Review: And Chaos Died

And Chaos Died by Joanna Russ
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is classic Joanna Russ. I've mentioned her complex, often overwhelmingly dense prose before, and "And Chaos Died" is the epitome of that style. The opening of the story finds a ship crash-landed on a planet where everyone has the powers of telekinesis, teleportation, and telepathy. The rest of the book is an attempt to convey the experience of telepathy and telekinesis as a normal human would comprehend it. It's an insane goal. And somehow she succeeds. The book is crazy hard to follow, one of the most challenging things I've ever read, but I enjoyed it, I think.

I usually try to do a brief summary of a book when I review it. The plot is... fairly unimportant here, but I'll give it a shot anyway. Jai and his ship crash land on a planet populated with telepathic, telekinetic people. He slowly develops these powers as well - it seems like those abilities are inherent in humans and just being around people with them will teach you how to use them. When he's rescued one woman comes with him as a representative of the world. When they get back to Earth, she disappears and Jai travels around using his powers, trying to stay out of the hands of people who would make him into a lab rat. He makes a friend, a young boy, and they go on terrifying adventures through the strange world that Earth has become. The finale is especially bizarre. Several other telepathic people from the other planet come to Earth and offer to meet with some major leaders. There's some kind of wiping of the global human consciousness. And then it ends!

The biggest 'pro' of the book is how well it does the overwhelming, disorienting nature of telepathy (or at least, what I assume telepathy would feel like, and what Russ thinks telepathy would feel like). It would involve states of consciousness completely foreign to our experience and combined with telekinesis, it would change our entire way of interacting with the world and the way we constitute self. As I said before, Russ did this well, which makes the book good and almost unreadable. It's slow. There are huge swathes of story in which nothing concrete happens or where none of the things that happen have any basis in normal human experience. It's great! And very challenging!

There are two very interesting things in this book aside from the feeling-of-telepathy aspect: the portrayal of Earth, and Jai Vedh's sexuality.

Earth in this story is in a state of extreme overpopulation and climatic disaster. Coastal areas have flooded, plains areas are desert wastelands. There's not enough space for humans to live and when they're gathered so close together there is often hedonism and destruction. There's a chapter-long description of a riot and another chapter that follows a couple living out hyperbolic examples of 20th-century gender roles. To see Russ's vision of the future is to see a very modern vision of apocalypse: gender roles are exaggeratedly performed not because they're how people want to live them but because it's traditional, global warming is destroying the world, and the American government (or at least the puppet organization that controls it) has a secret agency that hunts people.

Jai is gay. He says this in the first few pages. It was a little uncomfortable because it was immediately connected to his interest in fashion. It got very, very uncomfortable when Russ paired him off with a woman not just romantically but sexually (over and over again). I appreciate that Russ included a queer person as her main character, and I understand that the whole story focuses on the propagation of telepathic humans throughout the galaxy, and that he would be influenced by the thoughts and desires of those around him. But to then treat him as if he were straight throughout the entire rest of the story (because he definitely keeps having straight sex until almost the very end) is a little problematic.

Overall, parts of the story feel very much of their time, other parts feel incredibly modern, but the entire effect is strikingly original. This is a story that will drag you along and stick to you after you've read it.

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Review: We Who Are About To...

We Who Are About To... by Joanna Russ
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I love bookstores and libraries of all kinds. Big ones with an endless buffet of options, curated collections with a peculiar slant to them, haphazard piles of books that the owners clearly didn't know what to do with. But I have a secret test for any book vendor that few pass and those special few have a permanent place in my heart: is there any Joanna Russ?

Russ is a classic SF writer who published during the New Wave and won or was nominated for most of the major SF awards. She also wrote kickass feminist nonfiction. She's a big enough name that most people who've read SF have heard of her, but I've only seen her books on the shelf in two bookstores ever, and through one academic library's interlibrary loan. I went into D.C. with a few friends to play Pokemon GO and we wandered our way to several bookstores until we finally settled in one that was next to a Pokemon gym. Just after taking over the gym, my phone ran out of battery, so I was able to devote proper attention to the books themselves. Their SF section was delightfully pulpy and meticulously shelved, and when I climbed up onto a step stool to check the top shelf, I found two Joanna Russ novels with green-edged pages and crazy pulp covers. I was ecstatic. (I also got an old collection of SF by female authors, which is also a rare find - things like that are much more common from the past 15-20 years).

Anyway, the book itself starts out like a pulp sci-fi novel. A group of travelers crash-lands on an uncharted planet where it's fairly certain they'll never be found. It's essentially Gulliver's Island in space. The first-person narrator is savvy and cynical and knows several things from the get-go: 1) there is no hope for long-term survival, 2) her fellow passengers will hold onto hope and try to perpetuate humanity (which means impregnating all fertile women ASAP whether they like it or not) and 3) she finds a respectable death far preferable to most of her other options.

