Smart Energy

It's... a book!

Sometime in 2002, I responded with a proposal to a call for papers on Joanna Russ from British science fiction scholar Farah Mendelsohn. Mendelsohn accepted the proposal on the condition that I not write about The Female Man, Russ’s most famous novel – and pretty much the only thing of Russ’s anyone reads anymore.That was fine with me, and I proceeded to write a paper that touches on pretty much everything but The Female Man.

It was a long road, full of switch backs and revisions, but On Joanna Russ has finally been published Wesleyen University Press. Edited by Mendelsohn, contributors include Samuel R. Delaney (it’s too bad he and Russ never conceived a child), Tess Williams, Gary Wolfe, myself and a host of others.

My essay, the last one in the book, is called “The Narrative Topology of Resistance in the Fiction of Joanna Russ.” In a nutshell, I try to show that narrative is a space of gendered topology; in other words, that fiction is a landscape of cocks and cunts. Russ certainly resisted that landscape. Her writing is a macrophage ravaging the immune system of mainstream science fiction. I tried to take a snapshot of the action (a highly academic one) to capture the lesions, superations and oozings of consciousness through space that I found in her work.

Thank goddess I had Delaney’s great essay to guide me. After the book is available, I’ll post the essay.