Modern Classics of Science Fiction by Gardner Dozois

Author:Gardner Dozois
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Publisher: St. Martin’s Griffin

JOANNA RUSS

Nobody’s Home

Like Kate Wilhelm and R. A. Lafferty, Joanna Russ would begin selling in the late ’50s, but would not become widely known until the late ’60s. Even Russ’s early work would display the same kind of wit, sophistication, and elegance of style that would characterize her later work, and the best of it – stories like “My Dear Emily,” “There Is Another Shore, You Know, Upon the Other Side,” and “The New Men” – holds up well even today. Almost all of Russ’s early work is fantasy, much of it about vampires – 1962’s “My Dear Emily” remains one of the most stylish and fascinating vampire stories of modern times – and she might have established her reputation years earlier than she did if she had continued to steadily produce work like this, but her output was sparse throughout the first half of the decade, and mostly overlooked. (Even at her peak of production, Russ would never be a prolific writer, even when compared to most careful craftsmen, let alone to the high-production sausage factories that have always been common in the genre.)

By 1967, Russ would be attracting attention with her “Alyx” stories, which at first seemed to be merely better-than-usually written sword and sorcery stories, featuring a tough-minded and wily female cutpurse rather than the usual male hero, sort of the Gray Mouser in drag. This may seem an obvious enough reversal now, when the fantasy genre is flooded with sword-swinging Amazons and swashbuckling women adventurers, but it was radical stuff at the time – with even Damon Knight saying that, before Russ, he would have thought that “nobody could get away with a series of heroic fantasies of prehistory in which the central character, the barbarian adventurer, is a woman.” The Alyx stories would veer suddenly into science fiction with “The Barbarian” in Orbit 3, in which Alyx outwits a degenerate time-traveller, and then Alyx herself would be snatched out of the past and thrown into a decadent and fascinating future for Russ’s first novel, 1968’s Picnic on Paradise, the work with which she would make her first significant impact on the field, and a work which even now strikes me as one of the best novels of the late ’60s. (It was one of two books, both Ace Specials – the other was Lafferty’s Past Master; the impact of Terry Carr’s Ace Specials line on the SF world of the late ’60s can hardly be overestimated – that I read for the first time during a long and grueling Trans-Atlantic flight, miles above the roof of the world with sunlight gleaming on the clouds far below. I remember thinking how appropriate both books were to the setting in which I was reading them, for both were unlike anything I’d read before; I still maintain a special fondness for both novels.)

By the early ’70s, Russ would have published her complex second novel, And Chaos Died, by turns brilliantly effective and opaque almost to the point of

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.