I am partial. I truly believe that Joanna Russ is one of the greatest writers that the science fiction field has ever produced, and from 1977–1991 she was a professor at the University of Washington in Seattle.
When you are a kid people are always asking you what your favorite novel is. From the time I first read The Female Man (courtesy of the Women’s Press Book Club in the United Kingdom, which curated a feminist science fiction line at a time when—get this!—Silver Moon, the London women’s bookshop, would not stock science fiction) this was it. I was asked my favorite novel in an interview just this week, and it’s still The Female Man.
Joanna Russ came to prominence first as a short story writer. Her first story, “Nor Custom Stale,” was published in 1959 and “Dear Emily,” a lesbian vampire story, in 1960. Through the 1960s and 70s she produced a steady stream of quietly subversive tales which can be found in The Adventures of Alyz (1976), The Zanzibar Cat (1983), Extra(ordinary) People (1985) and The Hidden Side of the Moon (1987).
Russ began publishing novels at the end of the 1960s, with Picnic on Paradise (1968), about a female adventurer scooped from time to rescue a stranded party on an alien planet, and And Chaos Died (1970), in which Russ first broached the topic of homosexuality in ways unsatisfying but still unusual.
Then in 1972 Russ gave Harlan Ellison “When it Changed” for his Again, Dangerous Visions collection. This short story, told from the point of view of a woman on an all-woman planet, considering with sadness the effect of the arrival of “men,” has been multiply anthologized and is easy to find online if you have not read it. The core of the story is this: women without men can be fully human in ways they cannot be in our current world. It is a story both inspiring and enraging, depending on which side of the (then binary) gender divide you fall.
“When it Changed” proved to be a rehearsal for The Female Man (1975), but it is neither a prequel nor an extract. The Janet in the short story is not the Janet in the novel. The novel uses four characters, four worlds, and shifts constantly between genres, styles, and rhetorics. It’s a challenging and at times overwhelming novel. I took to collecting secondhand copies to “loan” out because they were never returned. At the time of writing this, I have written 40,000 words on this book because it is just so much in all ways—political, experimental and funny (the short critical book will be out from Luna Press in 2026).
The Female Man is Russ’s masterpiece, but We Who Are About To… (1977), The Two of Them (1978), and On Strike Against God (1980) are each very important works. In We Who Are About To… Russ challenges the humancentricism of so much science fiction; in The Two of Them there is a challenge to the concept of a member of the oppressor class who purports to be a political ally. On Strike Against God is a mainstream novel, recently reprinted with very good contextual essays and edited by Alec Pollak.
By 1983 Russ’s fiction career was almost over, but her critical writing was taking off. Russ’s novels had been an insider’s attacks on the absurdities of our genre, and an outsider’s attacks on the majoritarian culture she and all marginalized people are forced to endure. Russ’s essays continued in this vein. Most people know the collection How to Supress Women’s Writing (1983) and its titular essay, along with To Write Like a Woman (1995) (which contains a superb article on “The Yellow Wallpaper” as a ghost story), but my favourite is Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans and Perverts: Feminist Essays (1985) for the titular essay, which is a superb analysis of the often ignored and poisonous class, racial, and gender dynamics of women’s activist groups.
I wish I’d had the chance to meet and be taught by Professor Russ, although everything I’ve heard about her suggests that she could be terrifying. But as it is, I am aware that I have learned so much from her fiction and her critical work (even where I disagree with it), and I would love more people to read it and talk about it. Maybe at Worldcon?
Novels
- Picnic on Paradise (1968)
- And Chaos Died (1970)
- The Female Man (1975)
- We Who Are About To… (1977)
- The Two of Them (1978)
- On Strike Against God: A Lesbian Love Story (1980) (novella)
Short fiction collections
- The Adventures of Alyx (1976) (includes Picnic on Paradise)
- The Zanzibar Cat (1983)
- Extra(ordinary) People (1985)
- The Hidden Side of the Moon</i (1987)
Children’s fiction
- Kittatinny: A Tale of Magic (1978)
Nonfiction
- Speculations on the Subjunctivity of Science Fiction (1973)
- Somebody’s Trying to Kill Me and I Think It’s My Husband: The Modern Gothic (1973)
- How to Suppress Women’s Writing (1983)
- Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans and Perverts: Feminist Essays (1985)
- To Write Like a Woman (1995)
- What Are We Fighting For?: Sex, Race, Class, and the Future of Feminism (1997)
- The Country You Have Never Seen: Essays and Reviews (2007)
Farah Mendlesohn is a con-runner, a retired history professor, a charity manager, co-editor of the Hugo Award-Winning Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, author of the Hugo-nominated The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein, and is currently working on a short book about Joanna Russ’s The Female Man (preorder Considering The Female Man by Joanna Russ, or, As the Bear Swore). Farah has chaired three Eastercons, has served in various capacities in Worldcons and Eastercons, and is part of the World Fantasy 2025 team. (Farah/they/she)