Essayists From The United States

"The mystery stories are very interesting because again, often the ones that women write are as good as or not as good as the ones the guys write, but the women write about personalities, about characters, and what is character-driven. The men tend not to; they are more comfortable apparently with technical problems. I think the best writers are the kind who do both at the same time."

"I am not religious. I am a socialist atheist just as my mother and her parents were. I come out of that radical Jewish socialist tradition that started in roughly 1900. These secular Jews took the messianic, utopian promise of religious Judaism and transferred it to this world. I'm very much part of that tradition, and I didn't even realize it until recently. I've been reading books about the Pale in Russia [where the czars allowed Jews to live] and the ghetto life there; I recognize a lot of things that I didn't even know came from there which deal with me."

"If you take things and turn them on their heads you often get the truth. If you push things logically further and further until they explode into their opposites, then you've got something artistic and truthful."

"this is a public discourse in which female sexuality really doesn’t exist...If you believe the public discourse then you have to also believe that female sexuality is a dreadful thing and must be squashed at all costs, and so on. I just hope there are many, many more young people who are growing up without that, without all of it, anyway."

"You notice that some of the stuff by men that I would call certainly pornographic, Henry Miller, for instance, is taken very seriously. It’s all so obvious. When women do it, it’s silly, when men do it, it’s serious."

"All of Joanna Russ's novels are interesting beyond the ordinary. They ask nasty and necessary questions. They are always asking who owns things and what does it cost to survive, how and what do you eat and who do you use, what do you dare to do to make your own choices. They offer a gallery of some of the most interesting female protagonists in current fiction, women who are rarely victims and sometimes even victors, but always engaged sharply and perceptively with their fate...One advantage of working in a genre is that things have to happen, you must create a moving plot, and that discipline keeps Russ's springy intelligence at least somewhat anchored. If she is like any other writer, she makes me think sometimes of Swift. She is as angry, as disgusted, as playful, as often didactic, as airy at times and as crude, as intellectual. The quality of outraged, clear-sighted, pained intelligence, at once incandescent and exacerbated, is one of the major experiences for me in reading her work. Her critical essays tend to be witty and savage. Boredom is a torture to which the world obviously condemns her a lot."

"One thing I have tried to do when I write...was take the sex in my stories and simply make it part of the whole fabric. It’s not special, it’s not sacred, it’s not demonic, it just happens. It’s as much an ordinary part of life as heating your dinner up, or something, and I always worked very hard to get that over."

"Joanna Russ has written in "Recent Feminist Utopias": "I believe that utopias are not embodiments of universal human values, but are reactive; that is, they supply in fiction what their authors believe society lacks in the here and now. The positive values stressed in the stories can reveal to us what, in the authors' eyes, is wrong with our society. Thus if the stories are familial, communal in feelings, we may safely guess that the authors see our society as isolating people from each other, especially (to judge from the number of all-female utopias in the group) women from women. If the utopias stress a feeling of harmony and connection with the natural world, the authors may be telling us that in reality they feel a lack of such connection.""

"As I see it, there are three stages of science fiction. The first is inventing things: telepathy-geez, wow, gosh!; robots-wow! The second stage is what [Isaac] Asimov does with his robot stories, where you construct a plausible society for this to happen in. And the third when you use it for some other purpose. I think that Delany and Disch and Le Guin and Gene Wolfe and I are third-stage writers."

"Art is collective. Always, it has a tradition behind it. Always. And they will let some of us in but they will not let our traditions in with us or our aesthetic in with us."

"Real artists, it seems to me, are those who don't repeat themselves."

"It's the people who are on the "wrong" side of the equation in all these splits who are making theory and doing coalition work and are absolutely crucial for our future."

"there is no God in any of my stories or in my beliefs. In fact, if there's one thread running throughout my fiction it's precisely the lack of that kind of authority. My books, I would say, are designed to undermine that notion, to force readers to question the authorities governing their lives, be they literary, sexual, political, religious, whatever. Cosmic awe isn't religion. I'm an atheist, and I loathe having religion imported into my work. If you believe in religion, do it, but don't assume or insist that I do."

"The point is to show how small the greatest of disasters can appear when seen from a distance of several billion miles or years."

"most of the women in my generation who were doing groundbreaking work usually felt the need to find a way to distance a lot of personal, controversial issues. And while some awareness on some questions has gone up among the general public, so that it may be possible to say things out loud now that in 1965 or 1970 were certainly very tough to say out loud, in many ways they're getting tough to say again. Back in the early '70s, I shocked myself in writing parts of The Female Man. It scared the dickens out of me. I doubt that women are ever going to feel comfortable being direct, at least not until our society's undergone some changes of its own. When women try to speak totally directly, we lack the social forms or the cultural images or the permission to do so. These things just aren't in our vocabulary yet, so we still have to get at things in a roundabout manner."

