We Who Are About To . . .

PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF JOANNA RUSS

As hard and mean and fine as Flannery O’Connor … I wish that everyone would read Joanna Russ’s books. —Dorothy Allison

Joanna Russ offers a gallery of some of the most interesting female protagonists in current fiction, women who are rarely victims and sometimes even victors, but always engaged sharply and perceptively with their fate. —Marge Piercy

Joanna Russ is one of the pioneers and luminaries of women’s science fiction. —Ms. Magazine

Russ is a master crafter. —The Washington Post Book World

The Female Man

A stunning book, a work to be read with great respect. It’s also screamingly funny. —Elizabeth A. Lynn

A work of frightening power, but it is also a work of great fictional subtlety. … It should appeal to all intelligent people who look for exciting ideation, crackling dialogue, provocative fictional games-playing in their reading. —Toronto Star

We Who Are About To …

An important science fiction novel. —The New York Times Book Review

If this were a film it could be one of Peckinpah’s, violent, self-indulgent, obsessively contemptuous of humanity, nihilistic and fascinating. —Publishers Weekly

Picnic on Paradise

The depth, humanity and craft of this novel are as rich as the situation is stark. —Samuel R. Delany

Splendid! —Theodore Sturgeon

The Two of Them

"Beyond questions of genre or gender, Joanna Russ is one of the best prose writers working in the English language today. The Two of Them is informed throughout by her intelligence, wit and imagination … by her vision of the pertinence and necessity of speculative fiction to feminists." —Marilyn Hacker

Fine science fiction, a challenging sexual polemic, and a wittily, economically constructed novel. —Kirkus Reviews

And Chaos Died

"Many novels have dealt speculatively with psi-phenomena, describing the effects on people and society. Ms. Russ has taken it on herself to put the reader through the experience. She is wholly successful … spectacular." —Samuel R. Delany

A work of awesome originality. —Robert Silverberg

We Who Are About To . . .

Joanna Russ

INTRODUCTIONSamuel R. Delany

My claims for Joanna Russ are large. She is one of the finest—and most necessary—writers of American fiction to publish between 1959, when her first professional short story Nor Custom Stale appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and 1998, when St. Martin’s Press published her overview of feminism What Are We Fighting For? Sex, Race, Class, and the Future of Feminism. Between these dates fall six novels—seven if we count her children’s book Kittatinny: A Tale of Magic (1978). Six are either science fiction or one or another mode of fantasy. Neither science fiction nor fantasy, the sixth, On Strike Against God (1980), is a moving and meticulously crafted story of a young Lesbian academic’s coming out in the early days of the women’s movement, a book that has been all-but ignored in a body of work that, despite one book-length study, Demand My Writing: Joanna Russ/Feminism/Science Fiction (1999) by Jeanne Cortiel, deserves and requires more attention.

With the exception of her second novel, And Chaos Died (1970), all the books grow directly from feminist concerns, with which Russ was deeply involved from the second half of the Sixties on. In that second novel, a gay male, Jai Vhed, encounters a telepathic woman on a far world, who cures him of his sexual deviation. (It was written when homosexuality was still classified as a pathological condition.) As well she teaches him her telepathic skills, thus rendering him unfit for human society. On his return to Earth, because of his new knowledge, the world that to us would appear normal appears to him a dystopian nightmare. At the end, he can only leave Earth once more and rejoin his mentor. Here the feminist concerns are indirect, and in the extraordinarily rich text a range of interesting ideological problems ring out as resonances against Russ’s fiction both before and after it.

The problems of feminism no more limit the meaning of Russ’s fiction, however, than the problems of slavery limit the meanings of, say, Huckleberry Finn. Rather, feminism provides a structure for her arguments, which, in her various novels and tales, move over everything from music to mysticism, from the direct perception of matter at a distance (Chaos, 1970) to the problems of running a late-medieval convent besieged by Vikings (Souls, 1982). This is not to imply that Russ is other than perfectly serious about her feminism—or that, somehow, her work goes beyond it or engages it only accidentally. Feminism plays a role in Russ similar to the one Marxism plays in the theatrical works of Brecht. Indeed, another reason Russ’s work may have escaped its due recognition is that the feminism has a decidedly Marxist leaning.

