Showing posts with label Joanna Russ. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Joanna Russ. Show all posts

Wednesday, December 6, 2023

SSW: "A Game of Vlet" by Joanna Russ (the final Alyx story) THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION, February 1974, edited by Edward L. Ferman: Short Story Wednesday

Joanna Russ was perhaps less prolific than she hoped to be, afflicted as she was with distractingly painful back problems in the last decades of her life (she noted she could only write comfortably while standing, and eventually that didn't help, either), and this might've contributed to the relatively few stories (including a short novel and several novelets) in her influential Alyx series of sword & sorcery fantasies (some science-fantasies, as s&s fiction often dances across that line, if rarely into out and out science fiction), some of the earlier examples to feature a woman protagonist (Catherine L. Moore and her Jirel of Joiry stories were among the relatively few predecessors). Nonetheless, her body of work, nonfiction (including a lot of literary criticism) and mostly early poetry along with her fiction, was influential and often controversial, some of it intentionally, some of it simply because there were too many too easily outraged. 

Most of the Alyx stories have been collected in the volumes Alyx (Gregg Press 1976) and The Adventures of Alyx (Pocket Books 1983), but for whatever reason, Russ didn't choose to have today's story, "A Game of Vlet", included in either collection...perhaps because she chose to see the story as a sort of coda to the others, perhaps because she distances even the character in the story from the others by never naming Alyx thus in the 1974 story, though it seems pretty clear we are to understand the trickster and predator on the elite in "Vlet" is Alyx. 

The Library of America has produced an omnibus of Russ's work, this one perhaps most driven by the novel The Female Man and its companion story "When It Changed", and the Alyx cycle, collected here with the novellas On Strike Against God (which in contemporary-mimetic terms deals with some of the aspects of The Female Man, and has been too long out of print) and "Souls", and the novel We Who Are About To... (this last in part a slap at and refutation of insanely antifeminist strands in sf perpetuated by such writers as Randall Garrett ["Queen Bee"] and particularly and most directly Marion Zimmer Bradley [Darkover Landfall]; Russ and Bradley had an exchange of letters about Vonda McIntyre's unfavorable review of the Bradley novel in the early feminist fantasy/sf fanzine The Witch and the Chameleon, and excerpts from the letters can be read here. 

Russ contributes one of her series of book review columns to this issue as well; the issue can be read here; "A Game of Vlet" follows the review essay.

But it is useful, as LOA editor Nicole Rudick notes, to have all the Alyx stories together, and in introducing "A Game of Vlet" for "The Story of the Week" web-feature, she notes that Russ's friend Samuel Delany was inspired by this story to do his own sword & sorcery sequence of stories, the Neveryon cycle (as well as having characters play Vlet in his sf novel Triton), and that Russ was in turn sparked to write this story by Avram Davidson's historical fantasy The Phoenix and the Mirror, in which Vergil Magus attempts to create a virgin speculum, with certain powers it confers. Rudick doesn't note the degree to which Russ's friend Fritz Leiber, a grandmaster in chess competitions, made chess and chess-like gaming a part of his s&s series of stories, running from vignettes and novels, and vlet if anything is a magically-powerful elaboration on chess (Russ and Leiber also wrote one story each in their sword and sorcery cycles that features the character from the other's...Fafhrd, the Leiber character who is in a few ways based on Leiber himself appears in Russ's "I Thought She Was Afeard Until She Stroked My Beard", and Alyx, based in a few ways on Russ, appears in Leiber's "The Two Best Thieves in Lankhmar")...Leiber's and Russ's careers had certain other parallels, as well, quite aside from being two of the most literarily innovative writers in fantastica. As was Davidson, as Delany remains, albeit he's moving, I think, toward complete retirement in re: fiction-writing.

The story is politically charged and cleverly worked out, and brief...Russ noted that she had no more stories to write about Alyx after its publication; had she lived longer and more healthily, she might've eventually found some more to say. Alyx in her late years might've made an excellent study.

