If you scream, people say you're melodramatic if you submit, you’re masochistic if you call names, you're a bitch. 'What'sa matter, you some kinda prude?' he said and enfolding us in his powerful arms, et cetera-well, not so very powerful as all that, but I want to give you the feeling of the scene. 'Give us a good-bye kiss,' said the host, who might have been attractive under other circumstances, a giant marine, so to speak. I've been in these places far, far too often to write off the circumstances in this book as some so flippantly have. I'm really confused what rose-colored glasses they're wearing, because as far as I can tell, the majority of this book is still far too true. For our Story of the Week selection, we present “When it Changed,” along with an introduction about Russ’s extraordinary career.I've seen people argue, both here and elsewhere, that this book is outdated and no longer topical. A half century later, both the story and the novel are considered classics-significant turning points in science fiction. Whileaway, the name of the planet in the tale, would figure again in Russ’s novel The Female Man, published in 1975. And it points out why I think women’s lib is one of the three or four most potent and influential movements to spring up in our country during these last decades of social upheaval.” It is, in the best and strongest sense of the word, a female liberation story, while never once speaking of, about, or to the subject.

In his introduction to the story, he called out his fellow authors for their chauvinism and declared that “others may pillory me for this, but as far as I’m concerned, the best writers in SF today are the women.”Ībout the story itself, he wrote: “Joanna has here written a story that makes some extraordinarily sharp distinctions between the abilities and attitudes of the sexes, while erasing many others we think immutable. It first appeared in Again, Dangerous Visions, the second of two legendary science fiction anthologies edited by Harlan Ellison, who knew the story would be controversial among some of his readers. The story turns the tables on those many earlier tales and novels in which astronauts land (or crash) on a planet where all the inhabitants or all the rulers are women (usually portrayed as randy vixens or dominatrices) Russ re-imagines the idea from the women’s point of view. “When It Changed” and parts of The Female Man are set on the planet Whileaway.įifty years ago, in 1972, Joanna Russ’s Nebula Award–winning story “When It Changed” was published-and it caused quite a stir. First American edition of Russ’s The Female Man (Bantam, 1975) with a cover illustration by American artist Morgan Kane (1916–2014). From The Future Is Female! More Classic Science Fiction Stories by Women Photograph of Joanna Russ, 1984, by Ileen Weber (Wikipedia).

The Female Man by Joanna Russ