The radical feminist writer and academic Joanna Russ, who has died after a stroke aged 74, was a unique, seminal thinker as well as a most entertaining and challenging science-fiction novelist. She began writing and publishing in the 1950s, but her feminist concerns did not emerge until the appearance in the late 1960s of her stories about Alyx, a tough-minded and intelligent female assassin from the classical Greek period. Russ herself once said that it was the Alyx stories that gave her the breakthrough in confidence to deal with feminist issues in fiction.
The best known of her novels, The Female Man, did not appear until 1975, after publisher delays. She had written it six years earlier, around the time she first publicly declared herself a lesbian. No consideration of the women's movement in the US can be complete without acknowledging the importance of this novel, a weirdly effective blend of humour and anger. It deals with four genetically identical women in different social contexts, who are all clearly facets of the author herself.
Jeannine lives in an economically bankrupt US where the second world war never happened, and where the only access a woman has to a successful life is through marriage. Joanna lives in a world recognisable as 1970s America, but finds expression of her humanity difficult and seeks to become a "female man". Janet's story is utopian. All men died out centuries earlier, leading to full social potential for women. The fourth woman, Jael, engages in a violent war against men, in the end bringing about the creation of "Whileaway", Janet's utopian world. The novel depicts meetings between these women as instruments of devastating social and sexual satire.
We Who Are About To ... (1977) uses a stranded group of tourists on a deserted planet to subvert the myth of Robinson Crusoe. The female protagonist rejects the survivalist demands of her companions, especially when threatened with forced breeding. The novel is concerned with human responses to imminent death, but also examines how those responses are informed by gender.
In addition to her six novels, she wrote a children's book, Kittatinny: A Tale of Magic (1978), and many short stories. She won several prizes, science-fiction genre awards such as the Hugo and Nebula, and mainstream recognition for her critical and academic work.
Provocative, uncompromising and brave, Russ was not content merely to chronicle women's issues but to open the debate to include a frank examination of women's weaknesses. In particular, she did not shrink from depicting her female characters as capable of destructive violence and used the medium of speculative fiction to place women in extreme or militant situations of a complexity denied to more conventional feminist writers. Her fiction was stylistically diverse, and much of her work showed genuine good humour and a sense of the absurd, comparable, as several commentators observed, to Jonathan Swift. She was extraordinarily successful and stirred up much engaging controversy, especially among fellow (ie male) SF writers.
Russ spent much of her life as an academic, gaining a BA (with high honours) in English from Cornell University, where she studied under Vladimir Nabokov. A master of fine arts in drama followed from Yale in 1960. After lecturing at several universities, including Cornell, the State University of New York at Binghamton, and the University of Colorado at Boulder, she became English professor at the University of Washington. She was a National Endowment for the Humanities fellow in 1974-75.
Her essays and non-fiction books were often polemical but always reasoned and scholarly. To read them alongside her fiction is to gain insight into Russ's deep intelligence and remarkable personality, also to become nervously aware of her astonishing literary anger. Notable among her non-fiction is the book How to Suppress Women's Writing (1983), and numerous essays, including the collections Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans and Perverts (1985) and To Write Like a Woman (1995). Some of this early writing was also anthologised in What Are We Fighting For? (1997) and The Country You Have Never Seen (2007). Her papers are collected at the University of Oregon.
Always interested in the relatively unexplored effectiveness of genre fiction, Russ argued that it should be taken seriously. An early literary essay, for instance, was her revelatory article The Wearing Out of Genre Materials (1971) – ideas and tropes in genre fiction were said to develop through three distinct phases: innocence, plausibility and ultimately decadence.
A more startling fascination, and an insight into the way her mind worked, was Russ's late interest in the genre known as "slash". Slash is homoerotic fiction based on fictional personalities from TV or films. It derives its name from "K/S" ... or Kirk-slash-Spock. Most slash fiction is written and enjoyed by women, mostly lesbians. In 1985 Russ wrote a study, Pornography By Women for Women, With Love, which remains the key work on this activity. She argued that the enjoyment of literary fantasy is akin to sexual fantasy, but impossible to explain to outsiders or make them understand.
In 2007 Russ described her introduction to slash, when a friend told her about it over the telephone. She said: "I didn't get mildly interested, my hair stood up on end. I said, 'What? Can I get that?'" She became an avid collector of slash and not only published scholarly articles about it, but wrote many pieces of it herself. She said she found the writing of slash a wholly satisfying sexual experience. When her collection was so vast that it had become unwieldy, she donated it to the Popular Culture Library at Bowling Green State University, Ohio. That slash is taken seriously in many American universities is almost entirely because of Russ's work in the field.
Russ was born in New York City, the daughter of two teachers, Evarett and Bertha, and grew up in the Bronx. She began writing from an early age. She filled many notebooks with poems, comics, stories and illustrations, sometimes binding the material with thread. Obsessively interested in flora and fauna, she later said that she divided her childhood between the Bronx zoo and the botanical gardens.
In later years she protected her private life and was rarely seen in public. She was ill for many years with chronic fatigue syndrome, and also suffered back pain so severe that she had to write standing up. In April she suffered a series of strokes and requested not to be resuscitated in the event of another.
Julie Bindel writes: The Female Man made a huge impact on me and on other lesbian feminists. Many male reviewers viciously attacked the book at the time of publication. No wonder some found the book so threatening. It challenged traditional notions and beliefs about gender in a way that few feminists had managed to achieve in theoretical works. The power of the plot lies in the way the reader is invited to see men's dominance and superiority over women as ludicrous, and as stranger than (science) fiction.
Russ was an out lesbian at a time when very few women dared. I had the privilege to hear her speak in the 1990s, and her sense of fun and sharp intellect shone through.