On Joanna Russ

1. Alyx among the Genres

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1 Alyx among the Genres Gary K. Wolfe I have also, by the way, seen first-rate adventure stories ruined by people who insisted on reading them as if they contained profound moral problems, though the story itself clearly had no such intentions. There is no reason on earth why a story has to be didactic, has to teach an explicit moral. But if you are going to moralize, you had better make sure it’s above the kindergarten level. —Joanna Russ, in a speech delivered before the Philadelphia Science Fiction Convention, November 9, 19681 The Orbit series of original anthologies edited by Damon Knight from 1966 to 1976 has often been regarded as one of the chief expressions of the American version of science fiction’s New Wave, as well as one of the most highly visible: with some eighteen volumes appearing in less than eleven years, it very nearly achieved the periodicity of a magazine. Edited with an eye to innovative , literary fiction, the series featured early stories by such authors as Gene Wolfe, Thomas Disch, Sonya Dorman, R. A. Lafferty, Kate Wilhelm, Kit Reed, Carol Emshwiller, and others, as well as newer, more experimental tales by established authors such as Brian W. Aldiss and Philip Jose Farmer. With its second issue, Orbit 2 (September 1967), Knight took the unusual step of including two fairly long stories by the same author: “I Gave Her Sack and Sherry” and “The Adventuress,” both by Joanna Russ and both featuring a character named Alyx, who begins her career as a mercenary adventurer, thief, and murderer in a sword-and-sorcery environment set in the Mediterranean world around 1500 b.c. A third Alyx story, “The Barbarian,” appeared in Orbit 3 in 1968, the same year in which Russ published her first and only Alyx novel, Picnic on Paradise, with Ace Books; a fourth, “The Second Inquisition,” appeared in Orbit 6 in 1970. (A fifth Alyx story, “A Game of Vlet,” appeared in 1974, but was not collected in book form until Russ’s 1983 collection The Zanzibar Cat.) Only thirty years old when the first of the Alyx tales appeared (the same age as Alyx herself in that first tale), Russ had previously published a handful of short stories in the genre, beginning with “Nor Custom Stale” in 1959 in the 4 Criticism and Communit y Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, a magazine for which she also became a frequent reviewer beginning in 1966. The four Alyx stories (two of them retitled) and one novel were collected in 1976 in Alyx, an omnibus volume from Gregg Press, a division of the publisher G. K. Hall devoted principally to producing fine library editions of science fiction classics, under the editorship of David Hartwell. Alyx was one of the few new titles offered by this series, and the edition came with a thoughtful and insightful introduction by Samuel R. Delany, omitted in the first paperback reprint, which appeared in 1983 from Pocket Books’s Timescape imprint (also edited by Hartwell) under the title The Adventures of Alyx (stories will be cited from the 1983 edition, unless otherwise indicated). This latter title was also that of the first British edition of the book, published by the Women’s Press in 1985. Meanwhile, individual Alyx stories were reprinted in various anthologies during the 1970s: “The Second Inquisition” in Nebula Award Stories 6, ed. Clifford D. Simak (1971; the story was a Nebula finalist that year); critic Leslie Fiedler’s odd but ambitious SF anthology In Dreams Awake (1975); and Pamela Sargent’s second anthology of women’s SF, More Women of Wonder (1976); “The Barbarian” in Gardner Dozois’s Another World (1977); and “I Gave Her Sack and Sherry” in Knight’s own The Best from Orbit in 1975. Picnic on Paradise, after being nominated for a Nebula Award in 1969, was reprinted as a stand-alone novel by Berkley in 1979. In short, even though the final original Alyx story appeared in 1970, Alyx herself remained a very familiar figure in the SF field for much of the 1970s and early 1980s. My apologies for beginning with such a litany of bibliographical detail, but it’s crucial to the intent of this essay, which is in part to reclaim and recognize Russ’s identity and achievement as a science fiction writer—not simply a writer who used science fiction toward other ends—and to establish the extent to which Russ’s work...