Previously to the LOA omnibus, the only Russ volume "A Game of Vlet" was included in was the fine collection The Zanzibar Cat, which saw a small-press-run edition from Arkham House (with a rather ugly cover) and a somewhat better package from Baen Books (I believe I have both editions in the chaotic personal library):


ISFDB is only aware of it having been otherwise reprinted in the French edition (but not the US ones) of Jessica Amanda Salmonson's anthology Amazons! and Joan and Fred Saberhagen's chess fantasy story anthology Pawn to Infinity (the ISFDB doesn't yet have a complete entry on the LOA omnibus). At this moment, the FictionMags Index doesn't have "Vlet" tagged as an Alyx story. We'll see about getting these lacunae filled...

Joanna Russ on Sweet Freedom

For more of today's SSW entries, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

Posted by at 6 comments:
Labels: , , , , ,

Wednesday, June 14, 2023

Joanna Russ: 1965 Stories (more or less): "Come Closer", ''Life in a Furniture Store", "Wilderness Year" and "I Had Vacantly Crumpled It into My Pocket...But By God, Eliot, It Was a Photograph from Life!": Short Story Wednesday

These first three stories included in Russ's 1998 volume (and the last collection of her fiction to be offered during her lifetime) The Hidden Side of the Moon (St. Martin's Press). There was some critical consensus that this volume was "disappointing" after two, The Zanzibar Cat and (Extra)Ordinary People, which concentrated almost exclusively on her fantastic-fiction writing, but I'd disagree, given the general excellence of the work collected here (much of it more "challenging" than the earlier collections' contents); this volume does give a rather more wide-ranging account of her writing career, as well. 


A (slightly-off-center) photo of the US trade paperback edition (which is the version I own).














"I Had Vacantly Crumpled It into My Pocket...But By God, Eliot, It Was a Photograph from Life!", The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, August 1964, edited by Avram Davidson; in the French edition, Fiction, May 1965, edited by Alain Dorémieux, as "La jeune fille en noir" (hence, the latter first appearance a weak excuse for inclusion here thus). Can be read here.

"Come Closer", Magazine of Horror, August 1965, edited by Robert A. W. Lowndes. Can be read here.

"Life in a Furniture Store", Epoch, Fall 1965, edited by Baxter Hutchison, A. R. Ammons, et al.; Managing Editor Barbara Hutchison. Can be read here.

...and a somewhat jokey, notional vignette, published as "Wilderness Year" (as Russ is quoted in the headnote as not being able to settle on a title), F&SF, December 1964, edited by Edward Ferman (though credited to his father, publisher Joseph Ferman) and never reprinted (hence a slightly less weak excuse for inclusion). Can be read here.





















































Joanna Russ was still a relatively new professional writer as well as academic in 1964, having published her poetry for the first time with Epoch in 1955 (and, apparently, with Red Clay Reader, another notable "little" magazine, in 1954--though that could be a typo in the bibliography linked to at the foot of this post, as RCR at least began a new series in 1964), after some work in the campus publication The Cornell Writer, and her first general newsstand-circulation publication in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1962. But her stories in 1965 were already indicative of her moving in the directions that would make her later work so influential, as well as demonstrating her wit and willingness to examine old tropes already well-developed. 

"I Had Vacantly Crumpled It into My Pocket...But By God, Eliot, It Was a Photograph from Life!" from the August 1964 issue of F&SF (an issue I have discussed on this blog before!), even by its title, a lift from H. P. Lovecraft's "Pickman's Model", puts it, in a way, in the tradition of those writers who liked to play in the Mythos created by Lovecraft and extended by many of his writer friends while he was alive, and by their heirs afterward, but in a more (but not completely) satirical mode than most of those stories by other hands, positing an awkward youngish office worker (and Lovecraft superfan) who falls under the thrall of a seemingly other-worldly woman, while earnestly and cluelessly trying to woo her, with requested advice from one of his friendlier office-mates, one of the few women he knows well enough to ask for advice. Thus does the narrator do her best to help her colleague figure out a game-plan that might not alienate the woman, while noting from the beginning something seemingly Different about his newfound crush. Things do not go so well for him. (Russ will touch on Lovecraftian flavors again with "My Boat", one of her best 1970s stories.)