Alongside her novels, Russ has written a book-length study, How to Suppress Women’s Writing (1983), two collections of essays, the aforementioned overview of feminism (What Are We Fighting For?), and three books of short stories, the second of which, Extra(Ordinary) People (1984), includes Souls. Beside winning the Hugo award in 1983, this novella easily stands on the same shelf with Joyce’s The Dead, Willa Cather’s My Mortal Enemy, Glenway Westcott’s The Pilgrim Hawk, and Guy Davenport’s The Dawn in Erew- hon. Russ belongs to a collection of modern stylists who excel at descriptive vividness—a collection one has to work at in order to extend it to include even a dozen: William Gass, Guy Davenport, Virginia Woolf, David Forster Wallace, Richard Hughes, William Golding, G. K. Chesterton, and Vladimir Nabokov—the last of whom Russ studied under at Cornell University and who, along with S. J. Perlman, is a dedicatee of And Chaos Died. From time to time Lawrence Durrell, Angela Carter, John Updike, Charlotte Bacon, Eugene Garber, Jeannette Winterson, or James Dickey may flicker at the group’s edges. Russ should be placed at its center.

That second novel contains such sentences as this delicious description of an interstellar starliner: The Big One was obviously one of those epoxy-and-metal eggs produced by itself—the Platonic Idea of a pebble turned inside out, born of a computer and aspiring towards the condition of Mechanical Opera (p 93). With its intertextual sweep, the sentence takes in everything from H. P. Love craft's pulp ponderosities and the instructions on the cardboard backing from the hardware store (… the Old One … and …this epoxy can be used with aluminum …) to the Nicean Creed (born of the Virgin Mary) and Walter Pater’s obiter dictum from his 1877 essay, The School of Giorgione (All art constantly aspires to the condition of music"). But these hypogrammatic resonances can make us forget how pleasurable such a sentence is simply as a mouthful of assonances and muted alliterations. Russ is a writer whose works belong to that category in which, if there is not a section in any extended consideration of them devoted to style alone, then that consideration is as radically incomplete as it would be were it a consideration of Pater, Nabokov, or Joyce. In Russ, as in Nabokov, again and again the most precise observation breaks through the sumptuous euphony, the most vivid descriptions, the coruscating wit to produce an electric version of the ordinary that is anything but.

We Who Are About to … may well be Russ’s most pristine, if not her most perfect, book. (Regularly I vacillate between it and her last novel, The Two of Them.)

In Tom Godwin’s classic science fiction short story The Cold Equations (1943?), a story that, because of its fundamentally synopsizable idea, has often been at the center of discussions about hard science fiction, during the early days of space flight an eighteen-year-old girl stows away on a moon-bound spaceship. Because the fuel is portioned out in exact accord with the payload, her extra weight has not been taken into account. If she stays on board, the ship will not be able to make the return trip to Earth, and all of the five-man crew will perish. Thus, there is no option but to jettison her to her death—which, tearfully, she acquiesces to.¹ The equations which govern We Who Are About to … are just as cold; but they are far more complex.

At the height of the New Wave, an sf convention that particularly exorcised editor Moorecock at New Worlds was what Kurt Vonnegut had already characterized as the impossibly generous universe of science fiction: When, in the real world, 95 percent of all commercial airline crashes are one hundred percent fatal and we live in a solar system in which presumably only one planet can support any life at all, from the thirties through the fifties science fiction was nevertheless full of spaceship crashes (!) in which everyone gets up and walks away from the wreckage unscathed—and usually out onto a planet with breathable atmosphere, amenable weather, and a high-tech civilization in wait near-by to provide interesting twists in subsequent adventures.

