The Country You Have Never Seen by Joanna Russ
Paperback, 288 pages, £20, Liverpool University Press
*
reviewed by Jonathan McCalmont
Joanna Russ is what can only be called a full-spectrum intellectual. Best known for her fiction (including the 1975 work The Female Man), Russ has also written plays, children’s novels and a number of works of feminist thought and criticism. She was also an SF critic. The Country You Have Never Seen is a collection of reviews essays and letters mostly comprised of selections from her long running column in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, but also featuring works from journals, newspapers and a plethora of other venues. Full of intellectual intensity, passion and a quite caustically dry wit, The Country You Have Never Seen is the work of a considerable thinker but it never manages to be anything other than the sum of its somewhat disparate parts.
While The Country You Have Never Seen does contain some longer pieces, its feel is dictated largely by the practicalities of Russ’ F&SF column. Like most “review columns” today, the individual entries are never more than a few pages and are divided up among 3 or 4 books. In effect that means that the bulk of this collection is given over to what might be called “capsule reviews”. But there is nothing capsule about the way that Russ approaches these practicalities and it is this method that comes to define the book.
Many people, when they produce a short review, feel the need to cram in a short description of the book or effectively write a short review that has the same shape as a normal review only with less room for argument or thematic analysis. Russ has no truck with this method. Each review Russ produces is characterised by her diving straight into what annoyed or enchanted her about a particular book, whether it be the insulting characterisation, the beauty of the prose or the ugliness of a work’s underlying politics. No plot summaries, no “on the other hand”, just full engagement with a particular aspect of each work. The result is a book that feels less like a collection of reviews and more like a series of 400 word slices of intellectual life as the critic gives us her reaction to a particular work either on its own terms or in terms of the wider scope of what she was interested at that particular time. A feeling that is only augmented by the fact that the F&SF pieces are mixed up with letters to academic and political journals.
Despite the seemingly kitchen sink approach to the editing of this collection, it is undeniably the case that the collection resonates with a clearly identifiable critical voice. This is partly due to the methodology but also due to the depth and breadth of Russ’ erudition and her frequently acidic and occasionally surreal sense of humour. Particularly memorable is her mock confusion at why a lesbian sadist would want to wear high heels and a tight skirt and her characterisation of one book as “The Goon Show gone sad”. However, despite having no qualms at deploying venom when necessary and a fluency of prose style that is also evident in her other fictional and non-fictional writings, Russ’ critiques no more fall into self-indulgent rants than her positive advocacy falls into fannishness. Russ may praise a book to the heavens and then be merely puzzled by the same author’s next outing. In other words, the collected reviews are models of how to comport oneself as a reviewer, in particular Russ’s brilliantly insightful defence of the creative freedom of the critic (a defence prompted by angry letters reacting to her dislike of certain forms of fantasy).
Also included in the collection are a series of more substantial critical essays featuring “Daydream Literature and Science Fiction”. Vaguely reminiscent of Michael Moorcock’s “Epic Pooh” (though pre-dating it by nearly 10 ten years), this piece is an attempt to isolate a form of fiction that arises from an attempt to write up a daydream. What Russ means by this is that in the creation of art there are two steps; firstly the formulation of an idea, sensation or impression and then the articulation of that mental object. What day dream literature attempts to do is to write about that object without ever articulating it. Daydream authors never get to grips with ideas, they never engage with them, instead they half-articulate them and fill the rest in with vagueness and stock phrases. A bold attempt to pin down a problem in fantastical writing, the piece feels rather lacking in structure, as though Russ is still trying to come to terms with the idea in her mind as she writes it. Given the subject of the piece, this is perhaps unfortunate.
“The Image of Women in Science Fiction” is an entirely different kettle of fish. It is lucid, insightful and utterly damning in its criticism of the sexism prevalent in SF at the time. But this is no whinge about the lack of female Hugo nominees or a call for greater inclusiveness, this is a persuasively argued and powerful critique of the lack of vision and childish insecurities of the Golden Age SF authors who always wrote about middle class America and couldn’t help but write about heroic He-men. While SF has clearly moved on from some of the ridiculous examples or irrational short-sightedness that Russ cites, the arguments have not aged a day and continue to be absolutely correct.
“The Wearing out of Genre Materials” makes an point quite similar to the one made by John Barnes in Helix, namely that SF has moved through a series of phases where the commons of the genre (the tropes) are created, re-invented and then fall into stylised convention and pastiche. This is a tightly argued “death of SF” piece that, for me, put an interesting spin on the emergence of new subgenres such as MilSF and Paranormal Romance. MilSF is effectively a continuation of a form of space opera that has slipped from the mainstream of the genre as new generations have emerged who do not see man’s future as a possible retread of World War II. However, rather than reinvent the old staples of that genre, MilSF has created its own ghetto; a “historical town” where it’s always 1965 and people still see space as an arena for battles, FTL and galactic empires. The same goes for Paranormal Romance, which can be seen as an attempt to stop the clock in the 1990s when the vampire officially stopped being an object of menace and became a sex object thanks to Ann Rice and Buffy. Since then there have been attempts to move the vampire on as a trope, but for some people, the ideas of the 1990s are where they want to stay and so a creative ghetto is created.
The Country You Have Never Seen is a strange beast. While there are some substantial pieces of criticism here, they are clearly not what the book is about. Instead, it should probably be understood as a historical document; a guide not just to the early history of feminist SF but also of GLBT politics. Indeed, given that Russ is now over 70 and has given her collected papers to a university, I can’t help but wonder whether the main goal of this collection is just to get Russ’ stuff out there for the sake of future researchers and historically minded SF fans. The result is an interesting, entertaining and accessible collection that will probably appeal most to people with quite specific research interests.
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