Joanna Russ (1937–2011) was an award-winning and influential US writer and academic who grew up in the Bronx and became, as a high school student, one of ten finalists in Westinghouse’s Science Talent Search. Russ attended Cornell University, where she eventually taught creative writing, and took an MFA in playwriting at Yale. She was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 2013.
Russ, like Carol Emshwiller, published fiction in a variety of genre and literary outlets, including Manhattan Review and Damon Knight’s Orbit anthology series. She began publishing science fiction in 1959 with “Nor Custom Stale” for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, a journal for which she also contributed influential book reviews between 1967 and 1980. Her most influential and highly regarded piece of fiction is perhaps her novel The Female Man (1975), a searing work of feminist science fiction that still shocks and inspires readers and writers to this day. Her short story collections, long out of print, include The Zanzibar Cat (1983), (Extra)ordinary People (1985), and The Hidden Side of the Moon (1987). As of this writing, a “complete fiction” collection is urgently needed as her entire short output rivals in quality the oeuvre of iconic writers such as Angela Carter and Shirley Jackson.
Russ’s nonfiction was as thought-provoking, deft, and edgy as her fiction, winning the 1988 Pilgrim Award for science fiction criticism. Collections of her essays include How to Suppress Women’s Writing (1983) and Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans and Perverts: Feminist Essays (1985). According to the critic John Clute, “Like Samuel R. Delany, she was a thoroughly grounded intellectual, and every word she wrote, fiction or nonfiction, was shaped by thought in action. Despite this—or perhaps because of this—she remained exceptionally persuasive. She told often unpalatable truths in tales that were, as pure story, a joy to read.” Taken in total, her work, along with that of writers such as James Tiptree Jr., changed both the conversation in the science fiction world of the time and the emphasis about what was important in fiction.
“When It Changed” was first published in Harlan Ellison’s classic anthology Again, Dangerous Visions (1972) and won the Nebula Award. Of this story, Ellison wrote that it “makes some extraordinarily sharp distinctions between the abilities and attitudes of the sexes, while erasing many others we think immutable. 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.”
The setting of Whileaway is the feminist utopian world featured in The Female Man, and “When It Changed” tells the story of what happens to this utopia after the arrival of a starship full of men.