"Come Closer" is, in a sense, an even more sinister variation, deftly and offhandedly retold by an adult woman protagonist, on the Grimm-collected "Hansel and Gretel" and similar stories...she is one of the neighborhood volunteers looking for a lost child one northern-climes winter's day, who finds an oddly blooming garden of fruit trees and the like around a somewhat isolated house in the forest, and an even odder set of occupants within. Both these stories stand up as effective horror fiction, neither too pastiche-laden nor walking away from the inherent strangeness of their inspirations, while Russ is working at taking new approaches (and feeling her way to some of her eventually central gender-related concerns) in how to tell an unnerving tale.

"Life in a Furniture Store" is more allusive, and considerably more stylized; it flirts with at least the metaphors of horror and supernatural fiction while being at heart a contemporary-mimetic story, from the point of view of extremely alienated woman, who has never found a comfortable role in the world, and this is demonstrated by her accounts of how she loses her long-term adult job (deftly drawn) and her marriage ends (less detailed, but convincing). Much of this is reflected in how Russ has her narrate the story, with suggestions that her protagonist will tell a fairly straightforward account of her continuing estrangement from society and happiness, but she doesn't, quite...the closest she comes is in recounting an evening while she's not quite sure she wishes to accept the small but earnest romantic advances of one of her friends, clearly a lesbian who desires her but also doesn't want to further alienate her. Or, at least, our protagonist seems to see her this way, while eventually describing herself as a sort of ghost in her world...somewhat akin to something like the film Compulsion, with far less melodrama. The "Contributors" editorial in the Epoch issue notes that Russ's "kind of experimental fiction deserves close scrutiny." As with most of Russ's work, it's graceful and witty...though perhaps even some of her adult-life coping with physical pain is reflected in a few passages, something which would literally and figurative cramp her ability to do her best work, particularly in her last years.

"Wilderness Year" is a nice, straightforward anecdote, in comparison, with an amusing if not fully convincing twist ending that works in its joking context, as well as provides a kind of mild conceptual expansion. 

(indices and photos below include my original work--the Epoch issue--and tweaking/poaching of pre-existing indices and images from the FictionMags Index and ISFDB--both of which I've contributed indices and image to).



Epoch:  A Magazine of Contemporary Literature Fall 1965, Vol. XV, No. 1; 96 pp plus covers, tall digest (approx. 1/2 inch taller than the "Dell Magazines" today)

edited by Baxter Hathaway, Walter Slatoff, James McConkey, Don W. Kleine, Steven Katz, A. R. Ammons, Edgar Rosenberg and Geoffrey Hartman; Managing Editor: Barbara Hutchison; Assistant Editors: Walter F. Alexander, Geof Hewitt, Edwin Howard, Mary N. Gonzales, M. Jay Pearce and Stuart Peterfreund. Published in October, January and April by Cornell University. One Dollar a Copy, Three Dollars a Volume. 

