Joanna Russ by Gwyneth Jones

Author:Gwyneth Jones
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Illinois Press

REVIEWS, 1978–1981

Joanna's critical acuity and her entertaining style are intact in her last reviews for the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, but her editor's disgusted treatment of We Who Are About To (Algis Budrys, Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction [February 1978]) can't have helped their relationship. A proliferation of footnotes—correcting her errors and adding afterthought asides—suggests carelessness or weariness. Occasionally, as if tired of being anything but a teacher, she slips into workshop mode.

There were also sf reviews in the Washington Post's “Book World” and reviews of nongenre feminist works elsewhere.

In the fall 1978 issue of Frontiers she found Marge Piercy's gritty urban novel The High Cost of Living, featuring a lesbian protagonist and an unusual love-triangle on the margins of society, less attractive than Woman on the Edge of Time but nevertheless impressive: “Books that are truly alive and individual don't fit easily into preconceptions” (a riposte that could serve as a defense of Joanna's own recent work).

In the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (February 1979) Khatru panelist Raylyn Moore's only full-length fiction did not impress: What Happened to Emily Goode after the Great Exhibition was a time-displacement story with an excessively ladylike, thoroughly dishonest heroine. Rime Isle, a double from Fritz Leiber, Joanna found to be tired old stuff—without noticing both stories were recent reprints. In The Year's Finest Fantasy, edited by Terry Carr, the only outright failure, “The Cat From Hell,” a “clumsy piece of grue” would at least get Stephen King's name onto the jacket. A “youthfully energetic and rather appealing” pastiche from Steve Utley and Howard Waldrop won a special mention, and “The Kugelmass Episode” was “perfect Woody Allen.” Harlan Ellison's “Jefty Is Five” gets line-by-line, classroom attention, for the curious reason that Ellison “ought not to be writing ‘the best of the year’ but something much better.”

The rest of this column is devoted to her legendary denunciation of sub-Tolkien “heroic fantasy.” The works reviewed—Stephen Donaldson's Lord Foul's Bane (a “daydream of Byronic suffering and self-importance…that could easily have been cut by three-quarters”) and Joy Chant's Grey Mane of Morning (a smoothly crafted “daydream of primitive, idyllic nomad life”) are treated fairly gently—though it's a shame Joy Chant spends her skill on the “supreme worthiness” of the male characters, leaving nothing for the women. The (sub)genre gets a pummeling. Without real change, which “heroic fantasy” must avoid at all costs, these “guided daydreams” are just a parade of scenery, absurdly fixed characters, and a “dreadful predictability” that only Tolkien and possibly C. S. Lewis knew how to disguise. Her final paragraph gets to the heart of the problem and is worth all the rest:

The desire for escape is understandable. It's the supply that's spurious. Unfortunately, after Tolkien had wrung the last drop of meaning-freighted landscape out of an extremely tiny genre, the cry went up “Now we know how to do it!” and another, “There's money in it!” and the flood began.7

There are multiple footnotes, including a discursion on the failures of Star Wars versus the success of Ursula K.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.