgent wish, now, to read an intelligent exploration and speculation about that-- not in general terms, but in very specific examinations of texts and tracing of genealogies of texts and their ideas.

So imagine my bemusement this morning, when I read an article in the new issue of Foundation, "Biological Determinism, Masculine Politics and the Failure of Libertarianism in Robert Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress," by Jason Bourget. (You may be wondering what "masculine politics" might be. I know I did, when I first read the title. But given the context in which he uses the expression, I believe that by "masculine politics" the author means "masculinist politics.") Why bemusement? Because while the article, drawing on an essay by Neil Easterbrook, argues that Heinlein's version of libertarianism is an elitist tyranny based on a masculinist ("masculine," in the author's words) biological determinism-- taking note chiefly of the inequality of the sexes in Heinlein's "libertarian utopias"-- the article begins with the (likely inadvertent) exclusion of political science fiction written by women (much of which is feminist sf), which is an irony too familiar to be anything but wearying. Here's the first sentence:

In his essay on "Politics and Science Fiction," Ken Macleod boldly declares that "the central political voice in genre sf is that of Robert A. Heinlein" and that "the political strand in sf can be described as a dialogue with [him]."

Much as I've enjoyed reading some of Ken Macleod's novels, and much as I've enjoyed reading essays by many science fiction writers, I've pretty much dismissed Macleod's critical writings as worthy of my time and interest. And that's precisely because of his essay "Politics and Science Fiction" (a chapter in the Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction ed. James and Mendlesohn), which I read a few years ago and that pretty much convinced me the man's understanding of science fiction is of the mangled truncated variety that either does not see or cannot understand feminist sf. His essay mentions work by only three women writers: Le Guin, Russ, and Bujold, while at the same time generalizing wantonly about "feminist sf" without offering any examples other than Russ. Just about all the guys who talk or write about "political science fiction" routinely, probably unconsciously, exclude feminist sf from the category, but the fact that it's a widespread practice doesn't excuse it. (They did it at a WisCon panel a few years ago, by the way, and didn't get called on it there. Still doesn't excuse it.) In this case, Macleod actually devotes a whole paragraph out of his chapter to misrepresent feminist sf. In short, he bluntly dismisses feminist sf as "a more troubling exception to the generally progressive spirit of sf."

Each time I've read this statement, I've felt as though Macleod had turned the world on its head: since, as far as I'm concerned, most sf is ideologically conservative and most feminist sf is ideologically progressive. And each time I read it, I did a double take a few sentences later, when I realized that by "progressive" Macleod doesn't mean politically progressive, but instead means buying hook line and sinker into the full 19th-century liberal ideology of "progress." Here's what he has to say about feminist sf:

Some of [feminist sf] does indeed turn its back on progress and the conquest of the universe as a typically male power fantasy-- and to that extent, and perhaps for that reason, it has isolated itself from all but a few sf readers.

Are we to understand from this that women writers are ignored because they want to be? I guess Macleod doesn't think much of Russ's How To Suppress Women's Writing.

But not all feminist sf, even of the most radical kind, takes that view. Joanna Russ's The Female Man (1975) carries a militant message of progress in its title. That the English word for the human species and the word for the male sex is the same, with its implied exclusion of half the human race from the achievements ascribed to all of it-- "man's conquest of space," and so on -- is an old problem.

"Progress" is a loaded word with a truly terrible history of encouraging and accommodating simplistic thinking. Combine that with "man's conquest of space" and what do you get? It would seem that Macleod believes that we (feminists) feel excluded from the fruits and glories of imperialist conquest and thus repudiate "conquest" out of nothing more than sour grapes ressentiment, while Russ, by contrast, finds the grapes of imperialist conquest sweet and makes no bones about wanting them for herself, just like your typical 19th-century white feminist lording it over the inferior races, I guess. Can he really believe this about Russ? Does he actually thinks that's what Russ is complaining about? Reading on, it seems that he does:

While some feminist writers have responded by repudiating the achievements,

Not only has he thrown the ideologically loaded "progress" at us, but now he's conflating "achievements" with "conquest"? That's a slippery rhetorical move if I've ever seen one. And who, exactly, are these "feminists" who are repudiating human achievements (that women, contrary to general opinion, have had an important role in performing and for centuries have been being denied credit for)? I can believe there are such feminists, since "feminist" covers such a wide spectrum. But whoever these feminists are, they aren't anyone I read (or personally know). I do think Macleod needs desperately to read Helen Merrick's The Secret Feminist Cabal: A Cultural History of Science Fiction Feminisms. (It will be out from Aqueduct in December, folks.)

Russ stakes a claim on all of them for women.Women can be Man, without being men. Russ makes a passionate claim for freedom and achievement.

By eliding conquest with achievements, he slickly covers over a significant theme in Russ's work. Who, after reading We Who Are About To... could see Russ as a propagandist for triumphal human chauvinism? And where does he get off thinking that most feminist sf doesn't "make a passionate claim for freedom and achievement"? Clearly, our panel yesterday would have been incomprehensible to him. (As would most WisCon panels, I suspect.)

What most frustrates me about Bourget's article is that while Bourget views "masculine" (masculinist?) politics as at the heart of Heinlein's political fiction, he fails to explore what that means for males who do not fit the masculinist ideal of masculinity. (Instead, he attends to an already well-worked vein, viz., the suppression of women's public agency and speech in Heinlein's ideal political systems.)

