To Write Like a Woman

To Write Like a Woman by Joanna Russ (Indiana University Press, 1995) “[S]o much of what’s presented to us as ‘the real world’ or ‘the way it is’ is so obviously untrue that a great deal of social energy must be mobilized to hide that gross and ghastly fact….Hence my love for science fiction, which analyzes reality by changing it.” In this collection of essays originally published in the 70s and 80s, Joanna Russ turns to what science fiction is, how it works, and how our understanding of the world is either expanded or (in the case of terrible sf) constrained by it. Russ is routinely and delightfully acerbic in her writing, but that is in many ways the point: the world is too often a very sour place. We must speak directly of the devastation around us if we’re to have any hope of knowing it well enough to change it. She was writing at a time when sf was not taken entirely seriously relative to traditional literary criteria; that has changed somewhat in the decades since, but her…