"Anger isn't the only thing that happens. There's also an enormous access of energy that comes from finally turning the oppression the other way and saying, "There's nothing wrong with us. There's something wrong with all of you.""

"I've never lost the feeling of transcendental beauty and awe that attached itself to the physical world. Lucretius has a line in De Rerum Naturae that says something about how everything in nature fits together and gives a joy beyond expression. It's a feeling people have surely always had about the way the seasons or planets change, the way plants grow, a sense of joy or awe about what's around us."

"the whole Robinson-Crusoe-and-the-desert-island business is, at bottom, an imperialist myth: you find a place "out there" and you make it yours, whether the people who already live there want you to or not. This goes on in SF all the time--you can see it in Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover series, for instance. I'm not interested in that notion. It's been obvious for at least twenty or thirty years now-certainly since the '60s to us white folks-that it's simply not a good attitude for people to take. And, of course, if you were really put in that situation, I'd think you'd do amazingly well just to stay alive."

"A lot of reviewers froth at the mouth whenever someone takes a hallowed situation and refuses to reinforce all the usual capitalist, imperialist, Americans-can-do-anything attitudes associated with it."

"I'm not anti-utopian in spirit. I'm just not so naive as to think that people can discard who they are. My point isn't that utopia is impossible-I think "Bodies" presents a real utopia-but that creating it isn't as simple as most SF implies."

"One of the most exciting things about working in SF for me, a woman, is that SF is so open-ended-it's perfectly possible to imagine a world where sexism doesn't exist, or in which women can be presented in the context of new myths that women can admire or learn from."

"Anger is a necessity. It's part of all radicalism. When Marxism isn't second-generation, academic, and establishment-theoretical, its motive is sheer fury. What else? When groups get past a certain point of oppression, it's a revelation to be angry. Prior to that you'd go through a stage of feeling you have to be so moral, so good, that anger seems inappropriate; you think you shouldn't get angry. Eventually you get to a place where you can more honestly express that anger, and that's fine. Mother Jones said, "Farmers in this state are raising too much corn and not enough hell!" There's a point where it's essential to get in touch with anger in situations where people or structures are dumping on you. You need this anger to resist looking at the structure and saying, "It's us, it's our fault"; or "What they're saying is true, we must be wrong." If you lose touch with this outrage, you wind up forgetting what you were mad about in the first place; you start feeling that you'd really rather not get involved, that you can't change things, that it's no use. Oppression is always mystifying and confusing. Lying, really."

"The key for me wasn't the '60s but the early '70s and the feminist movement. Gloria Steinem once said that women get more radical as they get older because things start to pile up-the alienation, the outsideness. We don't age as men do; there's no reward. We get out or go under. Radicalism for any oppressed group isn't youthful; it's lifelong...Simply being a female so often has the effect of placing women so far out, so far on the margin, so far from being central or important, that when women go radical, they tend to jump a long way. Radicalism partly derives from the basic question, How much have I really got to lose? I'm not sure you can generalize about this, but it seems clear to me, from my recent researches, that black women are frequently more radical than white feminists and black lesbian feminists are more radical still, because just to stay alive they've had to become radical. Like Barbara Smith, Gloria Anzaldua, Cherrie Moraga. Audre Lorde has a collection of essays called Sister Outsider that is magnificent on this topic. There is a tradition of women on the Left being overlooked that I myself just found out about quite recently. I discovered that in the most amazing ways it's always been women who were the most radical figures on the Left. Suppressed radicals, punished radicals. Not only has this happened before, but it's happened and happened and happened and happened. There have been something like two to four feminist movements in the last three hundred years. Dale Spender's book, Women of Ideas, has some evidence of this. We've buried the slave revolts, and we constantly bury radical events like the labor wars."

"people will never be totally at home, spiritually, in any environment."

"The wonderful and terrible thing about politics in the very broadest sense is that you never know enough, you always find out more and more, and, of course, as you find it out, it changes, too."

"I'll never understand the kind of writer who genuinely advances the proposition that life is a dream or a fiction. To me that's the voice of privilege, whether it's money, class, sex, color, or what have you. Most of us can't find refuge in anything so false."

"I was constantly reading these stories about fucking in bars and fistfights and war, and my reaction, quite naturally, was that I didn't know anything about those things so I couldn't possibly write about them. And the stuff I could write about was considered trivial-writing about a fishing trip was considered "deep" and "raw," while a description of a high school dance was unimportant. There really was a profound bias about what was proper material for "Great Writing." So I decided to write about something nobody knew anything about-to transform the realism of my life into SF and fantasy. I was also drawn to the way SF writers' minds seemed to work. Current fiction bored me stiff, but not SF, where the conceivable was far larger than the personally observable. It's interesting to note that so-called mainstream fiction seems finally to be catching up to SF in this regard; it's becoming increasingly unrealistic, surrealistic, fantastic, “postrealistic.” I feel justified."

"We need to force the reader always to come back to where we all are. Otherwise, it's pure game playing, escapism. And you fall out with an awful shock."

