A short life of the author
Joanna Russ (1937–2011) was born on 22 February 1937 in New York City. She studied at Cornell University and the Yale School of Drama, and taught at several universities including the University of Washington.
Life and Career
Picnic on Paradise (1968) — about Alyx, a female adventurer from ancient Greece transported to a future world — introduced a new kind of science fiction heroine: competent, ironic, and entirely free of the genre’s conventional femininity.
The Female Man (1975) — about four women from parallel realities (including a world without men and a world at war between the sexes) — is her masterpiece and one of the foundational texts of feminist science fiction. Its formal fragmentation, its anger, and its refusal of conventional narrative make it a genuinely radical work.
We Who Are About To… (1977) — in which a woman stranded on an alien planet refuses to participate in the expected colonisation-and-reproduction plot — is a deliberate subversion of science fiction survival narratives.
How to Suppress Women’s Writing (1983) — a non-fiction work cataloguing the strategies used to diminish women’s literary contributions — remains devastatingly relevant.
Major Works and Themes
Russ wrote about gender, power, and the ways patriarchal society constrains women’s lives and imaginations. Her fiction refuses consolation, refuses compromise, and refuses the conventions of the genre she worked in.
Key Works
- The Female Man (1975)
- “When It Changed” (1972) — Nebula Award
- How to Suppress Women’s Writing (1983)
Collecting Russ
Picnic on Paradise (1968, Ace Books, paperback) brings $10–$40. The Female Man (1975, Bantam, paperback original) brings $15–$60 in fine condition. Russ died in 2011.