2 * Contributors * uncredited * ed/notes
3 * Lunch in the Cafeteria Room * David Ray* pm
8 * Euthanasia * Edward Hower * nv
36 * The Room * Wendell Berry * pm
37 * Stanzas to My Father * Harold Schimmel * pm
37 * New York City, 1939 * Harold Schimmel * pm
38 * Havdala * Harold Schimmel * pm
39 * Still Life I; Still Life II * Harold Schimmel * pm/gp
40 * Looking at the Morning Light * Harold Schimmel * pm
40 * Landscape * Gloria MacArthur * pm
41 * Friday Afternoon * Frazer MacLean * ss
59 * The Scaffoldings I Wear * George Hitchcock * pm
60 * Portrait While Sinking * George Hitchcock * pm
61 * Theft * Jack Anthem * ss
71 * Life in a Furniture Store * Joanna Russ * ss
83 * The Marvelous Dog * Peter Wild * pm
84 * Waiting for You in San Francisco * Peter Wild * pm
84 * The Tawny Fox * Peter Wild * pm
86 * A Question of Clouds * Theodore Holmes * pm
87 * Chichén Itzá * Robert Abell * pm
88 * Evening * Alfred Starr Hamilton * pm
89 * Notes, Reviews, Speculations: "To Hold Both History and Wilderness in Mind": The Poetry of Gary Snyder * Richard Howard * es

Joanna Russ on Sweet Freedom

Bibliography of Russ's work by Ethan Robinson

Demand My Writing, a study by Jeanne Cortiel

Gary Farber, a friend of Russ's in her later years, was moved to comment on Facebook about this post:

I was Joanna's houseboy for a week, after one of her many back surgeries left her unable to get out of bed for that week.
She also usually came to our monthly Vanguard parties, as well as some other gatherings in the Seattle sf community, back in the late Seventies/early Eighties.
I have fond memories of her conversations with various of us about slash fiction, which formed the basis of several of her later essays.
Among other fond memories.
I also got to read the manuscript of WE WHO ARE ABOUT TO... when my friend was copyediting it.
She also had the most severe palate of anyone I've ever met, in refusing absolutely anything with salt or spice or many other ingredients to the faintest degree, even unto cake ingredients. 🙂
Brilliant writer and essayist and thinker.

for more of today's SSW reviews & more, please see Patti Abbott's blog

Posted by at 6 comments:
Labels: , , , , ,

Friday, October 20, 2017

FFM: The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, January 1976, edited by Edward Ferman (Mercury Press 1975)

Stories by Joanna Russ, Kit Reed and Stuart Dybek, and the best columnists in the fiction-magazine field.

