The Robber Time: Joanna Russ in the Archives

Cameron Kunzelman In my life as a critic and academic, I am often fortunate enough to go places, read things, and generally have experiences with no expectations around them. I just want to learn without a real goal, and then, after the fact, I assemble that together. Normally that writing has some kind of critical thesis or a desire to say something specific about the world, but I am going to warn you right now that my trip to the Browne Popular Culture Library at Bowling Green State University was simply an excuse to wallow in the past. I have no bigger claim than a series of facts and suppositions, speculations of the most archival sort, that I think readers of the Ancillary Review of Books will find as fascinating as I did. What comes next is a story of looking at the personal papers and archives of many luminaries in science fiction and fantasy—Joanna Russ, Samuel R. Delany, and more. It’s an excuse to root around in the history of sff in its most meat-and-potatoes, workaday,…