What most strikes me about Bourget's article is that if Macleod is correct that all political science fiction [by men, that is] is in dialogue with Heinlein, then Bourget would logically have to argue that most political science fiction is Tiptree Award material, for if masculinism is supposedly at the heart of all political science fiction, then all political science fiction is necessarily about definitions of masculinity-- either challenging or exploring said definitions. Stan Robinson's fiction often does this, occasionally incisively, and Chip Delany's Triton addresses the issue dialogically, but can we honestly say that most other political sf novels [by men] have provided fresh insight into the issue that Bourget describes?

I seriously hope that someone someday will make a thorough exploration of the topos of anarchy in, as well as its significance for, feminist sf. Because that's a piece of critical writing that I would love, love, love to read.

"A Reviewer's Hardest Task"

Joanna Russ writes, in her F&SF column of January 1975 (reprinted in The Country You Have Never Seen):

A reviewer's hardest task is to define standards. "Good" can mean almost anything: what the British call "a good read," "for those who like it, this is what they'll like," "it won't poison you," "good enough for minor entertainment," "mildly pleasant," "intelligent, thoughtful, and interesting," "charming!" and just plain "good"--excluding the range of better, from fine to splendid to superb to great. Reviewers also tend to adopt a paradoxical sliding scale in measuring a book's quality, i.e., the more ambitious a book, the more it's likely to fail; yet the competent, low-level "success" can be less valuable and interesting than the flawed, fascinating, incomplete "failure." For example, in July 1973 I reviewed James Gunn's The Listeners (which belongs emphatically in category two, above) and managed to make it sound worse than Norman Spinrad's The Iron Dream, a considerably lower-level (although fun and interesting) category one. Novels don't only provide different kinds of pleasures; they involve a reader more or less profoundly. Listeners was "bad" because parts of it were so wonderfully good. Dream was "good" partly because it demanded so little of the reader-- some of this by the author's deliberate choice, which only adds to the complexity of the whole business.

None of this months' hardcover novels* lives up to its author's own best work and in that sense they are not good books. They're certainly not in the "good-by-any-standards" class. Yet none of them is in the droopy-eyeball or loathsome class, either, and all have some excellences. The reviewer's business (as so many reviewers have said) is distinguishing between various levels of failure, keeping in mind that by "good" here I mean very high standards indeed.

I'm variously a reader of reviews, a writer of reviews, a writer's whose work receives reviews, and an editor/publisher who hopes to see the work she publishes reviewed. I have long read reviews for pleasure-- and not as a guide to what I ought or ought not to be reading. I think I first began reading reviews as a graduate student, most often in the form of review essays (which I also, of course, was required to write). Review essays encompass more than a simple review does, exploring the subject matter of several books in a thoughtful, critical way. This probably has something to do with my interest--as a reader--in reviews these days. When I read a review for pleasure (as I still often do), it's in the hope of being given something interesting to think about, or even the occasional gem of insight. This is certainly why I'm reading Russ's old reviews. Reviewers who offer intellectually or emotionally threadbare descriptions or assessments of the books they're reviewing don't interest me; if after several encounters I see that their reviews consistently fail to give me anything worth thinking about, I stop reading their reviews. I also stop reading their reviews for pleasure if I see that a reviewer is intractably ignorant or stupid-- that they have a penchant for misreading or under-reading or for continually praising the banal. I'm a bit like Mr. Darcy, I'm afraid, in that my good opinion of a reviewer once lost, is unlikely to be regained. I'm a busy woman, you know?

As an editor/publisher, I'm largely unconcerned with whether or not a review is pleasurably insightful or even intelligent. It's still a mystery to me what actually sells books. A reviewer's writing intelligently about a book will likely make its author happy, but it probably won't make that much difference to sales. Because I read every review of Aqueduct's books (that I know of), I'm constantly made aware of how few reviewers are careful readers. More to the point, though, is that many of those reviewers who have passed beyond the naive-reader stage are so caught up in their own particular set of dogmas that their readings tend to be inflexibly rigid and skewed to conform to their dogmas such as they are. This doesn't concern me as a publisher, but I can't help reflecting on it as a reader and writer of reviews myself.

Not surprisingly, I try to write the kind of reviews I enjoy reading. It can be hard to do it, though, when a book is so poorly written that I can barely bring myself to keep reading it. (I've twice forced myself to finish really bad books and reviewed them, but the experiences were so painful that I have a deep aversion to doing it ever again.) Russ has no hesitation in characterizing books as "bad." But aware as I am of what inadequate readers so many reviewers are, I've been reluctant to deliver such bald judgments myself. [Though so as not to mislead anyone, I will cop to once having delivered an unequivocally scathing judgment of a book that really should not have been published.] And so I have to wonder just how useful terms like "good" and "bad" can be in reviews today. Russ, unlike most reviewers, offers insight into the books she reviews; so I'm tempted to think she knows what she's talking about. Even so, for me at least it is more her discussion of the books rather than her verdict on a given book's quality that "defines" her "standards." The "whole business" is indeed complex.

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*The books under review were by Robert Silverberg, James Gunn, John Brunner, Philp K. Dick, and Howard Waldrop & Jake Saunders.