"all political propaganda generally ends the same way: it's yours now, this thing isn't over; I can't tell you what finally happened because it hasn't finally happened yet! This is always a problem when you write anything with real social or political consciousness-what you're describing hasn't ended. I suppose this is true, in a way, of all fiction."

"This isn't something I feel the need to apologize for. The idea that every year or two years you're supposed to turn out these new books that are all going to be wonderful and commercially popular is a misguided notion that commerce has foisted upon us. The writing process has a rhythm all its own, and at least for me the rhythm is absolutely different for every book."

"The idea that artists should be willing to push something as far as it will go, until they watch it crack, has always appealed to me."

"People accept all sorts of attitudes-about racism, sexism, and class-simply because they don't have the time or the energy to think these things through. It's easier to accept the status quo, especially if you're part of a privileged group and want to think well of yourself. So one way to make people aware of how morally atrocious and even downright stupid many of their assumptions are is to confront them with a pattern whose meaning they think they're comfortable with-and then to undermine the whole thing, forcing them to see how arbitrary and wrong they've been."

"Revision, self-criticism, change-all these are essential for any art form to maintain a sense of vitality."

"There's an awful lot of mythology hidden in science. The pathology that was hidden behind nineteenth-century science is beginning to be fairly obvious. I think that the same thing goes on today in sociology and psychology, even in biology."

"The abortion question is illustrative of this. Women say, 'We want the right to own our own bodies.' And the opposition, the Moral Majority, say things like, 'When does life begin?' That's not the point. I don't give a damn when it begins. I don't give a damn what the real differences between men and women are. I just don't want to be stepped on when I walk out into the street. I don't want to have to go out at night in terror. I don't want you to tell me that you won't give me a decent job. I don't want to have a low salary. I don't want to be maltreated."

"The same professors who talked about literature as an absolute value never talked about the sexist messages we were getting from it. The rules of conduct of that time, in the 1950s, were completely different for women, on campus, from what boys were permitted to do. There was a peculiar kind of tacit agreement to pretend that the absolute values were classless and sexless, even though they aren't."

"You have to have conventions and rigid symbols and patterns before you can upset them."

"What we have to watch out for, to keep from being suckered in, is when someone purports to explain not one particular concrete thing, but the way in which a whole species works."

"Either you write what is essentially autobiographical or you have to do something else. You cannot imitate a genre which was intended to exclude you."

"SF was born didactic! It originated as a teaching medium-which is why its potential to actually effect some changes in people's attitudes is infinitely greater. It's got representative protagonists, for example-at least it starts like this in the works of H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, and other proto-SF writers. If you look at, say, The War of the Worlds, the human beings there may represent certain attitudes or types, but they are obviously not "individuals" in the sense that characters in the great realistic novels are."

"What fascinated me about the theater then was that you could project a private reality onto actual material things: people, sets, voices, scenes. It gradually dawned on me that I could do this in words, too."

"Duke Humphrey, bearded and humped, had died six hundred years before but not really, so that the people of Appletap-on-Flat were understandably frightened when he began to reappear in the outlying districts with (it was said) a demon cat from Zanzibar sitting on his hump and telling him what to do. (beginning of "The Zanzibar cat")"

"This is the tale of the Abbess Radegunde and what happened when the Norsemen came. (first line of "Souls")"

"Writing isn't talking. God damn it. Look, James, this isn't going to be an easy letter. I'm going to finish it, put it in the Net, turn my signal off, and go to bed. I'll be asleep by the time you get up, so don't call if you decide to answer your red light or just go looking for something intelligible to read or know about (little enough here for either of us). I keep thinking of the impulses in the Net as sparks flying underground or undersea or bouncing off satellites; of course it's faster than that. It's already morning in Hawaii and this will get to you almost instantaneously when I depress the Transmit key. Which is a little daunting, the irreversibility. (beginning of "Bodies")"

"Let's be for us. For goodness' sakes, let's not be against us. (p107)"

"The amazing peacefulness, the astonishing lack of anger, the sweetness and balm of being at last on the right side of power. (p100)"

"Sex doesn't last. (p95)"

"Lady Sappho in curly gold letters is the name of the book I will (will not) write. (beginning of "Everyday Depressions")"

"My mother's country: the body and garden of the Great Goddess, fair, ornamental, tended; I can wander forever in Her lap under the sun of Her face, in a cultivated place like the Botanical Gardens of my childhood where everything is suffused with the divine personality, regal, wide, and lovely. Everything's here-pineapples from Java, Norway pine, greenhouses like tropical igloos, the long wide lawns, camomile meadows veiled with hair, lawns that look like-and are-the dancing-grounds of angels. The fatherland is another place."

"Science fiction is a natural, in a way, for any kind of radical thought. Because it is about things that have not happened and do not happen. It's usually placed in the future, but not always. It's very fruitful if you want to present the concerns of any marginal group, because you are doing it in a world where things are different."