This is the fundamental convention Russ’s novel takes to task. She does this, however, by making it appear, in the first few entries of her tale, that this is precisely the convention she is bowing to. But at the start only a few phrases of a tell-tale harshness suggest how cold her equations are:

About to die. And so on … The light of our dying may not reach you for a thousand million years … We’re a handful of persons in a metal bungalow: five women, three men, bedding, chemical toilet, simple tools, and even simpler pocket laboratory, freeze-dried food for six months, and a water-distiller with its own sealed powerback, good for six months (and cast as a unit, unusable for anything else).

Goodbye everybody,

At dawn I held hands with the other passengers, we all huddled together under that brilliant flash, although I hate them.

O God, I miss my music.

For the flash of the exploding spaceship above them is the light of their dying—though the working out of the tortuous and protracted extinctions lingers on another few months, in terms of the single natural death, five murders, and two suicides which comprise the actual plot.

With its cast of a child and seven socially functional adults—all but the narrator, in effect, in thrall to just that notion of an impossibly generous universe—We Who Are About to … functions at the bad conscience of Golding’s Lord of the Flies.

The revelation of the remarkably familiar temperature at which Russ’s version of the cold equations work is what sets her icy vision. L.B. has only to be annoyed enough at the screech of the baby sparrows to kill them. The polite and well-bred Alan-Bobby has only to wake up to the fact that he is stronger than anyone else for civilization to slide back three thousand years. The allegorical resonances with a society that feels the whole world is there for that society’s taking, even while it is the stuff of high-school and first-year-college theme papers, is no less pertinent for that.

Radically, Russ suggests that the quality of life is the purpose of living, and reproduction only a reparative process to extend that quality. (By twenty years, her novel anticipated the recent critiques of Georgeo Agamban and Alain Badieu on the abuses built into the concept of making bare life the privileged node of philosophical attention and the relationship of that process to fascism.) Only feudal/fascist societies can really believe wholly that reproduction—i.e., the manufacture of cannon fodder—is life’s point.

The narrator herself—certainly the most civilized person among the passangers—both recalls and revoices Walter Benjamin’s famous observation: Every act of civilization is also an act of barbarism.

Little or none of the pyrotechnically accomplished rhetorical surface of Russ’s prose is explored in Cortiel’s study—or, indeed, even mentioned in it. Cortiel does note, however—and even devotes a chapter to the topic—that several of Russ’s heroines kill men. (Chapter Two: Acts of Violence: Representations of Adrocide) What Cortiel avoids, if not suppresses from her book, is any mention of the heroines in Russ’s works who kill other women. However paradoxical it may appear, these deaths are central to the form of Russ’s feminist vision. Whether the four anonymous duels fought—in The Female Man, certainly and deservedly Russ’s best-known novel to date—by Janet on Whileaway (I’ve killed four times) or her hunting down and mudering of the renegade woman philosopher Belin above the 48th parallel—presumably the 4th time Janet has killed another woman, since only three of her duels resulted in death (p. 55): Whileawayans are not as peaceful as they sound (p. 49)—these deaths occur in situations in which women have achieved enough power to be worth it, or even necessary, to remove.

We cannot leave this topic without looking at Valeria Graham in the novel at hand, whom the narrator (whose name might be Elaine) murders. Among those castaways out of touch with Earth, the Graham family—handsome and urbane Victor, bright, spoiled 12-year-old daughter Lori, and Valeria Graham herself—initially appears as the quintessential upper-middle class social unit. As the story unfolds, however, we learn that the money—and there is considerably more of it than we might have supposed—is all Valeria’s. Presumably she has made it herself: "How much money have I got?… You don’t even know… I’ll tell you. Six mill a month. Eurodollar. That puts me in the top one-tenth of the top percentile, I believe… with