Adventures of Alyx

Rating:
Summary: The best she has to offer
Review: Joanna Russ is a big name in feminist science fiction for a reason: she was one of the first big radical noisemakers in a predominantly male world.

First does not always mean best, and even best does not necessarily mean great.

I'm sure that die hard feminists would disagree with me, but, after sharing this and other Russ books with my female feminist friends, I can only say that her work is sometimes good, sometimes passable, sometimes garbage. Rarely great. The Female Man is an IMPORTANT book, but by far not a GREAT book.

This collection is probably the best, and not coincidentally, the least radical she has to offer. It is certainly more enjoyable, although could not be considered important.

It contains several stories collected from other sources (presumably previously published stories from magazines) containing, loosely, a chronological tale of an adventurer named Alyx. The descriptions and chronology are variously inconsistent; this is not necessarily a bad thing, since the stories stand independent, and since they are suppposed to represent an idea more than a single character.

Her writing style is short sentences and sentence fragments, if that is your sort of thing. Also of note, this book contains what is probably her only reference to heterosexual sex (I could be wrong, but there were no other references in the two other books of hers that I read).

Russ has often been vocal about getting people to go out and read the female corpus of literature, naming some great women writers as her inspirations. I agree; there are some great women writers. You should probably read them instead.