Joanna Russ
Joanna Russ was born on February 22, 1937, in New York City, a setting that placed her at the center of American cultural and intellectual life. A citizen of the United States, she was educated at Cornell University and subsequently at the Yale School of Drama, a formation that fed into a writing life conducted entirely in English and spanning multiple forms and registers.
Russ worked as a novelist, essayist, journalist, children's writer, and university teacher, bringing to each role her sustained engagement with feminist science fiction. Her novel The Female Man and the short story "When It Changed" stand among her notable works in fiction, alongside We Who Are About To..., The Two of Them, and The Adventures of Alyx. Her critical writing, collected in volumes such as How to Suppress Women's Writing and To Write Like a Woman, extended her work as a women's rights activist into sustained literary argument. Her fiction and criticism together earned her the Nebula Award for Best Short Story, the Hugo Award for Best Novella, and the Locus Award for Best Novella, as well as the Pilgrim Award, the Tähtivaeltaja Award, and the Otherwise Retrospective Award. She was also inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.
Russ died on April 29, 2011, in Tucson, Arizona. Her induction into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame marks one of the formal recognitions that her career, conducted across fiction, criticism, journalism, and the classroom, accumulated over its span.
Quotes by Joanna Russ
Joanna Russ's insights on:
If you want me to do something else useful, you had better show me what that something else is.
I cannot get into this swamp or I will never get out; and if I start crying again I’ll remember that I have no one to love, and if anyone treats me like that again, I’ll kill him. Only I mustn’t because they’ll punish me.
I think it no accident that the myth of the isolated achievement so often promotes women writers’ less good work as their best work.
How am I to put this together with my human life, my intellectual life, my solitude, my transcendence, my brains, and my fearful, fearful ambition?
An as-yet-unpublished poet in Boulder, Colorado, once said to me that anything worth doing was worth doing badly. I may seem, in the foregoing sketchy pages, to have followed her advice rather too well.
They validate perceptions that need validating, especially in adolescence – ie, under the bland, forced optimism of American life terrible forces are at work, things are not what they seem, and if you feel lonely, persecuted, a misfit, and in terror, you aren’t crazy. You’re right.
This is until you’re forty-five, ladies, after which you vanish into thin air like the smile of the Cheshire cat leaving behind only a disgusting grossness and a subtle poison that automatically infects every man under twenty-one.
I have had my share of trouble and sickness but always somewhere in me there is a little spot of warmth and joy to make it all easier, like a traveler’s fire burning out in the wilderness on a cold night.
The reply to this was that Three took out a small revolver, and this surprised me; for everyone knows that anger is most intense towards those you know: it is lovers and neighbors who kill each other. There’s no sense, after all, in behaving that way toward a perfect stranger; where’s the satisfaction? No love, no need; no need, no frustration; no frustration, no hate, right? It must have been fear.