The first half of the book explores the passengers' first week on the planet, the alliances and plans that quickly take shape, the growing distrust everyone has for the narrator. The book takes a sharp (but not unexpected, especially if you read the spoileriffic blurb on the first page of the book) turn about halfway through. The focus narrows to the narrator as she chronicles her slow death by starvation. Her hallucinations, her memories, her vacillation between panic and acceptance, her determination to die a deserved death. It's solid Russ work - even in the more lucid passages it can be difficult to follow a line of thought, and most passages are meaty enough to bear re-reading. It's a short book, though, so even though the second half is a slow march, it doesn't feel too long. And unlike 'The Female Man,' another of Russ's books I've read, it was just challenging enough to make me work without leaving me completely confused and in need of a syllabus to prep me for a re-read. Russ shows us glimpses of her characters' pasts and the world they come from that make me want to read other books set in the same universe, but she (and the narrator) refuse to elaborate on the history implied by the bits and pieces because they are irrelevant to the main event: the narrator's slow death.

It's a fascinating read with equal parts pulp and intellect. If you can get your hands on it, it's well worth reading.

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SF Women Read-A-Thon

I'm back! It's been a while since I've posted and I have a new project. I'm still going to read and review pretty much everything I read (including my yearlong backlog of read books, and including ARCs/galleys). But now I have a goal: prove to the world women have been writing sci-fi for as long as it has been around.

I'm tackling that goal by proving it to myself, first, by reading as much and as widely as I can by women who have written sci-fi. Then, when someone asks for recommendations for "something like Piers Anthony" or "really hard SF" I can offer up some great SF by a woman. Specifically a woman who is not Ursula Le Guin, who is amazing, but is so so often the only woman I see on 'best sci-fi' lists.

My methods are a little suspect but they're not difficult. I went to my favorite used bookstore and found about 20 sci-fi books written by women that were written in the 1970s or earlier. I picked women I'd never heard of, with a few exceptions for classics I hadn't read. It cost me about $16. I might end up reading a lot of mediocre sci-fi this way, but people have been reading a lot of mediocre sci-fi by dudes for decades and keep recommending those books so other people read them et cetera ad nauseum until they become canon. I know I'll also find some gems, then I'll recommend them, then hopefully other people will read them because I reached outside both the canon and my comfort zone.

Why? Because I want to help good books get read, and because people seem to believe that women don't write SF or don't write SF as well or didn't used to write SF for some reason and I want to prove them wrong. And because many good books by women especially from 30+ years ago get left on the shelf at the used bookstore because no one recommended them.

Largely, because every single time I go into a "looking for recs" thread for SF on reddit there are literally zero recommendations for books by women. Except Le Guin, probably because a lot of people didn't know Ursula was a woman's name when they were kids. (They only read a woman because they didn't know better!) In threads specifically requesting books by women there are always the 'why are you only reading women, that's sexist' responses, but when someone points out in other threads that only men have been rec'd, that's also called sexist. I'm tired of that. It is not the case that women don't write good enough SF to be recommended. It's not the case that women don't write SF, don't write hard SF, don't write good SF. 

And because these all seem to me to be problems that regardless of cause, I can't do much about except to be loud and vocal about books that I love, and to find more books I love and share them! So I'm going to stock my arsenal to launch a silo of recs.

I'm going to call this my Sci-Fi Women Read-A-Thon and tag my Goodreads shelves, Instagram, and blog posts with #readathon_sfwomen, so follow along!

I started this project about a month ago so I'm excited to see that other people like Liz Bourke from Tor.com feel the same way.

Review: Souls/Houston, Houston, Do You Read?

Souls/Houston, Houston, Do You Read? by Joanna Russ
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I wasn't planning to read this yet, but I shouldn't be surprised that I picked it up and read it out of order, since it's the first book I've actually purchased in quite a long time (support your local library, folks!). I liked the idea of a neat pair of double-bound novellas. They're printed upside down and backward to each other. So cute, and such an excellent pairing of novellas and authors. Both won the Hugo and Houston additionally won the Nebula.

Houston, Houston, Do You Read? by James Tiptree, Jr. starts with three male astronauts attempting to reach Houston. Instead, they make contact with an unexpected ship full of young women. The main character, Lorimer, is a man who is very aware of his lack of masculinity, and juxtapoxing that insecurity between the competent young women and the very masculine men on his ship provides some beautiful (if slightly unsettling) meaning and character development. I won't go into the plot here, but this is the best of Tiptree's stories that I've read so far and deserves any award that you could throw at it.

Souls by Joanna Russ features a sharp-minded Abbess in Germanic England who is faced with a Viking invasion. Again, with such a short story I won't go into the plot, but I'm slightly disappointed that the vague plot summary on the cover is not really what happens in the story. It's compellingly written - not quite the masterpiece that Houston is - and a quick but fascinating read.

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