Joanna Russ - A Requiem in Links

Posted by Jonathan McCalmont

2 May 2011

This weekend saw the sad death of the pioneering author, critic and academic Joanna Russ. In lieu of a personal tribute, I present a few links to some of the better tributes to appear online in the past couple of days. My thoughts go out to both her friends and her family:

Timmi Duchamp at Ambling Along The Aqueduct:

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.

Matthew Cheney at The Mumpsimus:

When I first encountered "When It Changed" and The Female Man, I was in high school and they terrified me in a way that just about nothing ever had -- I had always unconconsciously thought that I was the default audience for books: me, the white guy. Suddenly I was reading something where I didn't think I was the default audience; not only that, the people in these stories who were like me were despicable.

Nic Clarke at Eve's Alexandria:

It is no coincidence, then, that the word which recurs in so many of these essays about Russ’s work and her place in the SF field as both reader and writer is 'fierceness'. It is no surprise, either, that the sharp-witted fierceness of Russ and other feminist authors met with hostility in some quarters.

Paul Kincaid at The Big Other:

Joanna Russ died yesterday. She wasn’t important, she was essential!

Sue Lange at Book View Cafe Blog:

Russ’ ideas are radical. They’re scary in a genre that has the potential to be the most revolutionary of all but usually opts for the safety of the mainstream.

Martin Wisse at Wis[s]e Words:

Add it all together and you know why Joanna Russ was such an important writer; unfortunately she was also a writer easy to ignore, almost invisible if you don’t search her out on your own. Her influence is everywhere in modern science fiction, but that just makes it harder to see.

Annalee Newitz at io9:

People will be reading Russ when they've forgotten entirely about many of the top selling science fiction authors of our day.

John O'Neill at Black Gate:

The character who bears Russ’s first name, “Joanna” refers to herself early in the novel as the “female man” because she is convinced she must surrender her identity as a woman to be respected.

Farah Mendlesohn at Wherever I Lay My Cat, That's My Home:

What it may have done is convince me that there were more bolshie feminists out there just like me and they read science fiction. Now that was a category I hadn't met in person (and wouldn't for a few more years).

Nancy Jane Moore at Book View Cafe Blog:

I was hungry for serious books by women, but most of the feminist fiction was unsatisfying. Looking back, I think it was because the authors were angry — angry, I might add, with very good reason — and couldn’t find a way to discipline that anger into effective work. I’m sure I couldn’t have done it either, but Russ could. The Female Man is a profoundly angry book, but it works.

And Finally...

Patrick Nielsen Hayden pays tribute at Making Light only for comments section to explode into a space for discussion and the sharing of memories.

While...

Future of Feminism is a Dreamwidth community devoted to discussing Russ's work.