 This was the first issue of F&SF I ever held in my hand. It might not've been the first issue to appear on the newsstand of the Hazardville, CT, drug store where I bought my comic books, then running at an industry standard of a quarter apiece, except for the fatter ones. I had bought a very few paperback books off the spinner rack next to the comics, including a copy of Harry Harrison's anthology of new fiction (and an Alfred Bester memoir) Nova 4 as a birthday gift for my father. That edition was a Manor Book, a reputedly mobbed up outfit that seemed overrepresented on the paperback spinner rack, even as there was never any lack of Charlton Comics in the comic-book spinner (similar accusations). Considering the degree to which magazine distribution in the '70s was often a great source of legit business and money laundering for certain entrepreneurs, it might've been almost surprising how many DC and Marvel and Archie and Gold Key comics were also on the racks, though I'm sure the distribution mobsters weren't going to lose any legit profit just to make their brothers in paperback or comics publishing happier or richer. 
    Meanwhile, the little magazine rack had some items of interest from time to time...I bought an issue of National Lampoon there, I think a bit earlier or later since I road my bike over to do so, less likely in December. My mother confiscated and returned it to the store, and got a refund, delivering a ukase to me and a bored clerk never to attempt a similar transaction again. (I think my father, a Playboy subscriber for some years, must've bought the other two or three issues around the house. I assume my mother bought the Playgirls, or Dad bought them for her...possible she ordered it through Publisher's Clearing House. She never believed you could win their sweepstakes without buying something.)
    And I had certainly been aware of digest-sized fiction magazines. The earliest reading I remember vividly includes a science-fiction pulp reprint magazine, which one I still haven't rediscovered, and a DC sf comic book, likewise; I loved my few copies of Humpty Dumpty and Children's Digest magazines when four and five and six, and Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, which for some reason was stacked in the young readers' section of the Enfield Library in 1974-76, and a few Analogs were around the house from my father's haphazard collecting. But I'd never seen this title before...and might not've seen it again at the drugstore. What was almost certainly true is that I probably had 50c or 90c on me, rather than a dollar, so I knew I couldn't afford this magazine even as I flipped through it. I was even familiar with the magazine by name, and as a source of stories I had read read in various anthologies and collections. 
First US collections from each writer to include these stories.
    So it was another couple of years before I caught up with it again, through a 1971 back issue in the Londonderry Junior High library, and then the March 1978 issue. Winter's boon, fiction magazines for me in those years, clearly...I'd started buying new AHMMs with the January 1978 issue. And after falling in love, I ordered a box of back issues from the magazine, which never arrived. The Fermans & co. were kind enough to send a replacement...and among those warehoused items, smelling fascinatingly of wood and ink after sitting on palette stacks for a couple of years, was a copy of this issue, so I could read it in, if I'm not mistaken, the autumn of 1978.
resembles Trump.
    Three stories within made the strongest impression. "My Boat" by Joanna Russ was a fascinating meld of Philip Roth-esque discussion between two Jewish men of a certain age, the protagonist relating the adventures of his and two adolescent friends' (a girl and a boy) from decades earlier, and their sort of modified Peter Pan-esque experience, with an overlay of Lovecraftian flavors. 
    Kit Reed's "Attack of the Giant Baby" involves an experiment that goes awry, and an infant with a passion for Malomars who is enlarged (along with a favorite toy), and what can result from that. The attention to wryly sketched-in detail is what made the story both grounded and hilarious, far more so than, say, the film Honey, I Blew Up the Kid...which I believe faced some legal questions for its similarity in certain aspects to this short story.
    Stuart Dybek's "Horror Movie" is an urban nightmare...a young adolescent, not quite raising himself but coming close and having more traumatic events than usual go down in this particular day, has to deal with various sorts of predator including an apparently supernatural one...the basic Geist of horror, a fiction (or other narrative) which is in large part about learning to cope with the terrors we all face, though some of us more than others, was very explicitly spelled out by this story from fairly early in my reading. 
    The other stories were pleasant but minor--a slight "Black Widowers" story by Isaac Asimov, one of several rejected by Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine but with some tangential relevance to fantastic fiction, so they were good-enough reasons to have Asimov's name on the cover aside from citation of his monthly pop-science column. Gary Wolf's cover story, or at least the cover by David Hardy, might also have been a(n admitted) literary ancestor of Bender the robot in the television series Futurama (though I don't trust my faint memory of this, and should Go Check)...Wolf's clever, amiable work would eventually include the literary adventures of Roger Rabbit, the rather more sophisticated source for the mixed animation/live action film.
    And I must admit I haven't yet sought out the issue to reread the stories by Haskell Barkin (an old friend of Harlan Ellison and an occasional fantasist) or Michael Coney (a Canadian writer prone to sometimes goofy, sometimes quietly effective work), neither of which made a strong impression (or at least a lasting one). Good examples of Asimov's
science column and Baird Searles coping as best he might with one of the poor 1970s ER Burroughs film adaptations are joined by a cute, grim Gahan Wilson cartoon, one of F&SF's infrequent letters columns, and Algis Budrys's fine assessment of the work of, and reminiscence about, two of the more distinctive older writers in the field, "Lester Del Rey" (actually Leonard Knapp, but known to all his friends and spouses as Del Rey), who had been a mentor to Budrys early in the latter's career, and R. A. Lafferty, who had begun writing and publishing in middle age in the latest '50s, in part to keep himself away from alcohol, and had already cleared his own distinctive path through little and fantastic-fiction magazines...and of another veteran, one who came up in the same years as Budrys himself, if a half-dozen earlier, Poul Anderson. 

 The ISFDB index:
The earlier UK collection (1978 vs. 1981)
For more of today's books, and mostly actual books, please see Patti Abbott's blog.
Posted by at 4 comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)