Old Ideas, New Visions

By Mark Lacey

            The Library of America has a collection of stories by Joanna Russ.  The first was Female Man, a 1975 explicitly feminist science fiction novel (I use the term “explicit feminism” for works that examine feminist issues and “implicit feminism” for works that just assume gender equality) designed around the premise that different versions of the same woman are pulled from their different timelines; however as far as I could tell, there wasn’t much reason to do so except to give the author a chance to compare different versions of the war between the sexes. Sometimes the characters deal with gender issues specific to the 1970s, other times it seems there hasn’t been much social change between the novel’s publication and the release of Barbie.  

The opening could have slowed a little to help readers orient themselves between characters and worlds.  The description of the world without men sounds like a feminist version of Plato’s Republic, but also the sort of post-scarcity society that doesn’t require additional technology, just spending all the money we would normally spend on the military on education and welfare instead. One of the timelines posited a very literal war between women and men, to the extent they had to make other arrangements for affection and reproduction; part VIII goes into some detail about this dystopian situation that could be a useful starting point for a more traditional novel.  That section’s style reminded me of monologues I’ve seen in novels where the male authors get carried away with world building they can’t integrate into the plot but really love writing anyway.

I was slightly shocked at how rude most of the male characters were to women, and I wouldn’t have believed it if not for seeing the comments some men leave on social media. I suppose one dubious benefit of the Internet is seeing what sort of things some men say to women when I’m not around; my presence generally discourages unchivalrous behavior.  

Now imagine you went to the alternative Star Trek universe in which Spock has a beard and watched their version of Gilligan’s Island except on an isolated planet instead of a deserted island, and Gilligan goes nuts and decides to wipe everyone else out. That’s the best description I can think of for We Who are About To. It can’t be a coincidence the characters include a professor, a wannabe actress, and a rich, older married couple, right?

Her collection also includes a lesbian coming out story that alternates between interesting and revealing that dinner parties in the 1970s could be as insufferable as social media but harder to leave and a series of shortish stories about Alyx, a thief and pirate. In the longest story, Alyx is taken out of our past into our future because people in the future depend so much on technology they’ve become lazy, useless, and self-centered so need to recruit their effective agents from the past. Her first mission was rescuing tourists and her primary obstacle was how these supposed adults of the future kept acting like a bunch of spoiled college students.

The last two stories in the collection are A Game of Vlet, about a game of magical chess that controls the outcome of history, and Souls, her Hugo winning novella about the contest of wit and will between an abbess who is more than she appears to be and a Viking who is less. If published today, it would have come with a trigger warning, because the Vikings were being Vikings.